L+M Physician Friday -- Dr. Joseph O'Keefe

As a doctor of rehabilitative medicine, Joseph O’Keefe sees patients who have been hit by some of life’s hardest blows, often in the form of traumatic brain injuries.

Yet O’Keefe faces each new day with optimism, knowing that his patients would expect nothing less.

“It’s hard to feel sorry for yourself when you’re meeting people who have lost limbs or have lost brain function,” he says. “They’ve lost the quality of their lives and their ability to relate to their family members, and they’re struggling to get all it back.”

As a rehab specialist at Lawrence + Memorial since 1991, O’Keefe says it never ceases to amaze him to see the determination and willpower people bring to the recovery process.

“It makes me humble,” he says, “and it makes me proud of what they’re trying to do.”

Following patients over years – even decades – as they recover from traumatic brain injuries or other conditions, including strokes, is what gives O’Keefe his greatest satisfaction.

In fact, he calls himself a “primary care physician for the severely disabled,” a niche in the healthcare world that he’s proud to fill.

“As long as patients can learn, they can get better,” O’Keefe says. “The textbooks will tell you that recovery tends to end after a certain point of time, and I don’t necessarily abide by that. I think the value that I add to the healthcare system, since I’ve been doing this for nearly 40 years, is that I can say, from my direct experience, how things are going to go. I can say, ‘This looks horrible now, but you’re going to get there.’”

In a sense, O’Keefe’s mission helping others started early in life, taking care of his brothers and sisters as the oldest of 10 children growing up in an Irish-Catholic family in Boston.

O’Keefe did well in school, and coming out of high school he was accepted into a six-year program at Boston University that enabled him to go directly into medical school after two years of college. He graduated with a medical degree at 23.

At first, he thought he wanted to be a surgeon, and he trained in general surgery at Boston City Hospital. He entered the orthopedic program at Boston University Hospital, now called Boston Medical Center but, ultimately, “I realized I didn’t want to do that for the rest of my life, in part because you take care of the anatomy of the patient, and I wanted to take care of the whole patient.”

When O’Keefe settled on being a family practitioner, colleagues urged him to become a “physiatrist” (doctor of physical medicine) and so he did a second residency in rehabilitation medicine.

Today, he cares for those who need his encouragement and expertise for the long haul of recovery.

“It’s rewarding because I get to learn a lot about people and what they’re capable of,” he says. “I see people with horrible problems that just never quit.”

O’Keefe is a veteran at L+M who also serves as chairman of the Ethics Committee. But, years ago, O’Keefe had to push to establish Rehabilitation Medicine as its own department.

Since those early years, O’Keefe has helped L+M grow into a major leader in rehab medicine, now with its “Signature Rehabilitation Services,” which includes outpatient locations at Flanders, Groton and Waterford, as well as the region’s only Acute Inpatient Rehabilitation Unit.

“I insisted that rehabilitation services become its own independent department,” he says. “At the time, I think it was undervalued.”

Today, however, L+M’s acute inpatient program is the only one of its kind in eastern Connecticut, enabling doctors, nurses and therapists to work with patients in their earliest stages of recovery.

“Some patients’ problems are so complex that it really takes a squadron of people putting all their skills together, and I’m comfortable working in that environment,” he says.

As an example, O’Keefe mentioned a patient who, more than a decade ago, spent five months in a coma after a traumatic brain injury.

“Today, he’s walking and talking and making sense, and he does a lot of his own personal care,” he explained. “He still has a serious disability, but I’ve been working with him for years, and I haven’t ever stopped trying to advance his skills and make him better and reduce the amount of help that he needs. That’s the kind of life-long commitment to recovering patients that I envisioned for myself, and it’s what I like to do. That’s what gets me out of bed in the morning.”

To learn more about Dr. O'Keefe, click here.