Carolyn Goldschmidt, MD, is a neurologist with Endeavor Health Medical Group with offices in Evanston and Chicago. She completed her residency at Loyola University Medical Center and her fellowship in neuroimmunology at the Cleveland Clinic.
Dr. Goldschmidt answered some questions about what sparked her interest in medicine, the responsibility that goes with being a female physician and how she approaches patient care.
Where are you from originally?
I am from the Northern suburbs. I was actually born at Evanston Hospital. I went to New Trier High School and Northwestern for college. I lived in Evanston for a while.
What were you like as a child?
I guess in school I was kind of nerdy, not super athletic. I was on the newspaper and the scholastic bowl team as my extracurriculars.
When did you figure out you wanted to be a doctor?
I think I always wanted to be a doctor. My dad was a physician at Evanston Hospital for many years and I would come and hang out with him, and I worked there over the summers when I was in high school. I feel like I always wanted to be a doctor, that was always the plan.
Did you do candy striping or volunteering?
Nothing that glamorous. My dad was a pathologist so I worked in the pathology department in the autopsy room, that was my summer job. Hey, you can’t hurt anybody. It was a fun summer job.
What made you go into neurology?
I figured out quickly that I did not want to do surgery. I wanted the nonsurgical side. You see all the coolest stuff in neurology. The brain is just wild. It’s like a puzzle that you have to put together. Neurology tends to be very satisfying because we can figure out, based on somebody’s symptoms and exam, exactly what the problem is in the brain or the spinal cord. Our exam is still a very important part of what we do. It combines the physical exam, imaging — lots of different specialties altogether.
What do you specialize in?
I’m a neuroimmunologist, which mainly sees patients with diseases like multiple sclerosis (MS). A few other diseases fall into the neuroimmunology category, diseases that tend to be autoimmune in nature that affect the central nervous system. I also see a lot of headache patients as well. I see lots of people with migraine headaches and other headache conditions.
What got you interested in that specialty?
I actually grew up with an uncle who had multiple sclerosis so I was familiar with the disease. When I was going through my medical training, I really liked when I was rotating through immunology and I liked that in medical school, so between neurology and immunology it was kind of a natural fit for me.
How long have you been practicing?
I finished a two-year fellowship in 2021, so just a couple of years I’ve been a full attending.
That must have been difficult to go through your training during the height of the pandemic.
It was a little weird, for sure. At the height of the pandemic, I was in Cleveland, training. And they kept telling us they were going to pull us into the hospital to do that work, which would’ve been fine. Some good things that came out of it though was telehealth — everyone got really used to it during the pandemic which is very beneficial now.
A lot of our patients are on medications that suppress their immune system, so especially during the COVID pandemic, it was definitely stressful for us and our patients who were already at an increased risk for infection.
Speaking of patients, how do you make your patients feel heard and feel cared for?
I’m lucky, because all my new patient visits, I get to spend an hour with them so we have a lot of time to talk about everything. Multiple sclerosis has a bad reputation of being this horrible disease and people think they’re going to end up in a wheelchair, but it’s such a different disease than it was even 10 years ago in the way that we’re able to treat it and manage it.
It’s a lot of reassuring patients that they’ll be OK. The medications that we have are excellent. I have a lot of resources that are available that I give them, like the National MS Society website, the Multiple Sclerosis Association of America, and the pharmaceutical companies have really great disease information out there.
So I try to give them lots of resources, have a really long appointment, and then I follow up with them usually pretty quickly afterwards because there’s so much information in that first appointment. Especially when it’s a new diagnosis, there are a lot of questions.
What is it like being a woman in medicine? Do you feel a sense of responsibility?
That’s actually one of my biggest interests — women in medicine. It came up during residency. Despite there being slightly more women than men in medical school, the further along you get in training, the higher up you get in the hospital system and academics, there are less and less women in leadership roles.
I definitely felt that during residency. We unfortunately did not have a lot of female attendings that we worked with or a lot of female leadership to look up to, so I actually started a Women in Medicine group at my hospital during residency so we had a place where we could get together and discuss different topics, like imposter syndrome, and we had some mentoring and career advice.
Negotiating is a big thing for women in medicine when it comes to getting your first job and negotiating your contracts. It’s definitely a passion of mine because I have felt the difference both from the patient side — sometimes patients don’t want to see women doctors, but some prefer to. I will say the Endeavor Health Neurology Department is very woman-heavy and we have a female chair, Dr. Susan Rubin, and that’s one of the main reasons I wanted to work here, because there is that female mentorship.
What are some of your memorable cases?
Not one jumps out, but I really enjoy having those new diagnosis visits because they come in and they’re really nervous and they have all these ideas about what their life is going to be like. Then, at the end of the visit and after talking to them and going through everything, people often tell me they feel so much better and they feel relieved about everything we went through, and we have a solid plan for them and more of an idea about what their future is going to be like. Especially young women diagnosed with MS, they worry about having kids and family planning and I always reassure them that this is not an issue, they can have all the kids they want. They will be fine!
What do you like to do for fun?
I’m a Chicagoan and I’ve lived everywhere in the city. I really love exploring the neighborhoods and going out to eat. A lot of my friends are still in Chicago so I have a pretty tight friend group. A lot of going out to restaurants and bars and concerts — I’m a big concert person as well. My husband, Mike Kharouta, and I really like traveling. We’ve been to Europe, Asia, all over the place. We try to do a few fun trips a year.
What are some concerts and restaurants you’ve been to lately?
We recently went to a couple downtown at The Salt Shed. We went to Death Cab For Cutie and the Postal Service, which was amazing. We saw Guster over the summer. I have Wilco tickets for June, which I am very excited about. I also really like hip-hop — I went to Beyonce at Soldier Field. It was incredible, one of the best concerts I’ve ever been to, for sure.
Food, I will eat anything, anywhere. We go to China Town all the time. We live on the North Side and there is a ton of really good Middle Eastern and Indian food. Italian, sushi — I’ll eat it all.
Do you have hobbies?
I really like yoga. Yoga is like the one thing I try to do on the weekends. I try to find yoga in the breweries because you get a beer afterwards. Brewery yoga is my hobby.
Do you have a family, kids, pets?
We have a dog, Aayla. We rescued her almost a year ago. She’s a little ball of energy. She’s aggressively friendly. At the end of November, we actually had a baby, Toby. He just turned five months. So that’s my hobby now — having a baby. I have not done brewery yoga since before I had him.
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