Matthew H. Liang

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Matthew H. Liang is a physician specializing in social rheumatology, Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, Professor of Health Policy and Management at Harvard School of Public Health, and the Director of Special Projects of the Robert B. Brigham Arthritis and Musculoskeletal Diseases Clinical Research Center which he founded. At the Brigham and Women's Hospital he is Medical Director of Rehabilitation Services. He is a founding faculty of the Clinical Effectiveness Program at the Harvard School of Public Health and is a Study Director in the Veterans Administration Cooperative Studies Program.

He is the author of the book, History of the Robert Breck Brigham Hospital for Incurables: The First Teaching Hospital in America Specializing in Rheumatic and Orthopedic Conditions

Video Matthew H. Liang

Early life

Liang was born in California and grew up in Guangzhou, China. His grandfather originally migrated from the farming village of Jianlong ?? , Xinhui District in the Province of Guangdong. His father, Ping Yee Liang, an eye, ear, nose, and throat specialist, had attended the Rockefeller-funded Peking Union Medical College . His mother, Alice Kao, had accompanied a missionary who had suffered a stroke back to Springfield, Massachusetts who helped her go to NYU Nursing School. She became head nurse in the newborn nursery at Johns Hopkins Hospital where she met Ping Yee. The family returned to China, but then fled in 1949 by truck to Macau and then Hong Kong, eventually settling in the United States. Matthew attended public schools and the Baltimore Polytechnic Institute, leaving before graduation to go to Johns Hopkins University.

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Education

After Johns Hopkins, he went to Dartmouth Medical School and Harvard Medical School, where he earned his MD in 1969. After housestaff training at the University of Minnesota and a locum in the Grenfell Mission, he studied tropical public health and epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health, earning a MPH in 1972. Afterwards, on the Harvard Medical Service at the Boston City Hospital with the encouragement of Dr Charles Davidson, he spent part of his residency as the founding internist of a neighborhood health center in Roxbury and worked with Roger Mark, a champion for inner city patientsh. Mark and Liang developed a Nursing Home Telemedicine system for over 400 residents of five nursing homes and showed that nurse practitioners could provide effective, economic care.

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Career

Liang served in the Army and implemented the Army's algorithm-based physician extender program (AMOSIST) at Walter Reed Hospital from 1973 to 1975, which cared for over 30,000 patients a month. He also organized the first training program in general internal medicine at that hospital and a chronic disease nurse practitioner program, and helped design the computerized hospital information system. After the service, he was a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar and a rheumatology fellow with Halsted Holman at Stanford.

In 1977 Liang was recruited to build a new NIH multipurpose arthritis center program at the old Robert Brigham Hospital, and as a founding member of the new Division of Primary Care and General Medicine at the Peter Bent Brigham where Braunwald was Chief of Medicine. The enterprise grew into a center for population-based research.

They carried out a randomized trial in Boston home care programs which showed that at a small marginal cost, many homebound patients could achieve their functional goals with simple measures; a few patients improved dramatically from a bedridden to an independent status. Another study evaluated the Social Security disability determination for patients with osteoarthritis, rheumatoid arthritis and systemic lupus erythematosus in partnership with the federal agency, to test a more equitable and efficient system that affected over 75,000 subjects with arthritis disability. In a study at the Boston Post Office, they demonstrated that widely-touted safe-lifting programs did not prevent back injuries nor lead to less severe injuries.

The identification of the causative organism of Lyme Disease and its effective treatment were important discoveries, but its long-term course was largely unknown and it continued to grow as a public health problem. The group assembled the only prospectively followed group of Lyme disease patients in Nantucket Island to determine its long-term consequences. They also identified the reasons why people did not practice health behaviors to avoid tick bites. At a time when a new Lyme vaccine was being withdrawn from the market and rates of disease were continuing to climb the group showed that a novel intervention using street entertainers on the ferry boats to Nantucket prevented the disease in a clinical trial of some 30,000 passengers.

With Frank Speizer and Walter Willett, the group showed that silicone breast implants did not cause connective tissue diseases or gammopathies; that oral contraceptives did not prevent rheumatoid arthritis; and that women risked developing lupus from oral contraceptives and post-menopausal hormone replacement therapy. In the Physicians' Health Study, they provided the first convincing evidence that the antiphospholipid antibody was a risk factor for thromboembolic disease in healthy men. The group sorted out the effects of lower socioeconomic status and the characteristics associated with it that could be modified in populations with health disparities. They discovered that self-confidence in self-management and self-monitoring was linked to poorer health status, and then conducted a clinical trial that showed an intervention to improve self-efficacy could improve the quality of life in patients with lupus.

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Select major visiting appointments

• 1990 Kare Berglund Lecture in Rheumatology, University of Lund, Lund, Sweden
• 1990 A.S.B. Bank Visiting Professorship in Rheumatology/Rehabilitation Auckland, New Zealand
• 1993 Visiting Professor, South African Rheumatism and Arthritis Association
• 1993 Philip B. Licata Memorial Lecture, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston, MA
• 1994 Kovacs Visiting Professor, Royal Society of Medicine, London, England
• 1994 Distinguished Lecturer, Medical College of Georgia, Augusta, GA
• 1995 J.F.L. Woodbury Lecturer, Dalhousie University, Nova Scotia, Canada
• 1996 Pfizer/ACR Visiting Professor, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, CA
• 1996 Visiting Professor, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada
• 1997 Walker Lecturer, The Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow, Glasgow, Scotland
• 1997 Erik Allander Retirement Lecture, Karolinska Institute, Stockholm, Sweden
• 1998 Donald Mitchell Memorial Lecture. University of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada
• 1998 Ogryzlo Lecture, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada
• 1998 Charles L. Christian Lecture, Cornell University Medical Center, New York, NY
• 1998 Richard H. Fryberg Lecture, Cornell University Medical Center, New York, NY
• 1999-04 Harold Robinson Visiting Professor, University of British Columbia, Canada
• 2000 Pfizer Visiting Professor, University of South Carolina, SC
• 2001 Swedish Society of Medicine, Stockholm, Sweden
• 2004 National Defense Medical Center, Taipei, Taiwan
• 2007 Hanyang University, Seoul, Korea
• 2008 Wallace Epstein Visiting Professor, University of California, San Francisco

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Awards and honors

• 1980 Fellow, American College of Physicians
• 1983 Anglo-American Fellow, American Rheumatism Association
• 1985 Distinguished Public Service Award, Massachusetts Chapter of the Arthritis Foundation
• 1993 Honorary Member, Colombian Association of Rheumatology
• 1997 James H. Fairclough, Jr. Memorial Award
• 1998 Lawrence Poole Prize, University of Edinburgh, Scotland
• 1998 Lee C. Howley Sr Prize for Research in Arthritis (co-recipient)
• 2001-2004 Kirkland Scholar Award
• 2002 American College of Rheumatology Award of Distinction for Clinical Research
• 2005 Veterans Administration Executive Career Field Award
• 2006-2010 Molson Foundation Scholar
• 2008 Wallace Epstein Award for Training in Clinical Research
• 2009 Master, American College of Rheumatology
• 2010 The Matthew H. Liang Distinguished Professorship in Rheumatology and Population Sciences

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Publications

He has published over 370 papers in medical journals

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References

Other sources

• Gretchen Henkel, Another Vocabulary for Rheumatology Research.The Rheumatologist.Volume 3 Number 10 October 2009, p 40-42.
• Finland M, Castle WB. Harvard Medical Unit at Boston City Hospital. Vol. II. Boston: Commonwealth Fund Publication. Harvard Medical School; 1983, p. 1391-3.
• Liang MH. The Robert Brigham: First American Teaching Hospital in Arthritis and Musculosketetal Diseases(1916-1980), in press.

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