PHOTO COURTESY STERN CARDIOVASCULAR CENTER
Dr. Steven Gubin, Stern Cardiovascular Foundation
Editor's Note: Every year, this magazine presents its list of the Top Doctors in Memphis. The physicians are selected by Castle Connolly, a healthcare research company and the official source for Top Doctors for the past 25 years. Castle Connolly’s established nomination survey, research, screening and selection process, under the direction of an MD, involves thousands of physicians as well as academic medical centers, specialty hospitals, and regional and community hospitals all across the nation. The complete list of more than 250 Top Doctors in Memphis, arranged by 45 specialties, is published in the June/July issue of Memphis magazine.
Even though he says, “Mom and Dad never pushed me to become a doctor,” surely Dr. Steven Gubin was destined to join that profession. After all, his grandfather had been a physician in New York before joining the U.S. Army, which sent him to Memphis, where he ran the outpatient services department for the VA hospital here. His father served as a pediatrician for 56 years in Missouri, the only such specialist in the rural “bootheel” area.
Even so, Gubin might have ended up as a Top Dentist instead of a Top Doctor, or working in another field of medicine entirely — except for a meeting with the prominent cardiologist who pioneered the development of the pacemaker.
Gubin earned a degree in chemistry from the University of North Carolina, and then pondered a career as a pediatric dentist. After medical school at the University of Tennessee – Memphis, admitting, “I still didn’t know what I wanted to get into,” he began an internship at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where he met Dr. Richard Judge, a member of the team who developed the first successful pacemaker.
“Dr. Judge was very well-known, and for some reason, he took an interest in me,” says Gubin. “I respected him so much and was very impressed with how he worked with patients. He’s the one who really introduced me to cardiology. The rest is history.”
That history includes fellowships with the University of Illinois and Penn State before coming to Memphis in 1991 and joining what was then called the Stern Clinic. “I was only their tenth cardiologist, and now we have 40 physicians in Memphis, Germantown, Southaven, Oxford, Munford, and Union City. I really liked Stern because it was a private practice that had many of the benefits of an academic center, such as research facilities.”
In addition to treating patients, Gubin also serves as president of the Stern Cardiovascular Foundation. “We are 100 years old this year, and it’s unusual for a medical group to be together that long,” he says, noting that the founder, Dr. Newton Stern, brought the first EKG machine to Memphis. “I’m always humbled and honored to be only the fourth president in our long history.”
He feels he’s part of a good team, with doctors treating patients and others conducting studies. “I feel that everybody in our group is a Phi Beta Kappa in something,” he says. “I’m honored to be named a Top Doctor, but I think we have 40 Top Doctors.”
Many of the group’s physicians are specialists in specific areas — catheterization, electrophysiology, heart transplants — and Stern’s expertise is preventive cardiology.
“In the field of cardiology we’ve always done a good job of taking care of problems after they’ve happened, but I like to do things before that occurs.” On the board of directors of the American Heart Association since 1993, he works closely with AHA members “to address modifiable risk factors, blood pressure, cholesterol, obesity, sedentary lifestyle, and others. These are things we can do something about.”
He’s pleased with the technological progress in his field. “But it still upsets me that the number-one cause of death in men and women is heart disease,” he says. “We’ve come a long way, but we certainly have to do better.”