Dr. John Gore is a clinician, surgeon, researcher, and educator specializing in urologic oncology and general urology at the University of Washington.
Prostatepedia spoke with him about how Decipher changes the way doctors treat men with prostate cancer.
Why did you become a doctor?
Dr. John Gore: My initial vision for my life was that I was going to be a lawyer. Then I found that I really enjoyed my experiences while interning at the hospital. That brought about an application to medical school. I think being a doctor offers a chance to have a daily meaningful impact, which is a unique part of the job.
How did you end up working in urology?
Dr. Gore: Urology is a specialty that very few people enter medical school thinking that they want to do. In part, most people are like I was and don’t even know about the specialty. I don’t have any doctors in my family. The only doctor I knew was my own pediatrician. I just assumed I was going to be a pediatrician.
But I really enjoyed surgery. I enjoyed being in the operating room. I just really enjoy the generic construct that someone has a problem and I have the tools to fix it.
Urology is an interesting hybrid. Most surgeries have a homolog in internal medicine. For example, there’s cardiothoracic surgery and cardiology. There’s colorectal surgery and gastroenterology. We don’t really have that in urology. We do a lot of chronic disease management. We do a lot of long-term follow-up of our own patients. It is, in many ways, a hybrid of internal medicine and surgery, which is really cool.
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