Doctor Feel Good

Rajiv Kumar is a man on a mission: to help Rhode Islanders become the biggest losers (of weight, that is) and, in the process, get hooked on healthy living.

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In 2001, the surgeon general called upon Americans to slim down, saying obesity “may soon cause as much preventable disease and death as cigarette smoking.”

Kumar’s response to the problem was to start Shape Up RI. His adviser was Ray Rickman, his one-time boss.

Rickman, a former state representative and deputy secretary of state, was the mastermind behind Adopt A Doctor, a program to retain native physicians in the world’s poorest countries by augmenting their meager salaries. Rickman knew what he wanted the program to accomplish, but he wasn’t sure how to put it into practice. So, in early 2004 he went looking for help.

“Eleven or twelve people showed up who had applied,” Rickman recalls. “[Kumar] was the third person to go, and I hired him on the spot. He was pre-med, he was exuberant and he cared. It wasn’t a summer job, and it wasn’t for the resume. He wanted to do good in the world.”

I ask Rickman how he knew Kumar didn’t want the job to pad his professional credentials. “I know what realness is,” he replies. “You can’t fake it.”

He senses I remain unconvinced. “He’s the most honest person I know of his age,” Rickman says with some earnestness. “I know a couple of rabbis in their seventies who are as honest as he is. But that’s their jobs.”

One of the first things the pair did was draw up the group’s papers as a nonprofit. They sat along the river in downtown Providence, and Kumar pulled out his laptop and started pecking away. Six hours later, “he prints it out, and it’s all fine,” Rickman marvels. “He was so organized. I’ve done ten applications for [nonprofits], and it was the finest one I’d seen.”

Adopt A Doctor was a small operation, sponsoring about a dozen doctors in four countries when Kumar went to the west African nation of Mali in the summer of 2006. He worked at an AIDS clinic in the capital, Bamako, and although the government was providing life-saving drugs to combat HIV free of charge, there weren’t enough doctors to examine patients and administer the medication—especially to those who lived on the city’s outskirts. Distressed and frustrated, Kumar called Rickman and told him they needed to fund two more doctors. 

“I said, ‘We’re not going to add any more doctors,’ ” Rickman remembers. “And guess what? We got two more doctors in the clinic. He wouldn’t take no.”

“It was so simple of a solution” to pay for additional doctors to serve the population, Kumar explains. “It was about connecting people. It wasn’t creating a product or transforming anything. It was working with what we have.”