TALKS
Dr. Roberto Benzo | Pulmonologist & Behavioral Scientist
In one of the largest studies of its kind, Dr. Roberto Benzo studied the survival of patients with severe COPD — same disease, same damaged lungs — to see what separated the ones who died or who kept ending up back in the hospital from the ones who didn’t. Daily function mattered, as expected. So did something nobody had systematically studied before: loneliness, independent of how sick patients were.
That finding underscores what Benzo, a pulmonologist and behavioral scientist, has discovered in twenty years of research on health coaching, lifestyle, and mindfulness: what medicine treats as soft — human connection, attention, simply listening to patients about what is meaningful — has real efficacy. He believes connection comes first and agency follows — being cared for is not the reward for taking charge of your life, it is how a person becomes capable of it. His talk argues that what we call “the art of medicine” has a plainer name — kindness — and that it can be trained, delivered, and measured like any other treatment.
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Roberto P. Benzo, M.D., M.S., is a pulmonologist and behavioral scientist who studies how mindfulness and self-management interventions affect health outcomes in people with chronic conditions. He founded the Mindful Breathing Laboratory at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, where 20 years of continuous NIH funding have supported research into how lifestyle change affects outcomes for people with chronic lung disease. The lab has since expanded its work to study how health coaching promotes purposeful attention and a patient's willingness to participate in their own care, what Benzo calls participatory medicine, shapes overall wellness in the context of a chronic condition. As a researcher, the core of his work is investigating the beneficial effects of promoting awareness of lifestyle and life balance (health). Dr. Benzo also is a yoga and meditation instructor and a triathlete.
