Take the day off – Treat yourself to an interactive day filled with demonstrations, samples, seminars, and exhibits to improve the way you look, feel, and live!
Select from a host of seminar topics and meet dozens of vendors presenting new products and ideas
WIN a complete head-to-toe makeover sponsored by Macy's and Avanti Day Resort
Proceeds to benefit the Monmouth County Child Advocacy Center
Meet Dr Erika our May Issue Cover WomAn
Read her story online
Healing -from the Heart
By Fran Goldenberg
Growing up in a one room apartment in communist Romania in the 1950s, Dr. Erika Schwartz recalls the highly intellectual and educated environment that helped give her an unusual start in life. Exposed early on to the scientific wonders of the medical community, to art, music and literature by her parents, her uncle, a renowned Romanian physician, Mauricius Blechman, head of The International Tuberculosis Society, was the most inspiring. After a visit to his laboratory in Bucharest, to examine bullfrogs and organisms moving under a microscope, she knew then at the age of five, that she would be a doctor.
“In retrospect, my uncle was my inspiration for becoming a doctor. He was serious and successful, but what he did not show me was the humanity of medicine. That I got from my parents,” explains Dr. Erika. Young Erika’s family left Romania and moved to Italy where she graduated the Overseas School of Rome at age 16, a prestigious school attended by many English speaking children of the elite living abroad. There, Erika learned English and first came into contact with American ways. Eventually relocating to the Upper East Side of New York, Dr. Erika’s family reunited with her uncle and his partner, Dr. Emanuel Revici, considered one of the founders of anti-aging medicine. Dr. Erika’s exposure to these men and their dedication to keeping people healthy were crucial to molding her way of thinking.
Dr. Erika, applied to several colleges, choosing to attend New York University because it kept her close to home where her traditional European parents wanted her and offered scholarship money, two critically important factors. “Becoming a doctor in Romania would have been very different, “she says, referring to the government control over the few choices a physician had. With a strong Renaissance European education, college in the US proved academically easy although socially she felt out of step with the college scene driven by television and pop culture she had missed growing up in eastern Europe.
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