Practicing Medicine in the Gray Areas
Dr. Gena Foster | Assistant Professor of Medicine, Yale School of Medicine
For Dr. Gena Foster, medicine often begins where certainty ends.
As an Assistant Professor of Medicine at Yale School of Medicine specializing in autoimmune blood disorders, she treats patients with conditions that are frequently misunderstood, difficult to diagnose, and rapidly evolving. Many of these diseases lack clear standards of care, requiring physicians to make decisions in areas where the evidence is still emerging.
To navigate those uncertainties, Gena regularly turns to the scientific literature. Her work sits at the intersection of patient care, clinical trials, and immunology research, where understanding the biology behind a disease can be just as important as understanding the latest clinical study.
Consensus helps her move quickly between those worlds. Rather than searching through dozens of papers manually, she can investigate specific biological pathways, explore how therapies work at a mechanistic level, and rapidly evaluate evidence that may help inform both research questions and patient care decisions.
Recently, that approach proved especially valuable in a high-stakes patient case. A young patient with HIV developed a rapidly progressing spinal lesion that appeared consistent with lymphoma, but Gena suspected there could be another explanation rooted in immune system reactivation. With the patient's condition deteriorating quickly, she used Consensus to explore mechanistic immunology research and uncover evidence supporting an alternative hypothesis.
Armed with the underlying literature, she was able to bring relevant research directly to pathologists and other specialists involved in the case. The evidence helped support a decision to pursue urgent surgical evaluation and additional diagnostic testing rather than immediately moving forward with lymphoma-directed treatment.
For Gena, the goal is never to replace clinical judgment. It is to strengthen it. Having fast access to the underlying science allows her to evaluate ideas more rigorously, challenge assumptions, and ensure that important decisions are grounded in evidence rather than intuition alone.
As both a physician and researcher, Gena believes some of the most important insights come from understanding not just what works, but why it works. For complex autoimmune and immunologic diseases, that often means tracing a question back to the underlying biology and the primary literature itself. By making decades of scientific research easier to explore, Consensus helps her connect mechanistic discoveries to the clinical decisions that matter most for patients.
