The ever-beloved medical drama icon reveals why health is personal to him in a way fans might not have known.
Patrick Dempsey Opens Up About His Passion for Cancer Awareness
Published on Nov. 15, 2024
It’s hard to believe it was almost 20 years ago when in 2005, Patrick Dempsey originated the role of Dr. Derek Shepherd in a way that will forever make Grey’s Anatomy fans think of him as “McDreamy.”
What a lot of Grey’s loyalists might not have known is that health is close to Dempsey’s heart in real life, too. In 2008, the now-58-year-old founded The Dempsey Center in Maine, where the actor is from originally. Inspired by his mother’s battle with ovarian cancer, he started the center as a means of helping people affected by cancer, and now the center offers cancer resources, classes, counseling, and care—at no cost.
Recently, he’s also teamed up with the American Cancer Society for the Change the Odds initiative, with the aim of discussing how underrepresented communities, including rural areas, in the U.S. are often met with a lack of cancer care, and how to better connect them to valuable resources. Ahead, Dempsey shares why talking about family health history is important and how his mother’s fight with cancer shaped his mission.
This interview has been edited for length.
The Healthy by Reader’s Digest: Patrick, what a great cause. We’re so sorry for the loss of your mom. From your perspective, what makes rural communities unique when it comes to cancer awareness?
Patrick Dempsey: When you live on the coast, people forget about the small-town feeling and how everybody knows everybody and how close everyone is—but at the same time they give you a lot of space. You’re connected to the seasons, you’re connected to the community in a really deep way [that’s] multi-generational, and that makes it very special.
But at the same time, people are very private. So if there’s an issue, they don’t really like to share it. And I think this is the big barrier to get people to be able to communicate and work together if there’s a cancer diagnosis or “Hey, is there a history?” because people don’t like to talk about that, especially the older generation. They don’t share that with the younger generation. They keep it quiet, so there are a lot of those family secrets. But now we know if we have a better understanding of our family history, our health history, it helps us moving forward and making sure we communicate that to our doctor.
I hope [readers] go to the website, which is really important, number one, because all the information is there and it’s easy to navigate. All these services are being underutilized and the resources are there, and we want to make sure people can access them.
The Healthy: It sounds like over the years, you’ve done a lot to support cancer research. Can you articulate what you think that meant to your mom when she was able to witness your dedication to the cause?
Patrick Dempsey: My mother had ovarian cancer. What’s interesting is what came out of our conversation with this was that the doctor talked to me about that I could have a probability of having breast cancer as a man because of her ovarian cancer gene, which I thought was really fascinating and new information. So, to the men out there: This is something [where] if your mother or someone in your family has ovarian cancer, it’s something to look at.
My mom was around when we opened the center. She was really pleased. I don’t think she liked the spotlight on her at all, but she loved working one on one. I think there’s a lot of survivor guilt that people don’t talk about, and it actually came up in a conversation [recently] at an event I was at. I know it was hard for her. She had 12 recurrences of it, so it was remarkable she survived as long as she did. She was a real fighter, and she really loved being one on one with someone who was newly diagnosed, and talking to them—that’s where she really thrived, and she loved that. But she did not like being on stage and being out front at all.
The Healthy: Were there times during the height of Grey’s Anatomy where you heard from medical professionals who were fans of the show?
Patrick Dempsey: We usually had doctors around us when we were performing any of the surgeries, so that was really fun. I remember, before I started, I went to UCLA and I sat in on a craniotomy. I was in the OR for the entire surgery, and it was incredible. The doctor, who was a very prominent doctor at UCLA, his father didn’t like the fact that he specialized and that he was working there because [the father] was a small-town doctor and he thought he should be working in a small town in a rural community, which I think is really quite fascinating.
The Healthy: Is your philanthropy your major focus right now? What else have you been up to lately?
Patrick Dempsey: I think it’s growing because the need is so great for wraparound care. There’s so much emphasis, you know, on, certainly, medicine and sort of curing the disease—but we’re not healing the person. And what I’m learning is that there’s so much need after all those treatments are done. It came out of a conversation a woman shared with us, and I think when we get people to get out and share their experiences, that’s where we learn the most, the testimonials. She goes, “I came out and I was cured, but I wasn’t healed.” And I think part of the wraparound care, the hostile approach we give with the counseling is very important, working with nutrition, the acupuncture, the caregivers, the children’s program—all of those things are needed into survivorship. People are getting diagnosed earlier, they’re living longer, but they’re also dealing with the PTSD of that and also “Will it come back? Will it be a reoccurrence?” I think that’s something we need to focus on together and we need to be a team. We need all of these elements working together simultaneously.
The Healthy: What’s one health or self-care habit you refuse to skip?
Patrick Dempsey: Exercise. I think exercise is key. We have an issue with obesity, we have a problem with the industrial food complex and what’s being put in our foods, and there are people that don’t have a lot of choices because they can only afford what is there. There are areas in our country that they don’t have a lot of choices to get healthy, organic foods; it’s too expensive. So, I think that’s the biggest challenge: portion control and keeping the exercise going as well.
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