beautiful mountain scenery, skiing, and generally feeling pretty useless.

While other people were resisting what they perceived to be a gross injustice — something that the courts eventually agreed with, and struck down the executive order — I was doing nothing. And I felt like I had to do something.

So the morning that I returned to Chicago, I wrote a letter to my patients. I figured that many of my patients had no idea of my heritage, given that I don’t have an accent and (like most people of Syrian descent) I’m white, hardly fitting the Muslim stereotype that for many Americans is the only Muslim they know.

Opinion polls consistently show that Americans who know a Muslim personally are more inclined to think positively of Muslims than those who haven’t. For many of my patients, I had an opportunity to be the only Muslim they know.

And while many Americans support the idea of a “Muslim ban” in the abstract, I was optimistic that putting a human face on the issue would encourage people to reconsider it.

It is a cliché to say that we are a nation of immigrants. But it is also true. So I tried to frame the issue of immigrants from the Muslim world coming to America as the same pursuit of the American dream that has brought immigrants to these shores for centuries.

And I tried to hold my family up as an example of how immigrants can enrich America as much as America enriches them.

Maybe I’m supposed to be surprised at how positive the response has been from my patients, but I’m really not. I have complete confidence in the inherent goodness of this nation and its people, and I had faith that once my patients understood how this order affected me on a personal level, they would respond with sympathy and support.

And they have. Not every patient has read the letter, of course, and not everyone who has read the letter has commented about it. But those who have are completely supportive of it. Several patients have asked if I still have family in Syria (I do), and inquired about their well-being, given the humanitarian crisis taking place there.

And the next patient who says something critical about my letter, or tells my staff that they’ll be taking their business elsewhere, will be the first.