accessing fields of pandas dataframe

Question

I am new to pandas and I have inherited a script I need to maintain. I have a dataframe, if I print it out in the debugger I get this:

(Pdb) reportMatchingTable
    measurement             CALCArea CALCAreaProp IPHArea IPHAreaProp LRNCArea  
    patient target  section
    proxyI  aTarget U              0            0       0           0        0
                    V              0            0       0           0        0
                    W              0            0       0           0        0
                    X              0            0       0           0        0
                    Y              0            0       0           0        0   
                    Z              0            0       0           0        0   
    proxyII aTarget U              0            0       0           0        0   
                    V              0            0       0           0        0   
                    W              0            0       0           0        0   
                    X              0            0       0           0        0   
                    Y              0            0       0           0        0   
                    Z              0            0       0           0        0

What I want is to get a list of all the patient names (in the example that would be proxyI and proxyII). I have tried every way I can think of to access the data, but none work. Googling did not help.

What is the method for getting the data I need out of this frame?

Here is the output of columns

(Pdb) reportMatchingTable.columns
Index([        u'CALCArea',     u'CALCAreaProp',          u'IPHArea',
            u'IPHAreaProp',         u'LRNCArea',     u'LRNCAreaProp',
       u'LumenAndWallArea',        u'LumenArea',         u'MATXArea',
           u'MATXAreaProp',       u'PlaqueType'],
      dtype='object', name=u'measurement')