Wellness Medicine

Dr Patch Adams of Arlington, Virginia, charges no money, carries
no malpractice insurance and lives with patients in a country
farm setting.

One more interesting site I found recently is Global Ideas Bank, intended to collect ideas from different field of human life. The site is a collection of ideas and articles about interesting things. Every idea is rated within four categories: feasibility, originality, humor and overall.

The article about wellness-based medicine by doctor Adams is really interesting to me for a few reasons:

1. The core of his approach is using similar powerful force of love and acceptance as religions such as Hinduism or Christianity.

2. Dr. Adams actually a happy person (as far as I can see from the article). He lives simple life in his farm, does what he loves to do in the environment he created for himself.

3. He propagates happiness as an ultimate cure and I agree with him in this matter. Truly happy person is a goal for every spiritual approach or social movement. Everybody seek happiness as it is some kind of gold mine. Besides, human immune system much stronger when person is happy.

4. He uses personal touch, from heart to heart in his practices. He’s right. Doctor cannot be remote (unless it’s telemedicine, of course). Doctor can really help only if he or she is close to the patient. That helps to feel the patient better, hence, diagnose better.

5. He is a happy person (one more time).

Please, read below some small part of the article about him. For full text, please, go to globalideasbank.com.

‘When a person comes to me, unless the problem is an arterial bleed, which has to be addressed that second, the first goal is to have a friendship happen out of that relationship. So we spend three to four hours in the first meeting. We might go for a walk. If you like to fish, maybe we will go fishing. If you like to run, we run together, and I’ll interview you while we are running.
By the end of that time, I hope we have a trust, a friendship starting to develop, and from there we can proceed.

‘From the start, it was obvious to me that we had to have fun in what we were doing. Forget the patient, it had to be fun for us. Life has to be fun! I saw what life was like when I was serious. I had ulcers and I wanted to kill myself. That was me as a serious person. That failed.

‘When you say ‘That doctor has a good bedside manner’, what are you really talking about? The element of love and humour that they bring into the room.

‘But the fact is, until we build our place with beds for our patients and the technology required of a modern medical facility, a model, we will have no impact on the health care delivery system
in this country, and that’s what we’re about.’

Dr Adams adds in a letter to the Institute:

For 18+ years we have tried to challenge the problems of health care delivery in the US in a single model:

- By not charging any money - addressing the issue of the power that greed has in our society.

- By carrying no malpractice insurance.

- By living together. Staff and patient can feel a home environment that is not only hospital but also home - farm, theatre, crafts centre, recreational facility, in a beautiful material setting

- all to address the issues of boredom, loneliness and fear that also are hurting most patients.

- We will be a place to study health in relationship to community and how one can learn skills of cooperation and compromise. The whole community is an 18 year example of joyful inter-dependence.

- We find humour so important that we will substitute a silly, playful hospital in place of serious ones.

- It will be the first inter-disciplinary hospital in the US - having respect for and working in cooperation with all healers.

- It will be a hospital whose underlying ethic is that of living healthy lives and not just conquering sickness.