![]() For dieting, we kept extensive gardens and learned to feed lots of people. For example, we would host all-night dance parties, and yoga sessions during the day, as examples of exercise. In medical school, we never had a single lecture on health and so had to discover how to spark interest and give examples of exercise, diet, love, and spirit. One can never know before a treatment what the effect of that treatment would be, so we need the right to make a mistake, so we are the only hospital in the United States that refuses to carry malpractice insurance. So, we never had anything to do with them. They are, after all, one-quarter to one-third of the cost of care created by the practice of medicine. In this same flavor, we never heard anyone praise insurance companies. We wanted them to be excited to belong to something called community, a nest of care. We didn’t feel like a charity since our focus wasn’t on helping the “poor.” We simply didn’t want people to think they owed us something in return. By 1980 we had gathered enough resources together to purchase 321 acres in West Virginia (the least served state for healthcare).Įverything was given freely. ![]() If one came “as a patient,” our ideal was to have a three- or four-hour-long initial interview (instead of the 7.8-minute one we were taught) and to visit their home. We did not distinguish the patient from the “non-patient.” Instead, our focus was to try to have a relationship with everyone who came. ![]() In the peak years we had 500-1000 people in our home with from five to 50 guests a night. For 12 years we did this experiment, mostly with 20 adults and our children (three were physicians) in a large six-bedroom house. When I graduated in 1971 no one gave us a hospital, so I decided to form a commune that was a hospital open for 24 hours a day, seven days a week for all manner of medical problems from birth to death. After having wonderful words with Kat Kincade and others, I realized I was a communal person-part of the great tribe called human. Two years into medical school, in 1969 I went to visit the Twin Oaks community. I decided to spend my four years in a medical school studying hospitals with the idea upon graduation to create a hospital that addresses all the problems of care delivery, not as the answer, but to show that answers to these problems are possible. There were high levels of racism and sexism where the rich “elite” were treated so much better than the disadvantaged poor. I saw nothing “healthy” about a hospital setting. I immediately saw that hospitals were expensive, hierarchical, frantic, unhappy places easily causing burnout to all levels of staff. I entered medical school in 1967 to use medicine as a vehicle for social change.
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