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The 'Wellness' show |
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Score
88%
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2706 votes,
Feasibility
39%
Originality
34%
Humour
40% |
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Dr Patch Adams of Arlington, Virginia, charges no money, carries
no malpractice insurance and lives with patients in a country
farm setting.
Joy, he says, is more important than any other drug. Dr Adams promotes his philosophy of health care through a stage show in which he plays a 19th century snake-oil salesman. His 'products'
include nutrition, exercise, wonder, curiosity and love.
Dr Adams lectures regularly at medical schools throughout the US and has begun building a hospital and health care centre on a 320-acre farm in Pocohantas County, West Virginia. Once it is completed, the Institute hospital will be dedicated to providing totally free healthcare to the community at large. Patch Adams' income is based on donations and fees from his 'Wellness' show.
'The best therapy is being happy. All the other things doctors can do are at best aids,' he says.
'Health is typically defined as the absence of disease. To me, health is a happy, vibrant, exuberant life every single day
of your life. Anything less is a certain amount of disease.
'We will never think in terms of cure rates. It gives a false
sense of security. People are always 'in process' until they die.
You don't cure depression. You help a person find happiness, according
to their own definition, and hopefully you help them to perpetuate
that.
Additional extracts from an interview with Dr Patch Adams
in the Washington Post Magazine:
'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.
Additional extracts from an article by Russell Schoen, who volunteered at Patch Adams' Gesundheit Institute, in YES! (Spring '99).
'They taught me [at medical school] that you shouldn't touch your patients. That you should always distance yourself from them. What kind of system would do that?' asks Patch Adams. He began dreaming about creating his own brand of healthcare and in 1971 he started the 'wellness' institute. For 12 years he ran a hospital out of his house, providing free care to an estimated 15,000 people,
24 hours a day, and never charged a cent.
Patch Adams adds, 'We're not the answer. We are just one alternative.
Gesundheit is meant to be a stimulant and an irritant. I hope it's a stimulus for you to ask yourself and your community, "What is your fantasy hospital? What are your dreams?"'
Additional extracts from an article by Ian Holland in Connections magazine (June '97). [For subscriptions email: chiron@dial.pipex.com]
'The original project was to build this modern hospital, but it turns out that all over the world people are wrestling with
the same problems of health-care delivery, not just the cost but the patient/staff relationship... When I started out I never thought I would end up travelling the world trying to change how other countries provide healthcare services, but two heads of state have invited me to discuss these issues.
'It's my life to inspire people. I like to see it as a river. I jumped into the river of love and fun and life as a celebration and a concern for the world, the river of hope. Most people went for swim in the river of hope and then went and dried off. The
river's current was too strong or not strong enough. I encourage them to put their trunks on and jump back in. I'm a seducer, I give them paradise and the hope that paradise is possible now.
I use theatre and poetry and humour and a project that they can't believe is true but is.
'As a healer I hate this idea that the healing interaction is a draining one. If friendship, as it is for me, is the most
important thing in the world, and the healer's life is really a stream of intimacies, when a patient sits with you and tells you the worst stories that could burn you out, they are also giving you the greatest trust. I focus on the trust, respect and love they give me rather than the pain of their story... I'm there to be a good listener first and to be a good friend, and then to do what intuitively and scientifically both come to mind.
When asked about the New Age movement Patch Adams adds, 'I think it's naive and at times irresponsible, I think it has a self-indulgent quality that concerns me. New Age calls greed 'prosperity
consciousness'. On the positive side it's gone a long way to saying that you don't have to believe in Catholicism to have a spiritual life, you can love Jesus without being a Christian by any of society's
standards, so I think it's helped a huge number of people who were empty of faith or spirit. It has softened men, it has helped establish complimentary medicine and brought people into the environmental movement. It's not social activism. It's done two steps back for
art: new age music and new age painting - I'd rather vomit! I'd rather see Trainspotting.
'I've been with some of the big stars of the New Age movement who preach that we're all one and then I go to dinner with them and they completely ignore the waiter, they ignore anyone who isn't a star with them. There's a huge amount of bullshit. I want to walk the talk.'
Patch Adams, MD, the Gesundheit Institute, 6855 Washington Blvd., Arlington, VA 22213, USA (tel [+001]703/525-8169), or volunteer
coordinator Kathy Blomquist, Gesundheit Institute, HC 64, Box 167, Hillsboro, WV 24946, USA (tel [+001] 304/653-4338). Note: Patch Adams is not on e-mail. He is trying to raise up to 20 million
dollars for his hospital project. The Gesundheit Institute puts out an occasional newsletter called 'Achoo Service!' ('Good health is a laughing matter - and that's nothing to sneeze at!'). Those wishing to make a donation can send a cheque made out to the Gesundheit Institute at the above address or can put their names on a list at www.patchadams.org
See also a shorter piece in the Global Ideas Bank about Patch Adams' work at the Gesundheit Institute, entitled 'How
to be an ideal patient'.
For other very imaginative and socially innovative ideas to do with health, see the health contents listing of the Global Ideas Bank.
For information on a documentary entitled The Real Patch Adams, produced
by Judith Bourque, see www.therealpatchadams.com. Bourque is an independent filmmaker who attempts to sidestep the commercial
interests usually involved in documentary-making for the major networks. She is keen on creating an online bank for constructive, positive documentaries.
For more information contact her at judithbourque@email.com
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