Departments
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Week of 11 June 1999 |
Vol. II, No. 35 |
Feature
Article
Sense of humors
Adams' Rx for new doctors: laughter, altruism, activism
By Hope Green
Physician and professional clown Patch Adams sought not a guffaw, nor even a dignified chuckle, when he delivered an impassioned keynote address at the Boston University School of Medicine convocation on May 23.
On this occasion, the internationally crusading M.D. known for cheering his patients with boffo humor played it straight, and with the elocution of an evangelist, he beseeched the new doctors to help make health care more humane.
Quoting the poets e. e. cummings and Mary Oliver, as well as 13th-century mystic Jalaluddin Rumi, Adams urged the candidates to be courageous, even outrageous if necessary, in challenging the status quo.
"It is irresponsible to be a physician and not be political," he told them during the afternoon ceremony at Boston's World Trade Center, where he requested the houselights be turned on in Commonwealth Hall so he could see his audience. "Ask yourself, how can I design each moment of my day to be an effective instrument of social change?"
Adams, subject of a 1998 Hollywood film starring Robin Williams, is founder and director of the Gesundheit! ("good health") Institute in Arlington, Va. He launched the nonprofit organization 28 years ago, refusing to charge patients for his services, accept insurance payments, or carry malpractice protection and combining alternative treatment approaches with traditional medicine. A speaker and trainer for health and professional organizations around the world, he aims to encourage more humor and compassion in the doctor-patient dynamic and in health care generally.
In perhaps his most ambitious quest, Adams has struggled for years to create a hospital that would provide a permanent setting for his model of care. Thanks to last year's popcorn publicity for the cause, he said, the Gesundheit! Institute has received enough donations to start building a 40-bed community hospital and "ecovillage" in rural West Virginia. According to Adams, it "will fully integrate medicine with the performing arts, arts and crafts, agriculture, nature, education, recreation, and social services." By providing free health care, he said, "we want to eliminate the idea of debt in the medical interaction."
Neither did he consider the BU School of Medicine indebted to him, accepting no honorarium for the engagement, Dean Aram Chobanian noted in his introductory remarks.
Just hours after the speech, Adams said, he would board a plane for Macedonia on a mission to treat Albanian refugees from Kosovo. With the massive Balkan tragedy in mind, he implored the young doctors to practice tolerance wherever they practice medicine. "Celebrate diversity with your patients," he told them. "The job of a doctor . . . is to help midwife a humane, sustainable [world] community that eliminates the need for refugee camps.
"Our profession is not a job to support your lifestyle," he reminded members of the Class of 1999 and their families. "It is a calling."
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At the School of Medicine convocation, a flower-trousered Patch Adams is flanked by Dean Aram Chobanian (left) and Associate Dean of Student Affairs Arthur Culbert. Photo by Ron Bouley |
