From Doctor
to Healer
From Doctor to Healer
Welcome to my third memoir about my unusual trajectory in the world of medicine. In my first memoir, “Medicine and Miracles in the High Desert,” I shared with readers my profoundly life-changing and eye-opening time on the Navajo Reservation as a young schoolteacher in the early 1970s. Many years later, I returned to the Navajo people to serve them as a medical doctor in Cuba, New Mexico. The second memoir, “From Mountains to Medicine,” takes the reader on a spellbinding, ten-year odyssey in search of my life’s purpose.
This memoir begins with my wide-eyed excitement upon entering medical school. I had an unquenchable eagerness to learn information and skills that would help others. I held no pre-conceived ideas about the kind of education I would receive. Gradually, as time passed, I began suspecting that something wasn’t right about some of the information that the professors and mentors taught the medical students. Long after I completed my training, I discovered why some of the information I learned didn’t make sense, and the conflicts of interest involved in many of the studies that were done that influenced what the medical students were taught.
While in my training, I eventually understood that, if I wanted to succeed and graduate near the top of the class, I had to silence my common sense, critical thinking, and experiential knowledge. I put my soul in a little box and tucked it away, which allowed me to go along with everything the professors taught me.
As the years went by, a barely audible internal voice kept telling me, “This kind of corporatized medicine is not the path you were searching for. You are turning into a robot—a factory worker on a conveyor belt.”
Reminiscent of what happened in my younger life as a college student, it took a major disaster to liberate me from the path I had taken. The disaster upended my life and then threw me right onto the path that I had longed for.
At last, I found my life’s true purpose and, as a Navajo friend’s grandmother prophesized in 1971, “...if you survive the big and sometimes life-threatening obstacles that come your way, you will have powerful medicine to give to the people.”
