Pioneers of a new medicine: meet a group of renegade doctors who are part of wave of change revolutionizing American medicine

Vegetarian Times, Feb, 1997 by Eric Patterson, Luise Light

Feeling there was nothing he could do for his flu patients at Kaiser, Gray asked them to come to his house after hours to try homeopathic treatments (a 200-year-old healing art based on the concept that "like cures like"), which he had been studying on his own. Of the 30 patients who accepted Gray's offer, 27 were cured -- within 24 hours. "It confirmed for me that homeopathy would work," says Gray. To the outrage of his supervisor, Gray started asking Kaiser patients with arthritis, ulcers and other chronic diseases to visit his home office. After six months of tense relations, Gray left the clinic to start a private homeopathy practice. In 1986 he co-founded the Hahnemann School for Homeopathy, in Albany, Calif., a leader in homeopathy's current resurgence.

The tendency to see patients as pathologies with no connection to mind or spirit is what drove other doctors to go beyond the bounds of conventional practice. As a medical student at the University of Michigan in the early 1970s, E.J. Linkner was a straight-A student, but he was distressed at how patients were treated. "I felt doctors were putting Band-Aids on people," Linkner says. They were treating symptoms, but they weren't addressing the underlying reasons for disease -- the lifestyle factors, the emotional issues and, the thought processes that contribute to illness.

While still in school, Linkner and some friends formed the Ann Arbor Free Peoples' Clinic, which, like the famous Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic in San Francisco, treated all people regardless of ability to pay. Unlike most of their fellow medical school graduates, Linkner, a family physician, and his colleagues made a concerted effort to get to know their patients. Whether the problem was an ear infection or recurrent headaches, Linker would have an extensive conversation with a patient to find out what was going on in his or her life, emotionally and spiritually. Among his prescriptions were relaxation techniques or recommendations to do volunteer work to bolster patients' spirits. "We were teaching people they had a great power over their health by how they were looking at the world," Linkner says.

Linkner's view of the world led him to create a "healing community" that he believed was integral to his patients' health. "As part of your medical training, you're taught not to become emotionally involved with your patients," Linkner says. "But I can't separate myself from that deep interaction. I feel like I'm part of a patient's family. I've attended births, bar mitzvahs, weddings and funerals. As long as it doesn't interfere with your medical judgment, I find nothing wrong with being emotional."

A ROCKY ROAD

For many of these innovators, traveling outside the mainstream has not been an easy road. As students, they received little or no encouragement to go beyond convention. If medical professors touched on alternative therapies at all, it was to dismiss them totally. Forced to educate themselves however they could, these M.D.s found their pursuit of alternatives isolated them from their colleagues and made them suspect.