Dr Patch Adams of Arlington, Virginia, charges no money, carries no malpractice insurance and lives with patients in a country farm setting.
Dr Adams lectures regularly at medical schools throughout the US and has begun building a hospital and health care centre on a 310-acre farm in West Virginia. His 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 writes 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.
Dr Patch Adams, the Gesundheit Institute, 2630 Robert Walker Place, Arlington, Virginia 22207, USA (tel 703 525 8169). He is trying to raise up to four million dollars for his hospital project. The Gesundheit Institute puts out an occasional newsletter called 'Achoo!' ('Good health is a laughing matter - and that's nothing to sneeze at!').