Dr. Patch Adams, born in 1945 as a military brat turned "war orphan," critiques modern medicine’s profit-driven model while championing his Gazuntite Institute, a free 24-hour hospital blending art, agriculture, and compassion—treating 15,000+ without fees or malpractice insurance. His $3,000/year staffing vision contrasts with today’s $85,000 medical debt crisis, rejecting involuntary psychiatric care as human rights violations. Callers echo his mission, offering support for the West Virginia clinic set to break ground in June, funded solely by community donations like Shriners Hospitals or Sai Baba’s model. Adams argues systemic change—prioritizing trust over bureaucracy—could redefine healthcare and even eliminate mental illness as we know it. [Automatically generated summary]
From the high desert in the great American Southwest, I bid you all good evening and or good morning wherever you may be across this great land of ours from the island of Guam commercially out across the mainland eastward into the Caribbean and the U.S. Virgin Islands south into South America north all the way to the Pole and world one on the internet.
This is post-attozed AM and I'm RFL.
Good morning.
We are going to do something a little different tonight.
Normally we start out in the second hour with a guest.
Tonight we're going to start out in the first hour with a guest.
And he is Patch Adams.
Patch Adams.
You may recall, I'm sure most of you, the movie about Patch Adams' life.
Played by Robin Williams?
In fact, the real Patch Adams is here tonight.
An MD, a social revolutionary, it says on the back of his book, who has devoted his life to giving away health care.
Doctor?
Clown?
Man of many hats indeed.
Adams is the founder of the VajunType Institute, a home-based medical practice in West Virginia that has treated more than 15,000 people for free.
Whether it means putting on a red clown nose for sick children or taking a deserved patient outside to roll down a hill with him, Adams does whatever he has to do to help heal.
In his frequent lectures and performances at medical schools and international conferences, his irrepressible energy cuts right through the business-like facade of the medical industry to address how the need for a caring relationship between doctor and patient is at the very heart of true medicine.
This is the story of Patch Adams' lifetime quest to transform the healthcare system.
And he has extremely strong opinions on that, which is all right.
Gaining supporters from across the country, the Gazuntite Institute will soon build a free full-scale hospital that will be open to anyone in the world.
Ambitious?
Yes.
Impossible?
Not for those who know Patch.
It is an astounding story you're about to hear, if you'll tell it for us.
Coming up in a moment, Dr. Patch Adams.
this is going to be i think very interesting from the hills From West Virginia, here is Patch Adams.
Well, even more dangerous than just surviving in it, there's an undercurrent that children here to excel in it and to go to the kind of a who wants to be a millionaire has a huge number of listeners because they want to be the millionaires.
It's not a matter of surviving.
It's being the top consumer that is pushed onto the population where surviving is a lot different than that.
One, people have been so dummified by the modern society that they actually are able to watch something that is as inane as that TV show.
I think they're bored.
I think that people are unhappy and anxious and that they actually don't have intentions that drive them to create the life that is available for anybody.
Anyone can have intentions and live a blissed life following those intentions, but that's not the messages out there.
And so, I mean, in my experience, I assume people are depressed and anxious until they prove otherwise.
And the message of our society, and implied in the statement of the show, who wants to be a millionaire, if you actually ask people, most everybody does.
It is a much closer definition of success than being a good friend.
Well, I mean, on the microcosm, one could say they see a lot of it.
But we could take people, number of people that said they belong to the Christian church, and I wouldn't take that a figure as to be the number of people who are actually Christians.
That for me, probably less than 5% of Christians actually are.
Because Christ's message is to serve, to live a life in service and caring for others.
So unless you're doing that, you're not really a Christian.
You're just hovering.
And I think the same is true.
I think there is a hunger for people to have meaning in their life.
And the spiritual life is one area to have meaning.
I mean, one, they don't give themselves the personal benefit.
If a person truly surrenders to Christ, they need never suffer.
I'm speaking not as a Christian, but as an understander of the texts and meeting a few faithful people that if one is full of their faith, it covers their suffering.
So they won't suffer.
They won't want.
The Lord is my shepherd.
I shall not want.
And so by wanting, they obviously are not shepherded.
And we are a society of wanting.
So one of the benefits of having a faith, and some would suggest, certainly Dostoevsky did, that if God didn't exist, humans would have created God for that purpose, to try to give them meaning in some way.
And, you know, it's impossible to find meaning in a society that worships money and power.
There is no meaning in money, and there's no meaning in power over.
There's just quantity, but no meaning.
And so it makes sense that people, the body of 20th century literature around the world is about loneliness and loss of meaning.
and in a in a century of this loss of meaning it makes sense that that people would be vulnerable to almost any kind of empowerment well but i don't think it's
And that, to me, is a spiritual life, and that's why I say that very maybe many people are religious, but not very many are spiritual.
I was born in 1945, a weekend furlough of my father, who was a professional soldier in the European theater.
And then I think I saw him again 18 months later.
And I grew up on Army bases overseas.
My mom was a school teacher.
And at age 16, having lived in Germany for seven years at that time, my father died suddenly.
And so I became a war orphan and returned to the United States in 1961 to the South, which was in the throes of confrontation with racism in the form of the Civil Rights Movement.
And I immediately got involved.
I was also a nerdy kid, nerdy science kid, and didn't really fit into the American society very well.
I was in an all-white school and frequently beaten up because I took a stand.
And those two years, it's between 16 and 18, were pretty turbulent for me.
They couldn't make Robin look 18.
And then the film opens with me in a mental hospital.
My three hospitalizations occurred when I was 17 and 18.
I didn't want to live in a world of violence and injustice.
Since I had such a loving mother who really gave me a very clear picture of unconditional love, to go out and suddenly notice that the adult world didn't care about those things.
I used to hide under my bed, not understanding why people cared about what color a person was.
And the hypocrisy that Was in the churches and not having a mentor, and not really, I guess, dealing with my father's death, and being a weird nerd, and not really having success in courtship.
All that was happening at the same time, going to jazz clubs, and being in the Math Honor Society, geeking out and working for justice.
It was long enough ago to where I mostly philosophized about it and have a fully clear memory.
I was a happy-go-lucky nerd kid.
My father died.
We were uprooted, came back to America.
And the hate and the racism, it was everywhere.
People being denied eating at food counters and going to the bathroom and drinking fountains.
It was inexcusable.
And that was probably even more devastating than my father's death, was that people could deny a person something because of their color, that they could actually speak about black people as if they weren't people.
And then I noticed in my school, the white school I was in, they didn't care.
Why do you care?
"You're not black," is what they would tell me.
As if they had no idea what this country was formed on, injustice and those sort of things that they...
Well, I think the more one studies history, they know that change is going on all the time.
There was a very visible 60s thing.
The civil rights movement was a change.
The more one study histories and see the connections of things, the changes in medicine, the changes in education, the changes in what the atomic bomb did the year we were born, the changes of the Cold War, all of that.
And so often we talk just about, I mean, at that time all I thought about was the United States and the little world I was in.
And there were huge changes happening in other countries that we, of course, never even learned anything about.
Sure.
It's just that the media and the attention that the 60s had is that it looked like it was a big movement, even though there were movements.
There are always movements going on.
A parallel course with the traditional history is a whole history of people trying something else and trying to make something else.
You know, the kinds of drugs young people are exposed to is colossally different than when we grew up.
And all of them, in some way, affect what's going on.
I'm one of these people.
When I grew up, I was concerned about the nuclear war and remember hiding under a desk.
And now it's even bigger for me that I actually feel our impending extinction.
That the misuses of our environment, the fact that so much of our population is powerless and lonely and depressed and anxious and and what the multinational corporations are doing on a global scale.
You see, I set out in medical school 34 years ago to use medicine as a vehicle for social change.
As a nerd, I knew I'd have a lot of free time in medical school, and I studied healthcare delivery systems historically and around the world.
And what I wanted to do when I graduated 30 years ago was to create a medical model that addressed every single problem of the way care is delivered in one model.
So what that meant is that 20 adults and our children moved into a large six-bedroom house, and we said we were a hospital open 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for all manner of medical problems from birth to death.
We ran this for 12 years, and that's when we saw those 15,000 people.
Never in our 30-year history have we charged money for anything.
In fact, it wasn't that we wanted to be free for poor people.
We wanted to eliminate the idea of debt in the medical interaction.
We didn't want to have people think that they owed something.
We were a political act to recreate community.
And we cannot conceive of a community that won't take care of its people, not out of responsibility and guilt, but out of the ecstatic experience of a sense of belonging.
In that same vein, we've never had anything to do with third-party reimbursement, Medicaid, Medicare, Blue Cross.
We never heard anyone say anything good about them, so we didn't want to have anything to do with them.
We also have a lot of control over the way care is delivered.
We also have never carried malpractice insurance.
When you carry malpractice insurance, you're telling your patients, I'm afraid of you and I don't trust you.
So you live your professional career in fear and mistrust.
We are the politics of vulnerability, so we did not have people sign waivers.
We decided not to be frightened.
We also have been the only hospital to fully integrate all the healing arts, so that straight medicine as well as all of complementary medicine was always welcome.
As a family doctor, my initial interviews with patients were three or four hours long.
And in spending that kind of time with patients, we found that practically no one was healthy if we defined health as a happy, vibrant, exuberant life.
And so that it very quickly behooved us to really look at the whole person, to start looking at a person and saying, look, people want to learn how to make friends.
They want to learn how to love life.
They want to learn how to be full of wonder and curiosity and passion and hope.
They want their sense of humor back.
And that these were medical issues.
And that's why from our very beginning we integrated medicine with performing arts and arts and crafts, and agriculture, and nature, education, recreation, social service.
This was all part of the package of being a doctor in a hospital in a community.
We did this for 12 years.
No one gave us a single donation in that whole time.
In fact, our staff had to work outside jobs to pay to practice medicine, which is what I've done for 30 years, is pay to practice medicine.
Well, it was scattered in Virginia and West Virginia.
Then we stopped seeing them and have devoted the last 18 years to try to raise the money to build a model hospital to our fantasy design that would have all of those principles in it and that we would operate this hospital on less than 5% of the national average, saving 95% of the cost by making it a service and not a business.
And because we've designed such a fabulous design, doctors and nurses line up to work for $3,000 a year, which is why it's really important for us to get our hospital built.
Well, most of them can't be on a path to do what I'm doing.
I would say many more want to now than when I graduated from medical school, partly because it's half women.
The problem is medical education, one problem is that medical education has become so expensive that the average person when they graduate owes $85,000.
And so how can they go out to serve humanity?
They're not going to do what I did, which is just ignore the debt and go do it anyway.
And so they're in a trap that makes them owe a huge amount of money.
There are also practically no models in the United States where a person can step into a service-oriented model.
They can say, look, I didn't enter medicine to get rich.
I wanted to enter medicine to serve my community.
But where's the hospital or the community that's got that kind of clinic where I can do that?
All right, but in your book, you do address the fact that there are incompetent doctors, and you say they need to go, but you don't lay out any method you might have in mind if the whole malpractice thing were to end.
I mean, it's cybernetics working in a beautiful, in our particular case, since we're on top of each other in the same building and living there with our families, we really have a chance to see.
And that we, you know, there's not a competition for who saved the person or who did the healing or who gets the wealth from doing the healing.
In competition, you want to inflate your own and deflate the other person's.
Yeah, you acknowledge that medicine, you stress, is an imperfect science and that people are going to, you know, when they come to you, some of them are going to die.
You know, I had thought of a question to ask you as I read your book, and that was: can you think of any we certainly are going to outline a lot that's wrong with modern medicine.
That's easy for you after having read your book, but can you think of anything that's right about what's being done now and the way the structure is set up?
And if you compared us to the third world, but you compare us to other countries in Europe and other wealthy nations, and we don't look very good at all.
Any time where they think that the most expensive, highest tech will give them a better shot than what they've got and they're wealthy, they can come here.
The only argument I was going to make for the sake of trying it out on you was that, yes, everything you say about it is true, but it does allow, boy, by God, we've got the most expensive, best machines available to mankind, right?
The thing is, though, see, if greed weren't there, even the transplants wouldn't cost that much.
it's the greed that makes everything cost so much everyone wants their piece of the greed if you know if this really were a democracy and if our tax dollars did not support multinational corporations and actually cared about people then there then why doesn't this nation have a generic pharmaceutical company first of all if you if they just took the generics,
if the government just took the generics, they could go down to, say, Angola prison, where there are 6,000 lifers, and create a beautiful place there to instead of making license plates, they could make generics and drop the bottom out of the pharmaceutical industry.
They could then, why don't they, in fact, create ten, we could call them complexes, where they had biochemists and physiologists and geneticists, and they got together, and whatever they produced was for the people.
Well, let me play the devil's advocate with you for a second, all right?
The argument would be, oh, but these wonderful drugs that we get, state-of-the-art drugs that are developed, come because the pharmaceutical companies have all this money to do all this R ⁇ D to find them.
Well, if people actually went behind the scenes and looked at the politics and economics of pharmaceutical companies, they would hate what they see.
We don't need these pharmaceutical companies.
Again, if we decided to turn our society towards one of compassion and generosity instead of power over and money, which now rules the world, in that world, we would be bragging about how little we made.
We would be saying how no one in this town has seen violence in 50 years.
Well, you don't need much compassion to know about oil, and he's already kissing oil, but.
What an embarrassment.
I mean, it's such a shameful embarrassment to intelligence, to what could be.
That's what I'm saying.
I'm not going to sit back and say, well, things have all war has always been, so I'm supposed to just go along with war.
Well, capitalism won the Cold War, so I'm supposed to just go along with that.
I don't go along with things that don't feel right to me.
I don't go along with the fact that people are denied care.
I don't go along with the fact that 60% of our school teachers have to have second jobs and professional sports figures are multi-millionaires playing with their balls.
Well, I was medicated, first of all, and not talked with.
It was pretty infantile.
And I was not a forced admission.
I admitted myself I was suicidal.
But there are tremendous numbers of people who are.
I worked eight years at St. Elizabeth Hospital, which was the only federal mental hospital.
And I definitely saw forced psychiatry there.
And I want to read a statement of my friend Rodney Yoder, who's in Illinois, who his story, I've not met him in person, but we've exchanged many, many, many letters, numbering in the hundreds of pages.
I know certainly as he is very intelligently, desperately trying to find freedom from his forced incarceration by people who are abusing our profession to keep this man in prison.
I'm going to read a statement.
I talked with him last night and I asked him to fax me a statement.
I am Rodney Yoder.
For 10 years, I have been confined to an insane asylum in Illinois as a retaliation for suing a lawsuit against a state official, for making repeated complaints about my incarceration, and for speaking and writing against forced psychiatry.
At present, mine is the most controversial case of madhouse incarceration in the U.S., and experts from around the U.S. have volunteered to testify the upcoming trial on my captor's petition seeking my continued confinement.
Among those who volunteered to testify is clown and physician Patch Adams.
Patch has helped me to garner the medical, the media, and press coverage needed to ensure that I receive a fair trial before an impartial judge and jury.
Information about me and my plight and regarding psychiatric oppression generally may be viewed at www.stopshrinks.org.
That's www.stopshrinks.org.
There are many other great websites linked to it.
It goes on to say some other things.
I'm not sure that that's germane right here.
What I'd like the listener to do is to remember the name and know that every day that they are free, that this man is held and he is not insane.
I know and would state all of my knowledge of humanity that this man is not insane, that there's a vindictiveness here and an unjust commitment in using psychiatry for that unjust treatment.
All I see is it says here, information about me and my plight can be at this www.stopshrink.org.
And so I'm hoping, because I know Rodney's listening, I'm hoping that he'll make sure there's a way for people who are willing to write him a letter or two to be part of his team, maybe the people in Illinois willing to go to bat for him.
I'd like to also tell the listening audience that going to bat for people, just put yourself in their shoes.
I don't know Rodney, but he wrote me and then he told me his story, and now I care about Rodney.
This is not the first media experience I've had.
This is, in a way, maybe a microcosm of the medicine that we offer.
Here is a man in another state who, because of an unconnected and certainly not a mental problem, ended up in incarceration.
And then because of his behavior, wanted to put him away.
And he's been put away for now up to a decade.
And he screams in tears for me.
He says, Patch, I could be here the rest of my life.
And I tell you, listening audience, if you want to do some, take a little time out and just go to the website and find a way to put your voice on the line for him and say that he has the right to walk free.
See, right now, in the current system of profit, care has been relegated to the burden category, the burden of our elderly, the burden of our poor, the burden of our mentally ill, the burden of the criminal element.
And these are all burdens, where it's really the multinational corporations that are getting the gigantic cuts and subsidies and benefits, but we never hear about them being our burden.
And so, no, in a world that I'm working for, we wouldn't need mental hospitals.
We would have, one, people would not be working all the time just to make money to consume more.
The work would be connected to the integration of their community.
so how would you separate them from And I'm saying that you haven't convinced me there's a scenario.
You know, if we celebrated eccentrics, if we celebrated difference and diversity, then maybe there wouldn't be such a narrow, tight-ass version of what normal is.
My friend Bowen White, a great physician from Kansas, wrote a book that people should really look at called Why Normal Isn't Healthy.
And Emily Dickinson, who easily would be diagnosed by any psychiatrist in the modern-day realm, said this, much madness is divinest sense to a discerning eye.
Much sense, the starkest madness.
Tis the majority in this, as all, prevail.
Assent, and you are sane.
Demur, you're straight away dangerous and handled with a chain.
And there's Rodney Yoda right there.
He demurred.
And what I'm very confident is, is that if compassion and generosity, if empathy were the way, we would have no idea what mental illness in that society would be.
Well, they're trying to sue doctors because they said, well, the patient was suicidal, you should have committed them.
Like somehow you can prevent a person from killing themselves.
It's such a stupid, typical behavior.
I mean, look, in order so that Jeffrey Dahmer could be served as papers, my favorite headline in my 56 years is the top two-inch headline, Jeffrey Dahmer is sane.
And they needed him to be sane in order to try him.
So let's just make him sane.
Yep.
And so how can we believe anybody about anything to do with mental illness?
You know, for me, mental illness, and this is what Rodney put in this last paragraph.
I mean, notice how much I consider almost all mental illness a consequence of a society that loves money and power.
Could we really provide the kind of service you're talking about, I know you did it for years, the kind of service you're talking about on a national scale without turning the entire country upside down, inside out.
It's necessary only to say that because I think most Americans' knowledge of Patch Adams is the movie with Robin Williams.
And this is the real fellow here.
I've been meaning to ask, and we will ask about that, if the movie was a fair representation.
I keep meaning to do that.
It keeps slipping my mind.
We'll do that in a month.
By the way, on my website right now, we have links under Dr. Patch Adams' name to his book, Guzuntite, Bringing Good Health to You, the Medical System and Society Through Physician Service, Complementary Therapies, Humor, and Joy.
We have a link to his website, www.patchadams.org, and we have an interaction for you, Humorous Therapy Discussion Area.
I'm not sure where that comes from, but that may have something to do with Patch.
We'll ask, in fact, now.
Patch, before we get off into anything else, most Americans did see that movie about you with Robin Williams.
And so a lot of us are curious, how fair was the representation of you?
I've made 80 hours or 70 hours of movies myself and have studied film.
And the movie doesn't add anything to the history of film from the standpoint of cinematography.
The writing was horrible, I thought.
I was embarrassed for the writing.
I felt myself dummified to the max.
I'm a really smart person.
I went to medical school during the Vietnam War and the movement and the civil rights movement, and I was pretty rabid in them, and you don't even see them in the movie.
The attendings, the administration were much bigger assholes than actually were depicted.
The real person murdered was my closest male friend in medical school.
If you saw my version of the noodle bath, you'd realize how tame even the most outlandish humor in the movie is.
So I tell people, if I pull out one hair of your head and say, does that represent you?
You have to say yes.
It just doesn't represent all of you.
I didn't see myself at all in the movie.
And my friends didn't see my gestures.
I think Shadiac and Robin both made a decision, I don't know how it was made, that they would not try to perform me, my gestures, my...
And I've grown to love the movie for its consequences, meaning that at least 3,000 people have come to me and said, Patch, I saw the movie, and I started a project that's helping other people.
And most people would like one of those.
And I know of at least 3,000 that have told me from that movie.
And many people, many thousands of people who are mentally ill have told me that because I got out of mine, they're going to get out of theirs.
A huge number, tens of thousands of people have contacted me about how they're teachers or doctors or nurses or they're helping or they're caring about something.
And the movie inspired them.
It helped them renew their own spirit to something.
I get letters from people saying I watch the movie some every day.
I've heard from people they've seen it 20, 30 times.
I mean, I don't know how they can do that.
But I think its popularity and all wasn't about the gags.
It was about the nations starving for anything resembling a positive tale about love, about caring.
Real compassion, real humor in medicine is so much more elaborate and sweet.
And the movie has also made it help.
I mean, one of the things I need to ask the listening audience is that our first donation came 14 years into the project.
No one helped us.
We had to pay to practice medicine.
And oh, for $1,400 in foundation grants.
No government agency, no corporation, no foundation has ever tried to support the only project in America addressing the problems of care delivery agency.
And the thing is, practically no one has sent us donations.
I would rager that 95% of the people that know and love me haven't.
That outside of some extras and Mike Farrell and Marv Minoff, who were friends before they were producers, no one connected to the movie gave me a donation.
All the people at the World Premiere, all those furs, they all, they said, oh, I love the movie.
I hand them my card and said, do you love it enough to support it?
Not one sent a donation.
Really?
Almost all the people who've called me for 30 years asking for care, when I'd say, look, we're trying to build a hospital.
Can you help us click?
They want something.
They don't want to help build a model hospital.
And what I can tell your audience, if it's the millions that I've heard, you know, if they each sent $100, I could bring free medical care to West Virginia.
I mean, isn't that astounding that I have thousands of doctors and nurses ready to work for $3,000 a year?
Why, 30 years into this project, am I having to go on some show at 1 o'clock at night begging for people to help me when I get offers from wealthy people to build it for-profit and make it for teenagers of rich people?
We're going to build it moderately over the next 300 years unless people say all these people, because everyone I've ever seen in the newspaper says, I'm interested and concerned about healthcare delivery, I write them.
Every time I see it mentioned anywhere, I write them and say, look, we're the only model in the U.S. addressing the problems of care delivery.
We have a 30-year record.
We have a film.
We're known all over the world.
It's a shoe-in.
We have 30 years of integrity in it.
And so I want the people who've gotten their pens to write this down.
The Gazuntite Institute is the name of our hospital.
Because at least, I guess, even today, a healthy percentage of people who go into health care as nurses or doctors really want to perform their art and they don't want to be in the stock market in the first year or two and all the rest of that, the fast track that doctors have, you're saying enough of a percentage of them.
And whoever has a heart sees the intoxication of giving.
That's the real secret.
Why am I so high on it, Art?
I'm high on it because giving, the unencumbered act of loving another person and caring for them, is as great as life gives.
And that being in a setting where you can do that, and that's your job, you're going to stay and bust your butt for nothing because it feels so good to do it.
And for the last couple hundred years, science has tried to reduce us down to things.
One cause, one thought.
Maybe there are 10 billion.
Maybe there are that many factors in any given day.
Certainly the mind-body, psychoneuroimmunology that's gotten a lot of play the last 25 years has clearly shown gigantic connections of things we already knew.
Look, tomorrow, go yell and bitch all day long at your spouse and see how you feel at the end of the day.
And then the next day, go and just have it be mushy and wonderful and sweet and see how you feel at the end of the day.
Mr. Adams, I had a similar experience like you about the involuntary, and it was from my father's rage that I learned at a very early age.
And then, I guess, my teenage years, I went and tore up the house.
So they locked me in the little lunatic asylum.
And I had about the same treatment you did.
Plus, brutalized by the staff a little bit.
And So I decided, I said, well, after I got out, I had an awakening, sort of like you did.
And I said, well, I'm going back and I'm going to work at this mental hospital in particular.
I went back to work, and my supervisor says I was getting too close to the patients, too personal.
And it always blew my mind that I had this type of battle with my administrators and supervisors just to treat these people as human beings instead of these, quote, what we're supposed to call them, patients all the time.