May 7, 2001 - Art Bell
01:25:00
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| 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. | ||
| Hello, Patch. | ||
| Hi, I'm actually speaking to you from Virginia. | ||
| Virginia, huh? | ||
| I thought it was West Virginia. | ||
| We're building a hospital in West Virginia, but you can't raise money in West Virginia, and that's my job. | ||
| Raising money? | ||
| In other words, you obviously want to finish your project, right? | ||
| Well, we're in our 31st year. | ||
| I thought it would take four. | ||
| Yeah, that's a pretty long haul, isn't it, to live with an unrealized dream? | ||
| Well, it's not really safe to say it was unrealized. | ||
| I mean, really important for people who want to create things or to have their intentions come true that they see each day as it being real. | ||
| Zintite has been living every day for over 30 years now. | ||
| It's not waiting to happen for a building in West Virginia. | ||
| No, that's true. | ||
| And as it points out here, you've treated a lot of people over the years for free. | ||
| Nobody does that. | ||
| Well, actually, there are some people do it. | ||
| Shriners Hospitals treat people for free. | ||
| There's a Deborah Hospital in New Jersey that does it. | ||
| Sai Baba has some free hospitals in India. | ||
| Let me rephrase that. | ||
| I've never been treated for free. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Ever. | ||
| And I think I probably am like most Americans. | ||
| Don't you think so? | ||
| Well, medicine is a big business. | ||
| I mean, business is big business, and medicine just happens to be the greediest one. | ||
| It was one of the biggest ones. | ||
| That's for sure. | ||
| All businesses. | ||
| Remember the movie about Wall Street where the guy stood up and said greed is good? | ||
| Well, that's certainly the message our children get. | ||
| Well, I guess they're taught to survive in the atmosphere that we have in America, economically. | ||
| Their parents naturally would teach them to survive in the atmosphere that exists out there. | ||
| And so it's propagated, right? | ||
| Right. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Well, they are the millionaires. | ||
| They're ABC. | ||
| They're billionaires. | ||
| They're a big, gigantic corporation, no question about it. | ||
| And it's a popular show. | ||
| I don't know why. | ||
| Why do you think it's so popular? | ||
| Well, I think there are a number of reasons. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Depressed and anxious. | ||
| 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, you know what? | ||
| I'm not sure that's as universally true as it was. | ||
| I think it's generally true, but I think that there are changes that are beginning to take place with regard to people's spirituality. | ||
| You notice any of that? | ||
| 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. | ||
| So you think 95% of Christians are just hovering? | ||
| Right. | ||
| 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. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| 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. | ||
| All right. | ||
| We're getting pretty deep, pretty fast. | ||
| Take me back, I guess. | ||
| Take me back, sure. | ||
| Tell me about your life. | ||
| Everybody's seen the movie Patch Adams, right? | ||
| 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. | ||
| Did they give you an official diagnosis? | ||
| Oh, golly, it's long enough to me. | ||
| I mean, I never saw the reports, suicide attempt, adolescent adjustment reaction. | ||
| They used different labels in those days than they do now. | ||
| It was before they had a book that told them they had to fit it into these specific labels. | ||
| Some kind of deep depression, though, anyway. | ||
| Well, my memory of it is that I wanted to die. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Plus, you never were able to form very long-term relationships if you were a military brat and moved all the time. | ||
| Right, which actually I see as a bonus, which is why what you do is you get really good at forming them very quickly. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| For those who do it well, we have great skills at going into a town where we don't know anybody and having a circle of friends really quickly. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| And I was one of those people. | ||
| I was a happy-go-lucky, playful kid until those two years. | ||
| Then the last hospitalization, I changed my life forever. | ||
| I looked around. | ||
| I didn't see a staff any happier than the patients. | ||
| When it came on, when this came on to you, I mean, you were pretty much happy-go-lucky. | ||
| And then, boom, is it like a big curtain coming down in your life? | ||
| 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... | ||
|
unidentified
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Good. | |
| Let's go back a little bit and think about that then. | ||
| You and I are the same age. | ||
| I was born in 45 as well. | ||
| And you're talking about a time when America went through a really big change. | ||
| It really went through a big change. | ||
| This period when you were ill, when you got ill, America was changing. | ||
| It was a moment of dramatic social change. | ||
| And we've been on a course from that change ever since, haven't we? | ||
| 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. | ||
| Are there really movements going on all the time? | ||
| What's going on right now? | ||
| Oh, what's the movement? | ||
| There are countless movements going on. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yes, that would have the huge. | |
| When you and I grew up, people never said the word environment or ecology. | ||
| And now they're women who climb a tree and stay for over two years. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| I've interviewed them. | ||
| Yeah, she's a good friend. | ||
| You know Julia Butterfly? | ||
|
unidentified
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Oh, yeah. | |
| She were buddies. | ||
| And so the environment is a huge thing that is different now than when we grew up. | ||
| You're right. | ||
| And the fact, when you and I grew up, kids could play outside. | ||
| That you'd say, see your ma, and whether you had breakfast or not, you ran out and maybe you made it back for dinner. | ||
| Now parents don't even want you to go outside because they're frightened you'll be sodomized or shot or something. | ||
| Certainly the personal computer is a huge difference and a great tool. | ||
| The thing that happened in Seattle and Quebec, the people fighting the WTO, IMF, the computer as a tool for social change is fantastic. | ||
| When I was young, my family left our front door unlocked always. | ||
| We never even thought about locking our door. | ||
| Yeah, and it doesn't mean that racism and violence aren't still an issue. | ||
| They're both still gigantic issues. | ||
| The forms, they take different forms. | ||
| You look at the populations of our prisons and the arrests, and you see big differences. | ||
| Over two million, I think, now in prison. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Actually, I agree with you. | ||
| I too feel impending extinction. | ||
| And I don't like that. | ||
| And it's certainly at the forefront of my tenacity with what I do. | ||
| I don't have to work anymore. | ||
| I could just get wealthy and play golf. | ||
| But the fact is, how does anyone do it? | ||
| How does anyone actually know that our human planet is in great trouble? | ||
| And they watch fake survivor shows when they're in the real survivor show and don't even know it. | ||
| Now that's a good line. | ||
| I'm going to steal that one. | ||
| Hold on, Patch, we're at the bottom of the hour. | ||
| They watch fake survivor shows when they're in the real one. | ||
| That's worth some consideration, isn't it? | ||
| I wonder who the last survivor in this larger case will be. | ||
| That'd be worth thinking about. | ||
| My guest is Patch Adams, the real Patch Adams. | ||
| And you'd do well to sit by your radio, turn the volume up, quit considering meaningless things, and listen for a little while. | ||
| I'm Art Bell, and this is Coast to Coast AM. | ||
|
unidentified
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Coast AM | |
| Coast AM | ||
| Paul Mark Bell in the Kingdom of Nive, from West of the Rockies, at 1-800-618-8255. | ||
| East of the Rockies, 1-800-825-5033. | ||
| First-time callers may recharge at 1-775-727-1222. | ||
| And the Wildcard line is open at 1775-727-1295. | ||
| To recharge on the Toll-Free International line, call your AT ⁇ T operator and have them dial 800-893-0903. | ||
| This is Coast to Coast A.M. with Art Bell from the Kingdom of Nine. | ||
| Like I think most other people, I saw the movie Patch Adams, Robert Williams. | ||
| When I saw that movie, I, you know, I was profoundly affected and I wondered what the real Patch Adams was like. | ||
| Tonight, if you'll just sit tight, you'll learn. | ||
| Once again, Patch Adams. | ||
| Welcome back, Patch. | ||
| Hey. | ||
| Hey. | ||
| You know what I'd like to do before we start? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Can I do that? | ||
| Of course. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Did you ever get sued? | ||
| I'm going to get to that. | ||
| I know you are. | ||
|
unidentified
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I was sued. | |
| 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. | ||
| What was the traditional medical communities, and I mean local to you at that time, reaction to what you were doing? | ||
| No idea. | ||
| No idea? | ||
| They never gave you feedback? | ||
| You never heard whether they like what you were doing? | ||
| Well, I mean, if they don't like you, they would sick the medical society on you. | ||
| So we never had any problems. | ||
| And we were very friendly and fun to be with. | ||
| And so we made friends with a lot of doctors. | ||
| We were also doctors that would make home visits, which we were the only doctors in this area that made home visits. | ||
| So we were appreciated. | ||
| And it was the fact that we really wanted to build a hospital that made us stop seeing patients. | ||
| Where was this? | ||
| 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. | ||
| How many doctors, when they get out of medical school, are, do you think, on a path to do something like you're doing? | ||
| 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? | ||
| You wrote that about 25% of all costs are paper-pushing. | ||
| Well, that's, I mean, those figures are pretty common. | ||
| Administrative. | ||
| No, 25 cents out of every dollar, a medical dollar, goes for paper pushing. | ||
| Well, I mean, they're the the figures are there. | ||
| People debate five or more percent one way or the other, but they're how much wasted money goes to malpractice? | ||
| It's waste. | ||
| There's huge amounts of waste. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Let's talk about malpractice for a second. | ||
| Let's say we want to get rid of the concept of malpractice. | ||
| How do you get rid of then, or how do you address incompetence? | ||
| Well, you think slapping a lawsuit on somebody is going to get them to stop being incompetent? | ||
| It's such an absurdist thing. | ||
| Most lawsuits have nothing to do with competence. | ||
| I mean, how do you root out truly incompetent doctors? | ||
| What method do you use? | ||
| What's an untruly competent doctor? | ||
| I mean, incompetence. | ||
| See, in a real hospital like ours, everyone's really close to everyone else. | ||
| But in your book, no one's going to be surprised that somebody's suddenly incompetent. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Well, the way you do it, actually I do mention it, is that you become really close friends with your staff. | ||
| And you work together. | ||
| You really see how the person is. | ||
| And you call them on their stuff. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| 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. | ||
| We need the right to make mistakes. | ||
| Medicine isn't about curing. | ||
| It's about caring. | ||
| You never, ever, ever can know before a treatment the consequences of that treatment. | ||
| You never can. | ||
| You can be the world's biggest expert on that specialty or disease, and still, when you take the treatment, you have to see what happens. | ||
| And every now and then, not the hoped-for reaction occurs. | ||
| Well, huge numbers of time it doesn't. | ||
| And that's a good plug for being healthy. | ||
| If a system is imperfect, it's good to need it the fewest numbers of times. | ||
| 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? | ||
| I can't think of a single positive thing about managed care. | ||
| Not one thing, huh? | ||
| Oh, it's a negative force. | ||
| It's not either neutral. | ||
| There's nothing positive about managed care. | ||
| First of all, the term care can never be managed. | ||
| It's inconvenient. | ||
| People don't have a heart attack between 4 and 5 each afternoon. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And managed simply means managed for profit. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's not managed for service. | ||
| It's managed so that you can use, you can understaff it and still get by. | ||
| Okay, here's one for you. | ||
| You've done a lot of traveling, I know, and in a lot of other countries, the care is far below the care available here. | ||
| If you have the money. | ||
| If you have the statistics, that's actually we're way down on a huge number of medical statistics. | ||
| Oh, I'm sure we are. | ||
| 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. | ||
| A lot of people do travel to the U.S. from foreign countries for some specialized care, yes? | ||
| Right, yes. | ||
| Heart, liver, lung transplants. | ||
| But not much more? | ||
| 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. | ||
| Okay, are they wrong in thinking that? | ||
| Wrong? | ||
| I mean, I'm not the judge here. | ||
|
unidentified
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You know, I think them is messed up. | |
| The victim is unhealthy. | ||
| Yes, but all I'm getting at here is people who are unhealthy and are rich, they want even the middle class to say, I want the best. | ||
| Imagine how much that makes the multinational corporations think, God, they want the best. | ||
| Boy, do we have them right where we want them? | ||
|
unidentified
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Sure, we'll give them the best. | |
| Yeah, that's right. | ||
| Well, and we do. | ||
| We do. | ||
| 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? | ||
|
unidentified
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It does buy that. | |
| Well, maybe we have them at the cost of not having low-income housing. | ||
| The implication that we have so often now with money and what it's been on is that we only have so much money. | ||
| And that we are in a real dilemma, if that's the case. | ||
| Because would you rather have, say, three children who need liver lung transplants or have low-income housing for 15 families? | ||
| It's a very easy decision for me if it's an either-or. | ||
| Is it really easy for you? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| We need low-income housing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Huh. | |
| You know, the... | ||
| First of all, liver lung transplants, those kinds of things, they're basically experimental. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And if you go behind the scenes of it, there's a lot of stuff where you don't know if they're experimenting with the kid or not. | ||
| What are they actually doing? | ||
| And what is... | ||
| If a liver transplant would save your life, would you refuse it? | ||
| Well, I don't know the other circumstances, do I? | ||
| I mean, today. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I'd need to know more information. | ||
| I can see situations where I wouldn't. | ||
| The rationing that goes on... | ||
| But that's true of everybody. | ||
| I mean, when Mickey Mantle got his transplant, he already was really sick. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He got the same transplant. | ||
| He wouldn't... | ||
| You wouldn't... | ||
| You know, another ball player from a bush league wouldn't have gotten it. | ||
| That's probably right. | ||
| In other words, I... | ||
| You know, they say they're not moved up on the list, but I find that's hard to believe. | ||
| You know, really hard to believe. | ||
| I mean, at least... | ||
| Well, they're also killing people in the Far East for their organs. | ||
| They're raising them as organs. | ||
| Well, it's true. | ||
| In fact, they had a mass murder in China the other day to harvest organs. | ||
| And so... | ||
| Mass execution, I guess, would be a better way to put it. | ||
| It's another kind of harvesting. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That kind of stuff... | |
| 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. | ||
| That would be the argument. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And do you think we would still brag as a nation that we come up with the best new drugs for whatever? | ||
| No, first of all, nations have gone anyway. | ||
| We're through with nations. | ||
| Think so? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Multinational corporations are the power now. | ||
| It used to be nations, and they just use nations in whatever way they want to. | ||
| That's what the WTO, IMF, these are about eliminating nations. | ||
| Nations are at best a nuisance to the corporate world. | ||
| Do you think that's a direction that things eventually will go in any way, that nation states will give way to something larger ultimately? | ||
| Well, I wouldn't be a political activist if I didn't think that we can do something. | ||
| We, all of the listeners here, I mean, from what you say, it's almost as many people as voted. | ||
| No, not that many, but millions. | ||
| We have the stupidest, most dangerous president in my 56 years in office. | ||
| Now? | ||
| The one now? | ||
| Oh, no question about it. | ||
| Bush? | ||
| You weren't a big Bush guy, huh? | ||
| Oh, I'm really big on the concern For him. | ||
| I mean, his level of ignorance is colossal. | ||
| I mean, that alone should make him frightening. | ||
| In what areas have you found the most distress when you think about our president? | ||
| When I'm spent my lifetime reading people's vibes, okay? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And I am assured from watching him, the little I've seen on TV, this man is clearly without one iota of compassion. | ||
| But he probably certainly couldn't spell the word. | ||
| But as far as actually knowing what it means and having it, he doesn't have it. | ||
| And well, he's dangerous. | ||
| He knows about oil. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I don't have to go along with that. | ||
| I can condemn it. | ||
| You can. | ||
| And you are. | ||
| You just did. | ||
| But you can't keep doing it because we've got a break. | ||
| You can do it tomorrow when we get back. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| Well, I told you. | ||
| Be a wild one. | ||
| Patch Adams is my guest. | ||
| I'm Art Bell. | ||
| This is Coast to Coast A.M. in the nighttime. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Though I would not give false home on the straight morning, I care for the life of me. | |
| Remember a Saturday I know they said let be Just don't worry Music Music Music Music If only you believe my folly, you believe I believe in God. | ||
| If only you believe in miracles, so would I So we'll make it love Wanna | ||
| take a ride? | ||
| Call our bell from west of the Rockies at 1-800-618-8255. | ||
| East of the Rockies, 1-800-825-5033. | ||
| First time callers may reach Art at 1-775-727-1222. | ||
| The wildcard line is open at 1-775-727-1295. | ||
| And to call it on the toll-free international line, call your AT ⁇ T operator and have them dial 800-893-0903. | ||
| This is Coast to Coast AM with our bell from the Kingdom of Nineveh. | ||
| My guest is the real Patch Adams. | ||
| The real Patch Adams. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You may have seen the movie of Robin Williams. | |
| And I guess to some degree, that was representative. | ||
| And we're finding out how representative, because we're talking to the real guy right now. | ||
| We'll keep that up in a moment. | ||
| Once again, here is Patch Adams. | ||
| Patch, welcome back. | ||
| Hey. | ||
| All right. | ||
| So there's nothing really right about anything we're doing right now, medically. | ||
| Well, you actually asked about the delivery of care. | ||
| Yeah, delivery of care, sure. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And yes, there's nothing good about managed care. | ||
| It's a nightmare. | ||
| It is a vulgar invasion of greed into what can be a beautiful profession. | ||
| What made you get into this profession anyway? | ||
| In other words, you were suffering yourself. | ||
| I mean, how did you transition? | ||
| I was a science nerd. | ||
| I always was going to be a doctor. | ||
| You were always going to be a doctor. | ||
| Even before you got ill, you wanted to be a doctor. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| All right. | ||
| So that's interesting. | ||
| That never changed. | ||
| You've got a lot of passion, then. | ||
| I do. | ||
| You talk about passion in your book a lot. | ||
| Well, it's the label for the living. | ||
| Can I do this thing that I want to do for my friend? | ||
| Yes, you can always do something, whatever you want. | ||
| Great. | ||
| I just want to let the listeners aware of my concern for forced psychiatry as a violation for human rights. | ||
| forced psychiatry right where Involuntary psychiatric commitments, forced electric shock, forced medication. | ||
| But I want to go on record for being very much against those things. | ||
| And, you know, I've had a lot of concern for the psychiatric profession anyway. | ||
| I saw how I was treated, and I've looked in psychiatric texts all over the world, and I've never found one with a single sentence on mental health. | ||
| And these are supposed to be the mental Health experts. | ||
| How were you treated? | ||
| 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. | ||
| Do you have a link to him on your page also? | ||
| 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. | ||
| Do we need mental institutions? | ||
| Well, again, it's, to me, not the right question. | ||
| What we need is a healthy society. | ||
| Right now, our society is dominated by a love for money and power. | ||
| We teach our children that. | ||
| No, but it's a valid question, Pat. | ||
| And that if we had a society based on compassion and generosity, there wouldn't be mental hospitals and there wouldn't be nursing homes. | ||
| There wouldn't. | ||
| And there wouldn't be orphanages. | ||
| There would be integration of all people. | ||
| 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. | ||
| But even in this perfect world that you envision, wouldn't there be mental illness, real mental illness? | ||
| Wouldn't there be crime? | ||
| What would real mental illness be? | ||
| The labels that the mental health professionals use do not make them diseases. | ||
| They are labels for a constellation of behaviors. | ||
| But, Patch, let me put it this way to you. | ||
| We're going to have, even in an almost perfect world, there'll still be crime. | ||
| And crime will have to be addressed in one way or another in this perfect world or almost perfect world. | ||
| Maybe that we would surround them with people saying, I love you. | ||
| some of these criminals are going to be mentally unstable and and uh... | ||
| 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. | ||
| Maybe there wouldn't. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I actually am not convinced there would be any. | ||
| There could be a celebration of eccentricities. | ||
| So we would just broaden the definition of eccentricity, and you're there, right? | ||
| Well, no, there's a huge difference between being called eccentric in our society and being called schizophrenic. | ||
| If you're called eccentric, people admire you. | ||
| At the instant somebody hears you labeled schizophrenic, they're walking the other direction. | ||
| Yes, I know. | ||
| It's probably the worst label you can give a human being, and it actually doesn't label something. | ||
| It is a horror. | ||
| It is a horror that you've experienced. | ||
| Well, you were suicidal. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Hey, I was psychopath for a couple of years after my mental hospital, and now I wish people would call me psychopath. | ||
| You said you were suicidal. | ||
| I was suicidal. | ||
| Okay, one of the definitions of putting people in mental institutions against their will is if they threaten life of others or themselves, right? | ||
| Right. | ||
| So you fell into that category even though you weren't there mandated to be there. | ||
| I was a voluntary commitment. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And certainly, yes, a doctor can commit a person who is suicidal now. | ||
| As a matter of fact, there are lawsuits if they kill themselves suing the doctor. | ||
| I like that. | ||
| You know, a person kills himself, who's to blame for crying out loud. | ||
| The doctor? | ||
| 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. | ||
| Instead of what happened, if you hadn't gotten the care that you got when you voluntarily committed yourself. | ||
| What kind of care did I get in that mental hospital? | ||
| You'd know better than I. But what I'm saying is... | ||
| Okay, yeah, but you were suicidal. | ||
| Do you think that if you had not committed yourself, that you might have committed suicide? | ||
| I mean, that's speculation. | ||
| And only you can answer that. | ||
| I mean, did that save you? | ||
| No, I actually, as I've grown and been with thousands of people thinking about suicide, I didn't get very close. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And I don't know. | ||
| I woke up really quickly and made a decision to never have another bad day, and I'm 38 years into it. | ||
| Still succeeding? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Was it... | |
| I just want, in a way, this is my retro rocket for the listeners to know. | ||
| Unless you're incarcerated, you don't have a clue what it would be like to be involuntarily incarcerated. | ||
| Please go to that webpage, www.stopshrinks.org, and take a stand for one human Being. | ||
| Okay, carry on. | ||
| No, that's fine. | ||
| A lot of people will go there, believe me. | ||
| Anyway, you, you got out of this mental institution. | ||
| It's a couple of years there, and then to medical school, right? | ||
| And I heard you say, you said, well, I just ignored the debt. | ||
| How'd you get through medical school? | ||
| Well, I was on war orphan. | ||
| I mean, I didn't owe much money. | ||
| I owed about $9,000 when I graduated. | ||
| Oh, that's not much at all. | ||
| Which is a belch by modern standards. | ||
| Sure is. | ||
| $85,000 is the, I think, the last figure I heard for the average debt. | ||
| $85,000. | ||
| Yeah, inexcusable. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's just all part of how... | |
| 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. | ||
| Change everything. | ||
| Do you want to change? | ||
| Well, change everything, you know. | ||
| Those are exaggerations. | ||
| Yeah, that's true. | ||
| There are huge numbers of things I want to change. | ||
| All right. | ||
| And I believe that making care political, making love political, is something. | ||
| That it is. | ||
| You know, I tell my audiences, I say, okay, go to where their children, 20,000 children die a day from starvation, all right? | ||
| So go someplace where they're dying of starvation and take several of your most valuable possessions. | ||
| I mean, that you can move, your Rolex watch or your Van Gogh painting, and hold it in one hand and the starving child in the other. | ||
| And see if one, see if the things can distract you. | ||
| Hold on, Patch. | ||
| We'll be right back. | ||
| My guest is Patch Adams, the real Patch Adams. | ||
| I'm Art Bell. | ||
|
unidentified
|
This is Coast to Coast AM. | |
| I hear the drums echoing tonight. | ||
| Cheers, the whispers of some quiet forgotten stage. | ||
| Wanna take a ride? | ||
| Call Art Bell from West of the Rockies at 1-800-618-8255. | ||
| East of the Rockies at 1-800-825-5033. | ||
| First-time callers may reach Art at area code 775-727-1222. | ||
| Or call the Wildcard line at 775-727-1295. | ||
| To talk with Art on the Toll-Free International Line, call your AT ⁇ T operator and have them dial 800-893-0903. | ||
| This is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell. | ||
| Talking to the real Patch Adams. | ||
| 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 don't know how one finds a yardstick for that. | ||
| Oh, the yardstick probably would be when you went to see the movie. | ||
| Did you walk out saying, damn, they got it all wrong? | ||
| Or no, it was, you know, that wasn't bad. | ||
| How'd you feel about it? | ||
| Well, when I first read the script and imagined it, I was really embarrassed for it. | ||
| Really? | ||
| I'm kind of a film buff. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I agree with that. | ||
| About having fun. | ||
| And the thing is, the movie was beginner. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Why do you think that is? | ||
| Well, I think it's many reasons. | ||
| I'm sure more conservative organizations will say, gee, a hospital is not going to carry malpractice insurance. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's irresponsible, immature, stupid. | |
| Oh, I asked you earlier. | ||
| Did you ever get sued? | ||
| No, no, of course not. | ||
| Never got sued. | ||
| Now, see, that really backs up what you're saying. | ||
| You're saying malpractice is all baloney. | ||
| The whole malpractice system is. | ||
| I made millions of mistakes as a doctor. | ||
| I was never sued. | ||
| Never sued. | ||
| 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? | ||
| Yes, and West Virginia in particular could use it, too. | ||
| And it's a poorest state for health care in the U.S. So I'm going to give actually an address to the people listening. | ||
| Oh, please do. | ||
| And I'll give them a little time now. | ||
| But I want them to realize that why am I going? | ||
| 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? | ||
| I could charge $10,000 a week. | ||
| Oh, sure. | ||
| Have a two-year waiting list. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| And it's not interesting to me. | ||
| I'm still going to beat... | ||
| I'm breaking ground next month. | ||
| Not because I have the money to build it, but because I've made enough in speaking fees for us to start building it. | ||
| So I'm still having to pay for it all. | ||
| So you're that close, finally, to breaking ground. | ||
| Well, we are going to break ground in June. | ||
| We don't have enough money to finish it. | ||
| 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. | ||
| You want to tell them how to spell that? | ||
| Oh, make up a spelling. | ||
| We collect Mr. Gazuntite. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right. | |
| All right. | ||
| And it's post office box 98072, Washington, D.C. 20090. | ||
| Once again, make the checkout to Gazinta Institute, Post Office Box 98072, Washington, D.C. 90090. | ||
| And so that never the rest of your life can you bitch about the way health care is without saying, I'm doing something about it. | ||
| Yeah, and you're a tax-free thing, so they can. | ||
| Absolutely, we're tax-free. | ||
| And if everyone listening sent a dollar, we would build our hospital. | ||
| That's what's so astounding to it, is that together we can do it. | ||
| Okay, and you wouldn't charge patients, would you? | ||
| I've never charged them. | ||
| Come on. | ||
| I know. | ||
| And we love them. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I know. | |
| So my question for you is, the doctors and the nurses who would work in your hospital, how would they live? | ||
| They would live there. | ||
| They would live there? | ||
| We live in the hospital. | ||
| You come to our home. | ||
| It's our home. | ||
| I mean, it's a whole, what the environmental movement calls an eco-village. | ||
| The 310 acres. | ||
| It will be actually a village. | ||
| It's a hospital and community that has a farm and a school and all of those things so that we can show humans living together dirt cheap. | ||
| If you had all of this physical facility, how many doctors and nurses, do you think you'd have a hard time getting them to live this life? | ||
| No, thousands apply a year. | ||
| I need 20. | ||
| And that's thousands apply not having it. | ||
| If we had it and they saw how much fun it was, oh, God, it's unlimited. | ||
| See, all of the compassionate doctors and nurses out there that are quitting, there's a giant nursing shortage. | ||
| No one's going into nursing. | ||
| Oh, I saw that. | ||
| Because the context sucks. | ||
| Big story on nurses on CNN earlier today. | ||
| 40% of them are having terrible stress problems. | ||
| Yeah, and most of them are over 40. | ||
| What does that say? | ||
| And yet they're dying to work for us. | ||
| A day doesn't go by, I don't get letters saying, I'll do anything. | ||
| What can I do? | ||
| I'm a surgeon. | ||
| I'm a nurse. | ||
| What can I do? | ||
| 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. | ||
| How many people? | ||
| And look out there who are ever thinking about sending us a check. | ||
| You know, you don't have to just go on this interview. | ||
| Get my two books, Gazuntite and House Calls. | ||
| Read them. | ||
| And if you like what you read, help us. | ||
| If you don't, at least help somebody. | ||
| At least put your effort to helping bring love and fun back to the world. | ||
| I understand that a lot of physical, so-called physical illness is psychosomatic. | ||
| I think the evidence of that is in the placebo effect. | ||
| That's pretty well documented. | ||
| Do you believe that to be true? | ||
| Well, see, I don't divide things up like that. | ||
| Physical, mental, spiritual. | ||
| We're one organism. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Duh. | ||
| Well, that's right. | ||
| Do you want to take a few calls just see what people are curious about? | ||
| Yeah, we're coming to the top of the hour. | ||
| We'll do that. | ||
| I don't know that I want to do a third hour. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Then a few calls is all it's going to be. | ||
| Yeah, well, let's try it, and maybe it'll get my fever. | ||
| I'm awake. | ||
| It's just that I've, you know, it's a couple of hours, and I'm getting cauliflower ear. | ||
| I understand. | ||
| All right. | ||
| I'm curious what people that call up are interested in. | ||
| All right. | ||
| We take on-screen calls, so you can expect anything. | ||
| They can hate me. | ||
| I don't care. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Well, some will. | ||
| East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Patch Adams. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Where are you? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm in Jackson, Mississippi. | |
| Okay, go right ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
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. | ||
| And I know exactly what you're talking about. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Take care, sir. | ||
| Jan, you write about that and write about that and write about that in your book. | ||
| Was to the Rockies. | ||
| You're on the air with Dr. Patch Adams. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello. | |
| Hi, turn your radio off, please, son. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi. | |
| Art? | ||
| Yes, where are you? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm in Los Angeles, California. | |
| Okay. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm a first-time caller. | |
| I've been listening to your show for about a month now, and I love it. | ||
| I fall off my bed at night just falling asleep listening to you and staying awake. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| I wanted to call your attention to a website that tracks psychiatric crimes. | ||
| It's called psychcrime.org. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I usually don't allow these on, but that's fine. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| And, well, also, I'll be telling my friends about Patch Adams' address and trying to drum up some donations for him. | ||
| Bless your heart. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello. | |
| Yes, it's been happening for a long time that psychiatric incarceration has been used as a political tool. | ||
| And I came across another website tonight. | ||
| I haven't had the chance to look at it, but I saw it. | ||
| All right, well, please don't. | ||
| If you haven't, don't give it out because we get misled sometimes on websites to bad things if we don't know the URL. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, I see. | |
| Okay, well, that's all I wanted to say was that psychiatry has been used a lot for political dissension. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Gotcha. | ||
| I guess you agree. | ||
| First-time caller line, you're on the air with Dr. Patch Adams. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello? | |
| Yes. | ||
| Yes, where are you? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm in Kentucky. | |
| How are you doing? | ||
| Fine, sir. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay, first of all, I'd like to say I'm not a long-time listener, but it's been a good show, and I wanted to hear this show with Mr. Adams. | |
| And I'm sure there is a way through his website to donate money for his cause. | ||
| Well, I'm sure the address is there, sure. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay, and I'm also asking, is it possible to take volunteer help in building this clinic? | |
| You know, bless your heart, if you're a professional builder, you, you know, we have a website. | ||
| Can I give out that website? | ||
| Yeah, we've got a link on my website. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I'll check it. | |
| It's on the slide there. | ||
| And, you know, if you're really, particularly if you're really interested in helping, at least get the first book, the Zoom type. | ||
| Read what it is so that you're a really informed citizen. | ||
| And if you like it, my address is in there. | ||
| You can write me. | ||
| You can make a donation to me directly if you want, and then offer what it is that you are interested in offering in the way of building. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Not too far from the great state of West Virginia. | |
| And what part of West Virginia would it be built in? | ||
| Ocahanas County. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| I'll have to look on the map there. | ||
| You've got the property, right? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Paid for. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We're going to break free in June. | |
| We're totally debt-free. | ||
| Yep, and they're going to break ground in June, caller. | ||
| So there you are. | ||
| All right, we're coming up on the top of the hour now, Patch. | ||
| So if you want to bail here and get some sleep, then now's the time to do it. | ||
| If you want to give it another hour and talk to more callers, you can do that. | ||
| It's up to you. | ||
| I think I'm going to... | ||
| I'm wired, but I think it's enough. | ||
| All right. | ||
| All right, fine. | ||
| If you get a feedback that it was really valuable, maybe we'll do it again. | ||
| Did you like it? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, I told you we'd just let you say what you wanted, and you said what you wanted, didn't you? | ||
| I did. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| You're very welcome. | ||
| Good night, Patch. | ||
| Good night. | ||
| Have fun. | ||
| That's what it's all about. | ||
| That love. | ||
| He's right about that. | ||
| All right. | ||
| That's it for now, folks. |
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