The Mayo Clinic
“Faith Hope & Science”
“The Needs of the Patient Come First”
“We Don’t Treat Diseases, We Treat People”
On Sundays, perhaps not all, but when something relevant happens to us, we will update our WanderLush site through this blog! I’m so grateful you’re reading this, welcome. Mostly these entries will not be about health… but I wanted to share something I learned this week.
All summer long as I struggled to get my arms wrapped around how profoundly The Mayo Clinic and Dr. Lester helped me, I kept finding myself mystified about why Mayo is so different … and how this world famous clinic grew into its magnificence from little tiny remote Rochester Minnesota.
Its honestly been on my mind so much, and is one reason I was compelled to travel there this September, on the suggestion of Dr. Lester, to see a surgeon he works with. I just wanted to see them, and this hallowed place, with my own eyes, to see what I could glean from seeing it first hand. It was just as magnificent as I had imagined, and the surgeon and several colleagues were kind calm and thorough, examining me in ways that had never been done before in Colorado. She also took a biopsy of some pre-cancerous tissue in my mouth (Leukoplakia) to give me a baseline and something concrete to monitor and maybe try to treat.
This past week we were taken to dinner by a Mayo Clinic representative who wanted to hear my story of my brief but life altering experience with them. In the process, after asking her some of my questions, she let us know about an incredible 2018 Ken Burns Documentary Film I want to recommend to you, which is called simply:
The Mayo Clinic
https://www.pbs.org/kenburns/the-mayo-clinic/
This beautiful film answered every question I had. It tells its remarkable and unlikely history of a successful collaboration between an agnostic physician - Dr WW Mayo and sons, and a convent of nuns, The Sisters of St Francis, which led to the birth the hospital and most notably, from its very origin, the rationale of its special philosophies. These philosophies have been so tightly and consistently adhered to since its inception, more than 100 years ago, with a distinct intention: “The Needs of the Patient Come First”
After a tornado hit the Rochester area in 1883, Dr. WW Mayo to met Mother Alfred, who were both trying to care for the community. She said she had a vision from God, to build a hospital directed by Mayo. She believed it would become world reknowned for the medical arts. “In one of the most unlikely of partnerships in one of the most unlikely of places,” she was right. This is still known today as “The Miracle in the Corn Field.”
Based on its reputation, in 1905 they performed more surgeries there than in Baltimore Maryland, home of Johns Hopkins. At the time, Baltimore population was 500,000 and Rochester’s was 7,000…
Whether long and complex - or short and brief as was my case, the stunning stories of many of its patients gave me chills, as so often throughout the film, I realized that their patients often experience similar things as I did. They tell of a middle aged father and pancreatic cancer patient who’s life was saved because they looked at his problem creatively and solved it backwards to traditional methods; a middle aged woman who over four years was admitted dozens of times to her local hospital with no diagnosis, until she came to Mayo and received a diagnosis of Lupus within 20 minutes following her exams; and also a poor woman, who thought to seek a second opinion from Mayo based on their reputation, after frustration with her own providers. At great expense to travel she was finally seen there and given a diagnosis of a low-grade Leukemia that she had likely had for more than ten years. Though she knew she could not be treated there, due to the distance from her home, Mayo gave her Answers, Mayo gave her Hope.
All patients seem to be given equal and paramount importance - whether they’re the middle aged people I just described, or a toddler with a brain tumor, a pregnant mother with eye cancer, Tom Brokaw, John McCain or the Dalai Lama. My own Uncle Ed - Dad’s youngest brother - received life-saving open heart surgery there in the 1950s. Dad traveled to Mayo too to support his brother and parents. Ed went on to graduate Stanford Law School and raise three spectacular sons who are now raising his 6 grandchildren. He lived into his 80s when they originally questioned whether he would survive into adulthood. Many other people and factors, including his own innate strength and will, contributed to his survival, but Mayo Clinic was one critical factor too.
I learned through this film that an important way they support their philosophy - is that all of their physicians, since their beginning - have always been on salary, rather than on a fee for service structure. This means the practitioners do not financially benefit off of any of the services they render for their patients, which supports thieir central philosophy: “The Needs of the Patient Come First”
“For 150 years, Mayo has been confronting age-old questions about our commitment of taking care of each other, and the role of money and profit in medicine, and the nature of healing itself.”
One physician says: “We choose to be here because we value teamwork and these philosophies over our own compensation.”
“These practitioners are at the top of their profession and could be making ten times what they are, but they are devoted to their profession of medicine and healing people over their own compensation.” John McCain
They acknowledge that they aren’t perfect, “There are barriers in access, mistakes have been made, and people die.” But their philosophies and teamwork makes a special difference to thousands of people every year.
“We aren’t trying to solve healthcare, we are trying to do it. From a health care professional’s perspective, this, is medicine. This is what it was meant to be. We will do what is in the best interest of the patient, and the rest of it, will fall into place.” Dr John Wald, MD.
We are so lucky Mayo is here in our “backyard” where it chooses and trains its practitioners based on this sacred pledge.
October 30, 2022