Blessing Way

Shiprock Pinnacle, NM

When People ask me how I became the Director of OB/GYN Services at the Johnson Health Center in Lynchburg, Virginia, I tell them I came from Southwest Virginia...by way of New Mexico...

In 2010, I lived for ten months on the Navajo Indian Reservation as a locums obstetrician/gynecologist.  The high desert of northern New Mexico was one of the more unforgiving places I have ever lived.  The summer was blistering hot, the winter was bone-chilling cold, and the sand storms could block out the sun.  For the first month, it defied my common sense that anyone would choose to live there, but the first monsoon rain would change my mind. Overnight, the desert went from brown to the lushest green, covered in desert flowers.  An instant oasis bloomed for a whole month, before retreating back into the desert sand.

I accepted the locum position after my private practice succumbed to the Global Recession of 2008.  It would take months to understand how a job that was supposed to be recession-proof could end in such chaos.  After so many years of private solo practice, I realized that increasing expenses and decreasing reimbursement demanded an integrated healthcare model.  Bitter from this reality, I arrived in New Mexico with all the frustration of an American doctor not living the American Dream.  I expected to teach the Natives a thing or two about real medicine, but ended up getting taught myself the place of medicine in a community in a most amazing way.

The “baby business” at the Northern Navajo Medical Center was busy from the start.  The regional hospital covered a service area across four states, and the medical resources were integrated to meet a challenging healthcare demand.  It was here that the futility of my private practice became apparent: The Navajo accepted that no system could meet ALL the medical needs of ALL the people ALL the time. Tribal representatives were integrated into the healthcare delivery system and available resources were directed to the greatest needs.  Each service unit featured a point-of-care ambulatory clinic, which funneled into a regional hospital with rotating specialty clinics.  Each hospital was affiliated with a university teaching hospital, accepting the most complicated cases.  Patients with jobs off the reservation (and commercial insurance) used private providers, in a multi-disciplinary practice model.  It was all neat and community driven.


The community attitude was best seen in the Navajo Blessing Way Ceremony: uniting community, culture, and wellness.  Thousands, from across the Navajo Nation, met annually to celebrate family, culture, and wellness. To watch a people brought near to extinction, displaced to the most inhospitable part of their former tribal lands, and exploited for uranium and oil, only to be thankful for their culture and community put medicine in a new perspective.  In the end, I would be forever thankful for most caring people, showing me the way from self-righteous bitterness to a new sense of purpose in my medical career.  I would take these experiences and perspective to my new home at the Johnson Health Center in Lynchburg, Virginia.