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“As a student, I learned what the model of a doctor was. You spent five, 10, at the most 15 minutes with a patient, got a list of complaints, did some tests, then prescribed some medication. That works for some people,*but it was unsatisfactory for me. I wanted to get more involved with people’s lives, and I knew there were people who needed and wanted a more personal relationship with a doctor, too. ”
In 1974, Dr. Adams and several other like-minded physicians began operating the non-profit Gesundheit Institute from a 12-acre farm on Ox Road in Fairfax. He practiced there, then at The Rocks, a communal firm in Jefferson County, West Virginia, and finally from his home in Arlington before stopping four years ago to devote his energies full-time to raising money for the new hospital. In those 10 years, he saw 15,000 people.
He charged no fees, believing it morally wrong to make a profit from giving patients what is rightly theirs. But he did earn about $52,000 a year from a part-time job nine nights a month as medical officer in the emergency room of St. Elizabeth’s Hospital.
He carried no malpractice insurance, refusing to “practice in fear and mistrust." He sees insurance as reinforcement of the doctor-as-God concept and an implication that the doctor is responsible for the cure while the patient is the passive recipient of it. “The huge majority of illnesses have a life-style component - ultimately, the health of each of us is our own responsibility. We'll have a sign in our hospital that says ‘Please live healthy - medicine is an imperfect science’.”
He would begin establishing the trust necessary for friendship at the very first visit, spending three to four hours recording a patient’s medical history. Dr. Adams started
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