Wendy Johnson: Medical Director at La Familia Medical Center / Fellow Holobiont / The Best Kind of Doctor

@artivizm

Upcoming book:
The Ecology Cure: A Doctor’s Prescription for Healing the Earth and Ourselves

The scene:
We are in Chupadero, New Mexico sitting on Wendy’s large “portal” (porch) overlooking an orchard and the acequia (canal) that was built in 1876. Wendy and I just met in person for the first time. She is kind and straightforward and accommodating - and her eyes are full of joy. She has a vibrancy and energy about her that permeates the stories of her life adventures from politics to public health and Chile to Mozambique. Join us holobionts to learn about Wendy’s “place” and her adventurous journey toward it.

Highlights:
+ New Mexico is in the middle of a 1200-year drought
+ The acequia used to have water from March through June (it’s dry now)
+ Humans forgot (300+ years ago) that they already are nature
+ Re-wilding feels like a privilege
+ We have lost our connection to place
+ Humans are part of an ecosystem and our bodies are also ecosystems
+ The Gaia theory: earth is a sentient organism and humans are the microbiome of the earth
+ Holobiont: all the symbiotic relationships in our bodies required for us to live
+ We can’t be healthy when earth’s ecosystem is unhealthy
+ Italian family, from Ohio, schooled at Ohio State and a year in Chile
+ Went to med school to do politics better
+ The people who are creating health policies are career politicians - not doctors
+ Doing a job to get the knowledge
+ Worked in Mozambique Africa helping scale up HIV treatment
+ Involved in the American Public Health Association
+ Worked with Doctors for Global Health - volunteerism, “liberation medicine” in marginalized countries, solidarity (not charity)
+ Jack Geiger - started the community health center movement, currently 1200 centers nationally
+ “The social determinants of health” - holistic considerations for what affects health i.e. stable housing, etc.
+ She became the Cleveland Medical Director for the City Health Dept.
+ Obtained her Masters in Public Health at Johns Hopkins while also holding that position (hero!)
+ Still (technically) a professor at the University of Washington Dept. of Global Health (Seattle)
+ What medical school teaches doctors addresses 20% of what we need to be healthy
+ If you’re going to be a good doctor, you’ve got to get involved in political issues
+ We share much of our DNA with trees
+ Being connected to PLACE and not reducing it to a resource for extraction
+ Creating a healthy society can be intuitive if you start from a place of revitalizing relationship
+ The ethic of and commitment to community
+ Buddhist-ish but not a club joiner
+ Walking away from a relationship if it means not becoming who you need to be
+ Women become invisible around 40 to 50 years old and up - in a great way
+ Thank you for connecting us Mariel Nanasi! (See her interview)

A taste:
“If you’re really connected to a place, if you’re really connected to a community of people - and of non-human people, then you’re going to have a whole different idea of what you’re willing to do to preserve it, [...] and not just see it as a resource for your pleasure, or something to be extracted.”

Favorite sayings:
“Medicine is a social science and politics is just medicine on a large scale.” 
- Rudolph Virchow

“I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve or save the world and a desire to enjoy or savor the world.  This makes it hard to plan the day.” 
- EB White