A Medicine Warrior: Dr. David Baines

TC:  How old were you?

DB:  I was eighteen. So then while I was there, I'd originally kind of thought of going into forestry and doing forestry management and stuff like that. So I took one of those career tests, you know they ask if you'd rather read a book or play basketball or all kind of silly questions. But the number one thing they said was truck driver, that is what I should be, but you know they gave you ten choices, so seven of the rest of the nine were all in medicine, so I kind of took that as a sign and thought "Well, I might as well shoot for the top and see what happens," so then I transferred over to Arizona State. There were a lot of Indians there, Navajos and Apaches, but there were quite a few other tribes, too. After my first semester, they called me in the dean's office and I thought I was in trouble but the dean said, "Hey, we got this academic scholarship, full-ride scholarship if you want it.' And I said 'Well, let me think about it. OK, I'll take it!"

TC:  Some of your relatives are involved in medicine. Were you the first one and kind of led the way, or how did that work?

DB:  My oldest cousin, who passed away a couple of years ago, Conrad Baines, Jr., was getting an M.P.H. at Berkeley when I was in college. And so he got his M.P.H before I got my medical degree, but then he went into medical school for three years, and I actually would have graduated ahead of him but he had some loan repayment with IHS and they yanked him out of medical school to do his payback, so he had to go drop out of med school and go use his M.P.H. And then he had two brothers that got masters degrees in public health – Terry, who now works in Juneau with the telemedicine project for the state, and then my cousin Ron who was working on the AIDS project here at the University of Washington for a bit. Then my brother Jonathan, he's getting his MD/PhD at the Mayo Clinic. He'll be the second MD in the family.

TC:  In the job you do now, do you still see patients on a daily basis?

DB:  No, I'm not as much on the front-line, I'm no longer so much the player but the coach. And that happens in a lot of things as we get older, not just medicine. So now I'm working on trying to shape these young healers.