A Medicine Warrior: Dr. David Baines

TC:  Will you describe some of the techniques or some of your processes, when you say you're shaping young healers. So how do you help guide that?

DB:  Well, like somebody comes to me, a resident, and says they've got this patient and this is what's going on. So you try to get out of them what do they think is going on and whether they think it's serious. So what is their gut reaction to this situation. And I encourage them to listen to that gut reaction, because there's been lots of times I've had patients that none of their symptoms that they were complaining of should have led me to the diagnosis I came up with, it was just listening to the energy around them and knowing that there was something else going on, and just keeping on pursuing it until you come up with it.

TC:  Can you give me an example of what you mean?

DB:  When I was first in practice, I had this lady come to me that had all these really vague symptoms, had been to lots of docs and nobody really found anything. It was really hard to pinpoint any specific thing. She just really knew she wasn't right, basically, and couldn't really describe a lot of specifics about that. She just kept saying "I know there's not something right, there's something here that, there's something wrong with me." And all her lab work looked good, and her exam was pretty unremarkable. But we were finally 45 minutes into that 15 minute appointment I had to just call it and say "Let's run a couple more tests and I'll see you back." And I took her to the front desk to check her out and just something hit me on the way out said she had a brain tumor. I have no idea where that came from. But that was what my intuition started saying, so I got a MRI and she had a like a handball-sized meningioma, a benign tumor of the lining of the outside of the brain. If I had relied on my strictly Western training, I'd have been still searching just like those other doctors had been. I usually find if I follow my intuition it works for me.