Interview with Neil Shulman MD (AKA "Doc Hollywood")

Kat Lieder: I’m here talking to Neil Shulman about an event he is putting on in April at Emory University, the International Medical Volunteerism Conference. Hi, Neil. So tell me a little bit about this International Medical Volunteerism Conference.

Neil: It is a conference to get all the humanizers together who volunteer in the area of health and medicine and to get them to share what they’re doing and to inspire others and to create synergism among themselves. And it’s all free!

Kat: How did you come up with the idea for this conference?

Neil: I was inspired by some individual stories that I felt needed to get out there. One of them is about a medical student who—he’s getting married—for his honeymoon he and his wife are going on a medical mission. Another is about a doctor who has gone to different countries and detected kids with heart problems, brought them back, and if they need continuous care, his wife and he adopt them. I was at his house for Christmas and they had kids from China, Ethiopia, Mexico. And both these people really inspired me, and there are many, many people doing things who are not doctors or nurses.

They’re lay people who do educational programs. They’re people who are disabled who have written books to inspire other people with disabilities to self-actualize. They’re doctors who are going to Africa to teach others how to do c-sections. There’s a woman in the community in Salem, Oregon, who has developed a program all over the world to try to teach kids with mental problems that hands aren’t for hitting. There’s a police officer from Chicago, a good friend of Michael Jordan’s, who has started programs for inner city kids to improve their mental health. There are people setting up gardening programs so kids in communities who don’t have access to healthy food can grow their own food. There’s this giant array of people in all walks of life who are saying, “we don’t care how the economy is, we are just going to help as we can.” I think Gesundheit really exemplifies that with all of its humanitarian clown trips and programming.

That’s our main goal with this conference—to create this free, world-wide event at which people can be doing things and inspire people in other places and learn from each other.

Kat: How did you find all these wonderful volunteers?

Neil: It’s become viral. People are finding us. Initially we created a website—college student volunteers helped with that. The website became very popular through word of mouth and from there, it exploded. Hundreds of people are paying their own way to come to an event where they can share and infect others with humanism.

Kat: Who do you want to come to this conference?

Neil: Everybody, whether it’s school kids who want to be around people like this who are creative and doing things to help others, whether they’re retired people who are looking for other things to do with their time. Whether they’re doctors who would like to practice in a totally non-bureaucratic setting or whether they’re people in some other profession and weary of their job. With the economy, people feel like there’s not a budget to do this or that. Money’s irrelevant if people are volunteering. This conference did not take a whole lot of money because everyone who is putting it on is volunteering and that’s become explosive.

Kat: Anything else?

Neil: I, myself, was also inspired a lot by Gesundheit and all the people at Gesundheit. Patch Adam’s spirit of volunteerism is like these other two individuals I talked about who inspired me. They made me think that there are all these humanizers who get their thrills out of helping other people. The whole Gesundheit team has been on the trajectory of humanizing. I got a lot of education in that area from Gesundheit, and I want to spread the word.

For more information on the International Medical Volunteerism Conference, please visit: http://emoryimvc.org/

Neil Shulman is a doctor and professor at Emory University’s Medical School. He also authored the book Doc Hollywood, now a major motion picture. He serves on the board of the Gesundheit Institute. Check out his website www.whatsinadoctorsbag.com to show kids who volunteered and taught Doc Neil about medicine and how to be healthy. Two other free websites are www.redlightwarningsignals.com for instant access to important symptoms to follow-up on for kids, adults and pregnant women. More than 250 doctors volunteered to help provide this information. Also, see www.dochollywoodproject.com, where anybody and everybody can learn how to perform a DOCTOR CHECK UP. Neil Shulman's latest book The Real Truth About Aging is summarized at www.therealtruthaboutaging.com

Kat Lieder works as a program developer for the Gesundheit! Institute in Urbana, Illinois.