“Let’s drop ‘just.’ ‘Cause that will only imply that giving them, say, Prozac or surgery is more important than the talking. Chatting is what more people want than anything.” People call me from all over the world who are hurting, and I care for them. My sense of a doctor is that one is a presence caring for health. “I’ve never made a penny being a doctor, so that makes it not a job. Patch believes to live life fully, you have to live your dreams.”Īdams, who stopped seeing patients 15 years ago, nevertheless still views himself as a healer. In truth, there are only outbuildings, including a three-story workshop, a couple of yurts and a five-person dwelling on the Gesundheit! tract near Droop Mountain in Pocahontas County.īob Gilbert, who lived on a commune with Adams and Edquist in the early ‘70s, suggests that Adams’ “true passion has been the pursuit of the dream, not the dream itself. The movie suggests that the hospital is currently under construction and everything is sunshine, lollipops and rainbows. He says doctors from all over are already clamoring to work at the facility, the only place on Earth, they say, where they can practice humanitarian medicine. Along with pills and plasters, the hospital will provide love and lots and lots of laughter. Patients will be treated free by doctors who don’t carry malpractice insurance and who won’t accept third-party payments. His goal: to build the world’s first ha-ha-hospital on a 310-acre tract in the wilds of West Virginia.

To that end, he’s spent the last 28 years raising money under the auspices of an amorphous entity called the Gesundheit! Institute. There are more holistic antidotes for this malaise, says Adams, who is not one to underestimate the curative powers of a rubber chicken. Instead of 82 million prescriptions for Xanax and 46 million for Prozac, how about trying life?” I think the most revolutionary act a person can commit in today’s society is to be publicly happy. There’s not a daily newspaper in history devoted to good news, and more good news happens than bad news. Very rarely does a movie about love or compassion get a good review. If you ask the 53-year-old longhair, that’s just about everywhere these days.Īdams, who bears only a cursory resemblance to Robin Williams’ character in the movie, believes that the actor manages to convey what’s important about his view of the world.

Give Adams a pair of baggy britches and a goofy smile and lead him to a children’s hospital, an old-folks’ home, a shopping mall, wherever people are suffering. Let other doctors wear white coats and a somber demeanor.

Hunter “Patch” Adams, the world’s funniest physician, is doing his laundry, a mountain of gaudy clown pants that he scoops from the kitchen table and shoves into the washer.

Patch adams he steals from hospitals