Mission-Focused Medicine

I heard this story on NPR recently, and all I could think was: "This should cause the secularists who listen to NPR to start bleeding from the ears."  One of the big problems in rural America is getting doctors to move to places that don't have an opera, a ballet company, a Starbucks on every other corner, and so on.  Ashland, Kansas, is five hours south of Kansas City, population 855.  They were desperate for a new CEO for their new hospital, and they hired a doctor who had a brilliant strategy for attracting doctors to a place that isn't terribly attractive:

Anderson is now well known on Ashland's Main Street. But he knew he needed doctors for the hospital to succeed, and he knew he had to offer something different than the thousands of small towns he was competing with.

So he came up with a novel plan. He offers potential candidates eight weeks off to do missionary work overseas. Because he's found that a doctor who is willing to sleep on a cot in the Amazon or treat earthquake victims in Haiti is ready to serve in rural Kansas. He calls it mission-focused medicine.

"When you recruit a mission-focused provider, they want to see the ghettos," he says. "They want to know that there's no Spanish-speaking provider in more than a one-hour drive. They want to see houses that are falling down, widows that are uncared for. They want to know that there's need and that by them coming there, they would fill a disparity that would otherwise not be filled. So we reversed it."

It worked. Last July, Dr. Dan Shuman and his family moved here from the Austin, Texas, area. The difference between here and all the other needy areas was his ability to continue his missionary work in Haiti and Mexico during his eight weeks off. But Shuman says Ashland's own challenges were equally attractive.

What amuses me about this is that for the elites in America, religion is the opiate of the masses, a crutch for weak minds, and yet here is an example of what happens when you decide to rely on what the elites regard as religious dopers/stupid people: a solution that all their materialistic thinking is having a hard time fixing.