From http://www.azstarnet.com/sn/mailstory-clickthru/232024.php via a friend. There is always hope; you can never tell who’s going to get the word.
Patients teach doc lesson in spirit life
By Carla McClain
Arizona Daily Star
Tucson, Arizona | Published: 03.30.2008
He is a doctor in love with his patients.
It is to them he gives thanks for the unexpected, life-changing journey that took him beyond this world of scientific fact to the otherworldly realm of the spirit and the soul.
Never in his wildest dreams did Dr. Allan J. Hamilton — a renowned University of Arizona neurosurgeon devoted to the super-technology of his specialty — expect to go there.
Most doctors don’t. Some have called their colleague “a nut” for admitting he did.
Hamilton shrugs. He gets that.
“If you had told me 20 or 30 years ago that I would go through this kind of change in my thinking about what medicine — and life — is really all about, I’d have said you’re nuts,” said the Harvard-trained brain surgeon, now 58.
“When I started as a surgeon, I was really focused on surgical, technical skills. It’s a very mechanistic view — you go in and fix things. You are so focused on that, you tend to blow by anything you see that suggests the spiritual.