From senior staff writer Emily Belz: Weeks of phone calls, planning, and then reporting in person in San Bernardino, California, went into today’s feature on one of the last Protestant medical schools in the US at Loma Linda University. 

A lot of interviews I did with faculty, administrators, students, and alumni ended up on the cutting floor. I could have done an article just about their training of doctors to work in low-resource settings. Faculty at Loma Linda asked students, How can you improvise without fancy equipment? The US is wealthy, but Loma Linda grads often serve overseas or in rural US primary care. 

And I could have done an article just about Loma Linda’s graduates overseas—I’ve seen one obstetrician in action saving women’s lives in Burundi. I could have done an article just about the school’s affiliated Christian health center in San Bernardino that serves a low-income community, where all the medical students rotate and which began as a clinic for migrant farmers in the 1960s. 

But this piece is focused on how Loma Linda’s “whole person care” differs from so much of the US health system where patients and doctors are both immensely dissatisfied. If you’ve ever been mad at a callous health system in the US, the Loma Linda approach is worth considering.