Faithful Observations: Dr. Johnson's quest for optimal health

By BOB SHILLINGSTAD

Special to The Press

It has been fascinating to meet so many interesting people who live in our area. One of these is Duke Johnson, M.D. His unique experiences provide him with an interesting perspective on healthcare — a topic very much in the news today.

Dr. Duke, you’ve lectured to audiences of thousands around the world and fielded many media interviews that have focused on preventive medicine and you had mentioned that you have done this in 30 countries around the world. How did this ever come about?

You’re asking a great question because I never dreamed that my life would go down this pathway! From a young age growing up in North Idaho, I had always wanted to be a doctor and was fortunate after graduation from Coeur d’Alene High School to get into UCLA School of Medicine. While there I became very interested in emergency medicine and practiced in a Level One trauma center in Southern California. Emergency medicine is rewarding because you feel like you are accomplishing something each day and I loved the variety. Some days I felt as if I was the head of a MASH unit in a war zone and the crazier it got, the more fun it was for me.

If you loved emergency medicine so much, what caused you to switch from emergency medicine to preventive medicine?

There was a patient who was brought into the emergency room by ambulance who changed my life. He was a 38-year-old man who was brought in by paramedics in full cardiac arrest. I anticipated that because of his young age, he would recover and be fine but despite our implementing the national protocol for cardiac arrest patients, we were getting no response from his heart. In order to not shock the family with his impending demise, I decided to go out to speak with his family to hopefully help prepare them for the worst. Out in the waiting room were his sweet wife and 10-year-old daughter. They were the only people in the waiting room at the time. When I walked up to them, I was deeply moved by the look of love in their eyes that they had for this husband/father who lay motionless in my emergency room while my staff continued the attempted resuscitation. His wife and daughter had an obvious deep love for him that I could feel and somehow I knew he must be a great man. I updated them and went back into the emergency room to continue to treat the young man.

Those had to be difficult times as a physician. What happened then?

Yes. He wasn’t responding at all and I didn’t want to stop the code because I didn’t want to declare him to be dead and face this precious family. After extending the code as long as I could and trying every possible treatment, I stopped the code. When I went out into the waiting room, his wife and daughter saw my face and realized he didn’t make it and began to cry with a sorrow that was palpable. In medical school, I was taught to control my emotions in order to think clearly in such circumstances but it just so happened that no other patients were in the waiting room so I walked over to them, put my hands on their shoulders and cried with them. I couldn’t believe how profoundly this family impacted me but that was a watershed moment for me. It felt so unjust for such a young man to die of heart disease. How could this possibly happen? He shouldn’t be here and this family shouldn’t be experiencing this pain. I thought, I was trained in one of the best medical schools in the world but established medicine somehow failed this man. I decided at that moment that I was not going to spend the rest of my life waiting for people to come into the emergency room with diseases that they shouldn’t even have. I decided that I’m going to go to the other side of medicine, namely preventive medicine in order to help teach people how to prevent diseases from occurring in the first place.

There wasn’t a specialty in preventive medicine at the time. How did you begin your journey into preventive medicine?

My first significant step in this direction was joining a company which performed health risk appraisals for corporation executives. This health appraisal company would contract with major corporations to perform assessments in order to keep their executives healthy. I became their main physician to perform these appraisals in Southern California and we had some large clients including Southern California Edison, ARCO, Allergan, and the FBI.

That was the start of what became an amazing opportunity. When the health risk appraisal company sold to an insurance company that I didn’t want to be a part of, I decided to start my own health risk appraisal company. Our first customer was Nutrilite products, a subsidiary of Amway Corporation, which wanted a health risk appraisal program for their 1,000 employees at their manufacturing site in Buena Park. After our first year there, we were told by the CEO that we saved them 25% on their healthcare costs and they wanted to keep us there. We ran the program for several years and the company decided to implement the same program to their largest distributors in the world in order to keep them healthy, too. This transition led to me becoming medical adviser and then Medical Director of the largest supplement manufacturer in the world for 14 years. During that time period, Nutrilite annual sales volume increased from $750 million to $4.7 billion! It was an exciting time to be there.

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Next Saturday: Dr. Duke Johnson goes international — and faith proves a powerful companion.

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Bob Shillingstad’s religion columns run Saturdays in The Press. Email Bob: bjshill@mac.com