Community Supported Anthroposophic Medicine - A New Form for Health Care

Author: An interview with Molly McMullen Laird, M.D.
Issue: LILIPOH #43 - Spring 2006
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LILIPOH: Can you tell me briefly about the community supported medical initiative that you and Quentin Mc Mullen, M.D. have started?

Molly McMullen Laird, M.D.: The driving force behind our Patient Organization, and the unique economic form that we use, came through looking at anthroposophical medicine as a whole and incorporating not just physician care but everything that should be included in that whole task of taking care of someone over a long period of time. This includes things like prevention, education, nursing care, therapies, getting patients to use more healthful body care things, over-the-counter and home-care remedies and products. What you see in a conventional fee-for-service model, is that people wait until they are sick to go see the doctor and be taken care of. The prevention aspects get ignored until something catastrophic happens, and then they seek help. We all know people do better if they take care of things at the beginning, like change their diet and stay educated about health, so we emphasize a preventive approach.

Another reason we began working in this way is that certain anthroposophical procedures and medicines are not covered by insurance. So people end up, just on purely economic grounds, being forced into this conventional system. We wanted to find a way that a community could support a group of like-minded individuals who want access to these therapies. We saw it as establishing a practice and a center where services could be available in the best way that we can make them available. The members of the group would support it by a monthly contribution. Then when someone was ill, they could come as much as they needed to come without any concern or economic problem. In January 1998 the organization was founded with 37 memberships.

When we started out, because we didn’t have a physical office at the time, we were renting space in the Steiner House. A couple of volunteers organized the schedule; they did it by scheduling appointments by e-mail. We lived along with that method for a little while but it was quite cumbersome. Then we found an office space in the summer of 1998. The Patient Organization members helped us move in and transformed the space very beautifully. People brought pieces of furniture – it was kind of like a barn raising. It was a nice feeling. We had an open house and I remember looking around the office thinking, so and so brought that, so and so brought that. It wasn’t a sterile medical office – but instead was a homey, comfortable space from the beginning. People comment when they walk into our office about how comfortable they feel. And I think some of that has to do with the process in which the office was started. It was not like hiring a company to outfit the office or set up the paperwork.

In the first year we had numerous meetings to consider what kind of legal form and bylaws we should adopt. We had lawyers as board members helping to make sure we were doing everything in the right way, so that we would be, from a legal standpoint, on the up and up, and be able to stand up in the world and be proud of what we are doing. This is a very important value for Quentin and I. That has been our signature all along in our practice. It was amazing that people stuck to it, attending meetings every month. They were difficult meetings, trying to figure things out, not exactly like having tea and crumpets. We were hammering things out that were very complicated.

We settled on $50 a month to begin with, and, amazingly, for the first couple of years it would hit the budget right on the nose. We would track the services and then track the contributions. We also have some patients that pay for services. At the end of the year we have a business meeting to see how much was the dollar amount of the services rendered, and what was the dollar value of the contributions. We have had a couple of years where we’ve fallen behind by a couple thousand dollars. But generally we are pretty close. We have now raised the minimum amount. We also have a sliding scale, and we now have a family membership and an individual membership. The family membership is $90 to $65 dollars. Individual memberships at this point are $55 to $35. So people can tick off whatever their level of member ship is, and they write a check for every month of the year, and they get a renewal letter at the end of the year.

The PO meets every other month. We have educational presentations during the meeting, or we have social activities, such as a gardening day.

LILIPOH: How many members are there now?

MML:We leveled off at over a hundred members. That covers about 250 people.

LILIPOH: Could you say a little bit more about how it works for a patient?

MML: The Patient Organization is one entity