It’s impossible to reach the town of Nome, Alaska by any other means than plane, boat or on the back of a dog sled along the Iditarod Trail.
No roads connect Nome to Alaska’s capitol city, Juneau, or the next largest city, Anchorage; and only a few roads lead out of Nome to nearby villages.
As a result, people in Nome don’t come here as a result of a wrong turn on the interstate 20 miles before or on a spontaneous whim to see a new town.
And since people coming to Nome usually come with a purpose, one of the first questions strangers ask each other when meeting is, “What brought you to Nome?”
My answer to this question is: I met a physician at a missions conference a few years ago who seemed to treat the patient as a whole person and not just a set of symptoms.
I wanted to work with him and also thought it would be a great opportunity to see rural ‘bush’ Alaska before I graduated from medical school.”
A jeweler-turned-miner I met while beachcombing told me he had come to Nome for the summer from Hawaii to try his luck at harvesting some of Nome’s “golden sands.”
When I asked him about the mining process, he said, “It’s easy. You just take your dredge, a small pontoon boat, out into the ocean. Then you place the nozzle of the hose on the bottom of the ocean floor where it looks cobblestone.
“Cobblestone areas are areas that are more likely to have gold near them than plain sandy areas.”
I looked into his bucket he had recently harvested from the ocean and saw more sand than gold.
I wasn’t sure if I was completely convinced of his method of mining. Then again, a good gold miner never gives away his secrets.
Regardless of their reason for coming, whether it is to provide health care, to educate children, or to mine gold, almost everyone has a unique twist to their story.
With so many unique stories and people, it was no surprise that this rotation has been a somewhat unique one as well.
Usually, a rotation consists of spending 40 or more hours a week in a medical clinic or hospital, learning how to diagnose diseases and treat patients and taking call every fourth or fifth night by seeing patients in the emergency room.
And while I have seen patients in a traditional clinic setting, many of my patients have presented with unique problems such as removing a fish hook from a gentleman’s head.
I have also had to diagnose a child with pneumonia only to discover that he and his mother live in a remote village that can only be reached by an hour’s plane flight and that they have no housing arrangements in Nome so that he can be treated.
Instead of driving a few miles to assist with a diabetes clinic and returning to my apartment at night as I might do in rural Tennessee, I have flown with our team for two hours and spent two nights in the medical clinic in order to manage this chronic condition in one of the local villages.
Throughout this experience, I’m learning that practicing medicine in Nome is different than practicing medicine in Johnson City.
I think the beauty of taking the time to study at a different institution or place allows us to gain a broader perspective about our field of study.
Nome is a unique place with unique people. I think this rotation might be the most unique one of my medical studies.

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