John McBurney, MD
Fellowship 2013 Winter
I was born and raised in Opelika, a small town in east central Alabama. I graduated from Auburn University, the first person in my family to graduate from college. I worked full time as a nursing assistant for my last three years of college. I regard my experience as a nursing assistant as a key part of my professional education. Many of the leading physicians at Opelika were Emory University graduates. I felt very lucky to be accepted at Emory where I attended medical school on an Army Health Professions Scholarship.
In medical school I became very interested in psychiatry and began my residency training as a categorical psychiatry intern at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. I became less convinced that I wanted to be a psychiatrist and switched to neurology. Following completion of my neurology residency in 1985 I was a solo neurologist in the army community hospital at Fort Benning Georgia for three years. Based on my experience there, taking care of patients with uncontrolled epilepsy and my involvement in the epilepsy mini-fellowship program at Wake Forest University (founded by the late J Kiffin Penry), I became very interested in epilepsy. In 1988 I began a fellowship in EEG and epilepsy at Walter Reed. As a part of this I've spent a large part of my time working on the epilepsy branch at the National Institutes of Health. Following completion of my fellowship I was assigned at Madigan Army Medical Center, where I was involved in establishing an epilepsy monitoring unit and sleep laboratory, and was also involved with the establishment of a neurology residency program.
Following my retirement from the Army I was briefly on the faculty at the University of Alabama at Birmingham where I divided my time between the epilepsy center and sleep center. I decided to leave academic practice and enter private practice after a couple of years. Private practice was a very disillusioning process for me. Since my retirement from the Army I had moved from one practice to another about every five years. I hadn't found what I'd been looking for and had become increasingly frustrated with the narrow focus of medicine in general and neurology in particular.
In 2009 I started doing a lot of yoga. This was my entry point into the world of complementary and alternative medicine. I attended a workshop for Sean Corne's organization "Off the Mat and Into the World" which seeks to translate yogic values into constructive community action. In this workshop I was challenged to develop an action plan and it emerged in my mind as trying to combine my yoga world with my role as a physician. My discussion partner in the workshop put me in touch with her college roommate who works as a pain anesthesiologist with the Integrative Medicine Center at Vanderbilt University. Within a month I had found the Fellowship and had a long and delightful conversation with Moira Andre which led to my enrolling in the Fellowship.
Like so many of my fellowship classmates I've experienced a period of profound personal and professional growth as a result of the experiences and relationships gained through the Fellowship. And like so many of my classmates I have found that this has changed my life trajectory.
The last day of my old neurology job was October 3, 2014. Beginning November 3 I will be the head of the epilepsy program with the Oregon Clinic in Portland. In this I plan to use skills and knowledge obtained through the fellowship to bear in developing a truly integrative model for the care neurological illnesses including epilepsy.
As I read this from the perspective of 2018 I am impressed that the arc of my life has continued to track differently as a result of this program. I am now working as a neurohospitalist for a small hospital in SC. In the past year I have survived multiple personal health challenges. My experiences as a patient convince me more than ever of the importance of integrative medicine. Although my "day job" is still as a conventional neurologist, every encounter is informed by this experience. The humility, mindfulness and compassion that permeate this training program are now my life blood. I honestly don't know if I would have survived to write thes words without the Integrative Medicine Fellowship.