Living the American Dream by Helping Others in Mexico

When Haywood Hall, MD, became an emergency physician many years ago, he seemed symbolic of the American dream. Here was a Mexican-born, pulled-up-by-his-bootstraps high-school dropout who, thanks to personal grit, beat tough odds to become a doctor. But after surmounting so many obstacles, he found he couldn't get past the one lurking in every patient encounter: the potential lawsuit.

And that is the reason, or at least a big part of it, he ended up returning to his homeland, founding a Mexican program that teaches Spanish to emergency physicians, and finding professional renewal, as he describes it.

Called the Pan American Collaborative Emergency Medicine Development program (PACEMD), it has, in the past decade, welcomed hundreds of physicians, residents, and other health professionals, who visit and live in a setting that immerses them in Spanish, steeps them in cultural literacy, and allows them to practice emergency medicine in a picturesque Mexican village, San Miguel de Allende.

As one of its many physician participants, Judith Tintinalli, MD, said the experience was just phenomenal, and for several reasons. Participants live in the geographic heart of Mexico while learning the language, take Spanish classes in a charming historic inn turned academic center, and use newfound language skills professionally while providing treatment at the town's emergency care facility.

But the PACEMD program, while impressive, is not the subject of Dr. Tintinalli's highest praise; that she reserves for Dr. Hall.

He built this out of nothing. It is absolutely amazing. He did it without [outside] funding. His ability to negotiate and network just blows me away, said Dr. Tintinalli, a professor and the chairwoman emeritus of emergency medicine at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

From Meter Reader to EP

PACEMD actually is the result of a combination of events. On the heels of some agonizing litigation, Dr. Hall returned for a visit to Mexico, a place where he always felt safe and comfortable. In the United States, he said, I had reached a place where I had felt stable, and then I really began to question that.

He had survived early discrimination, and overcome feelings of being an outcast, only to have his hard-earned sense of security threatened again, this time by legal challenges. On an outing in the Sonora Desert of Mexico, he witnessed a brutal car crash. He intervened to save the life of a man by fashioning a chest tube out of an endotracheal tube and a glove. Mulling over the incident, he decided to find a way to spend more time professionally in his original homeland.

As it turned out, he actually never abandoned his practice in America. He simply expanded the scope of it, as well as his professional influence, south of the border. Raised in Mexico during early childhood, Dr. Hall was just another happy Mexican kid, he said. He was different, however, in terms of his heritage: an African American father and a Caucasian mother, both American expatriates.