Alumni Interview: Dr. Alan Keister
Dr. Alan Keister, Baylor University AED alumni and founder of Heal the City clinic in Amarillo shares a unique perspective on intertwining faith and medicine. His free clinic focuses on providing care for the uninsured in Amarillo and surrounding area through excellent urgent and chronic care for general medical problems. The clinic hopes to communicate the love of Christ to volunteers and patients alike.
Among Christian pre-health students and physicians alike, there is an epidemic of separation of their faith and their careers. Dr. Alan Keister hopes to bridge this gap though his work as founder of the free clinic, Heal the City. The abundance of reward in this line of work makes Heal the City a unique experience to visit and to volunteer at. Each of the members of HTC are committed to being mission minded, choosing to show up and bring their best to the patients they see each day. Dr. Keister has a vision of “figure[ing] out ways to make it where dignity and respect are at the forefront of everything [the clinic does], from when a patient walks in the door until they leave”. This mindset allows for mission to be at the forefront of their staff’s minds, all of them having passion that pushes them to make a difference in their community. All involved in this project then have an attitude about their work where they “feel like it matters… and it does mater”. This ability to transform lives has inspired many of his private practice patients and local foundations to get involved in something that “has a bigger value than a dollar sign”. This gratification of making a genuine difference helps Dr. Keister and everyone else involved to avoid the path of burnout by reorienting their lives towards treating individuals over treating disease.
Heal the City is a part of a larger movement for Christians to incorporate their faith into their careers. Dr. Keister speaks on the idea that HTC is “still a training ground for people to look at ways to incorporate faith and medicine and do so in a way that neither is an add on and both are done excellently”. He challenges the students of Baylor and AED to learn to trust God when outside of your comfort zone and to take advantage of the wealth of opportunities around them. Alan Keister comments that some of the greatest lessons available to pre-health students are not found in the traditional pre-medical STEM classes, but rather the mentorship, humanities courses, and conversations that “help [students] understand the human condition”.
So how did Dr. Keister find himself as the founder of such an impactful organization? In Dr. Keister’s time in AED at Baylor, he was active in organizing what is now known as the Pre-Health Symposium. Keister comments that he “never would have dreamed that you go from organizing that to having a movement like this”. After multiple medical mission trips to Central America, he felt a calling to be ministering where he lived, allowing him to form more long-term relationships and build up the community that he was already a part of. Now, rather than seeking to replicate the clinic in a variety of difference cities, he focuses on investing in young people who will go to medical school and impact the way medicine is done.
Keister loves that he gets to connect Baylor students to spending time at Heal the City through their summer internship and gap year opportunities at the clinic. He works diligently to “have a summer internship that they continue to try and make an important formational experience”. Keister accomplishes this by allowing students and recent graduates to advocate for patients, scribe, shadow physicians, practice wellness coaching, and learning how the clinics systems can better serve the community. Interns have helped with writing grants to raise money for programs to help patients, been involved in marketing and social media, coordinated volunteers and more. AmeriCorps helps to make these gap year internships possible with a stipend and scholarships available to interested students. Keister notes that “we really try to utilize what students are good at to help improve quality of the clinic”. He recommends the gap year internship to students who could use the time to think and gain perspective. There is a lot of knowledge to be gained from this experience, but Keister notes that “doing well in this program is making the spiritual side and intellectual side of medicine mix and work together. People can see how those don’t have to be disconnected…let them be symbolic rather than separate”.
Written by Samantha Whitney