Physician, professional engineer, hobby sheep rancher, archer, and humour enthusiast, Dr. Taylor ardently believed there wasn’t much we couldn’t do if we’d only put our minds and hearts to it.
It flowed from this philosophy that, even as a father of four young children, Dr. Taylor transitioned from a successful career in professional engineering into a medical practice: a passion he continued until his 87th year. Indeed, just two years before, at age 85, he still enjoyed making regular house calls: a habit requiring a reliable 4x4 vehicle to traverse the often snow-covered prairie roads between the many patients and his acreage.
You see, Dr. Taylor was anything but a conventional physician. And, it was his openness to exploring options outside convention that gained him respect from both collogues in his field and patients alike.
During his first decade of practice, Dr. Taylor began noticing something that troubled him: it seemed that the medical system had a penchant for industriously sweeping away cobwebs, but ignoring the spiders. During his many speaking engagements, he was known to say, “no one has ever gotten a headache because their blood serum levels of Tylenol went down. We need to be searching for causes and not merely treating symptoms.” As an rigorous researcher, he studied both the new developments from within the alternative field as well as the more conventional approaches found in established medical journals like JAMA, BMJ, Lancet and others.
Dr. Taylor’s approach to medicine was something like his approach to making house-calls: first of all, the doctor can't ever think himself too good to leave his office. He might even have to get uncomfortable and travel to places he isn’t familiar with! Furthermore, the house calling doctor knows that cutting-edge approaches are sometimes like unique patients: they don’t always come to you through typical channels, you often have to be willing to travel down odd roads to get find them. For Dr. Taylor, a doctor should be willing to go off the beaten path to get to both his or her patient AND the information that is needed.