Dina Goodwill and the Whole-Person Alternative

Dina Goodwill had been drifting toward alternative medicine her whole life, but the decisive moment in her shift from environmental researcher to holistic healer came at a house party in Humboldt County, Cal., in 1990. Goodwill was enjoying the warm late spring evening, telling her friends and colleagues about her work.

She was studying the accumulation in mosses of methyl bromide, an insecticide. She can still list off several facts about the chemical- its method of action, its molecular composition, and its origin. “It was discovered in Nazi Germany. It was Mengele,” she said, referring to the Auschwitz physician notorious for human experimentation.

The other party-goers were horrified. They were polite about it, even jovial, but demanded she stop talking. It was too depressing.

If her work was too depressing to talk about, she thought, could she keep doing it?

Within a year, she had left California and her career. Now, she is a registered acupuncturist, herbalist, and practitioner of Traditional Chinese Medicine, or TCM. She has reconciled her scientific background with a more holistic vision of healing that observes few of the boundaries of mainstream medicine.

I met Goodwill at the Sholom Senior Housing and Assisted Living in St. Paul, Minn., where she had a 10 am appointment with a patient. She flew into the lobby at 10:15, talking in a flurry.

“Sorry I’m late I got a call from one of my patients this morning whose son was feeling sick,” she told me. “It’s this way,” she said. She turned her head and smiled at me, encouraging me to follow, but didn’t slow down.

The 54-year-old has messy shoulder-length hair that has started turning gray. She wears black, oval glasses and today she’s wearing loose cotton pants that snap against her legs as she hurries.

“She’s this concerned mother who was worried about her kid, but it’s her second kid. I told her she could take care of it herself, but she insisted that I come. I don’t get it, it’s her second child, you’d think…” She trailed off with a shrug and a laugh.

She went on, piling information ontop of itself faster than I could process; the kid had a runny nose, she’s been seeing Goodwill for a few years, it’s her second kid (she said again), the kid would probably be fine without any care, but pills (she didn’t pause to specify) would be worst of all.

Down a fourth floor hallway, Goodwill knocked on a door and asked “Dorothy..?”

This is the home of Dorothy Aminzade, who became a centenarian this year and who has been Goodwill’s patient for over a decade. Goodwill beamed at the old woman as she let herself in. “Hello, Dorothy.”

Goodwill easily moved through the apartment, pulling out the massage table that Dorothy keeps in the bathroom, and began setting up. Goodwill chatted with Aminzade as she did, about birthdays and daughters and buddhism, “We’re going to move your chi, Dorothy.”

When it came time for Aminzade to strip, Goodwill asked if she wanted me to go out to the hall.

“I’m a hundred years old. What do I have to be embarrassed about?” I looked away, but only I was embarrassed by the situation.

That day, Goodwill was giving Aminzade her usual treatment- two hours of Tui na, a kind of soft tissue massage.

Goodwill is licensed in a hodge-podge of disciples that can broadly be called holistic medicine: acupuncture, acupressure, Traditional Chinese Medicine, herbalism. She practices several more without certification: placenta encapsulation, aromatherapy, and, when her busy schedule permits, births.

She put on a CD of gentle ambient music, a low drone under layers of chimes. Goodwill helped Aminzade into position on the bed and took her pulse, “Am I still alive?”

Goodwill laughed, and began the massage. She started at Aminzade’s head. Over two hours, she worked her way down, talking and moving the entire time.

She offered dermatological advice, laughed about her patient from that morning, and asked about Aminzade’s children. If her patients let her in, Goodwill involves herself intimately in their lives.

The two women talked about Aminzade’s pregnant granddaughter. There was a pause, so Goodwill said, “In China the mothers stay in bed for a whole month and drink a lot of ginger tea.”

“Yeah, but the American way of doing it is to get out of bed, get up,” Aminzade said.

“That’s because of money, not because it’s the best thing to do.”

A push and pull was playing out between mainstream healing and the holistic medicine Goodwill practices. Goodwill has navigated this conflict most of her life.

Goodwill was born in Ayer, Mass., in 1962, the oldest of three children. Her middle brother followed their father to a sales career, but Goodwill was more intrigued by the medical textbooks that belonged to their mother, a nurse.

“My mom was kind of derailed when she had kids, but she had designs to go to med school,” said Goodwill’s youngest brother, Frederic “Ric” Goodwill. “I remember looking at her anatomy and physiology textbooks when we were kids.”

His sister did the same, developing an interest in science that carried her into college, majoring in biology. She was hardly a book-worm, though, and regularly took breaks to follow the Grateful Dead with friends and Ric.

“We had trips around New England, Maine, New York. Virginia one time… At that part of her life, she was more carefree than a care-taker,” Ric said.

Goodwill spent her first concert in a first aid tent after suffering a heat stroke. “Maybe I didn’t drink enough water, I don’t know. I remember lying down and listening to the music, The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down. I remember breathing and realizing I was OK... It was surreal.”

After finishing her bachelors in the late 80s, Goodwill went to work for the USDA, studying bio-accumulation in moths. After a day of resting on trees, the moths would turn gray, Goodwill said. The research led to the closure of several pulp mills in the area before it ended.

She entered a Master’s program at Humboldt State University in Arcata, Cal., where she studied methyl bromide accumulation in mosses.

“Methyl bromide is really simple,” Goodwill explained, “it's a bromine atom attached to a methyl group.” In the atmosphere, the bromine atom reactivates the chlorine atom in CFCs, causing a chain reaction of ozone depletion, she said.

Goodwill saw a kind of symmetry in the pollution, that the earth is damaged in the same way as human bodies. “As above, so below,” she told me.

This was the work Goodwill was explaining at that house party.

She graduated and moved to Minneapolis. A job at a health food store introduced her to a new conception of wellness. One day, on a whim, she walked into a small alternative health shop and started chatting with the man at the counter. He recommended that she look into acupuncture.

Goodwill spent the next five years studying acupuncture and acupressure. After short stints in Taylors Falls, Minn., and Wisconsin, Goodwill moved to a small office complex in South Minneapolis.

It’s a tight space. If Goodwill is seeing a patient in one of the two exam rooms, you have to step over their shoes (which Goodwill asks patients to remove) to walk down the narrow hallway.

Each room is outfitted with a table where patients lay while be treated. Anatomical posters hang on the walls, calling to mind the illustrations found in Grey’s Anatomy, but listing acupuncture points rather than bones.

Past the exam rooms is a small kitchen with a ¾ fridge and a stove. Opposite the stove is a shelf with a pile of smooth river stones and a crockpot where Goodwill warms them for hot stone massages. A higher shelf is filled with a small library comprised of two dozen reference books including Chinese Herbal Patient Medicines, Acupuncture - A Comprehensive Text, and A Handbook of Traditional Chinese Gynecology. On the wall hangs a calendar declaring 2016 to be “the year of the monkey,” courtesy of the American Acupuncture Council.

Next to the offices is the herbal pharmacy Goodwill owns. It is run, part time, by Goodwill’s protege and employee James Carolan.

Carolan recalls the first time he met Goodwill: “It seemed like there was a lot going on.” He has only been at the Medicine Tree since November, but already has a deep appreciation of Goodwill. After Carolan’s grandfather had a pair of seizures, she recommended lecithin, saying it is a precursor for the neurotransmitter acetylcholine.

“One of the shortcomings of science, with the great focus, the great refinement in specialization over the last forty or fifty years,” Carolan said, “is a narrowing of vision.

“It’s like the microscope approach versus the picture window. One looks minutely at details, the other looks at what is happening in a wider scope. I think both approaches are necessary.”

It’s the breadth of her experience, Carolan said, that’s sets Goodwill apart from other practitioners, both traditional and holistic. Carolan was talking about the number of holistic disciplines Goodwill knows - he said it is unusual to find a practitioner of more than one or two - but it is equally true of her scientific background.

Goodwill values her background for what it allows her to do for her patients-- one of her services is patient advocacy, accompanying them to doctors appointments to act as a scientific interpreter and to push the doctors to provide better care.

On the other hand, she is skeptical of an approach to health that focuses more on the disease than the patient. “I have clients who have had a heart attack already and we have to prevent a second. They’re on all kinds of medicines. We don’t know how that all interacts. Most of the time, they’re just trying to find something to knock them out.”

Goodwill said that this approach to health isn’t sustainable, that just as she has, medicine needs to find balance.