By Miles Romney
Whoopee cushions, fake dog poo and over-sized underwear are the medical instruments of one doctor who thinks happiness is a cure for any ailment.
Standing at 6 feet and 2 inches, weighing 200 pounds, Patch Adams, born Hunter Adams, spoke Thursday, Feb. 19, 2004 to students and faculty at the Utah Valley State College on his ideas that laughter is the best medicine, violence is evil and the government is fascist.
He bounded into the room, full of energy, and exclaimed in a loud voice, he was a true nerd.
'I was beaten up on a regular basis, all the time, for several years ... my high school years were really turbulent.'
The movie Patch Adams has the doctor in a mental hospital at the age of 30, but that wasn''t true, said Adams.
'I hospitalized three times at the age of 17 and 18, and not at 30 like the film suggests,' said Adams. 'Now I am crazy but not hospitalizable.'
The 58-year-old said it was during his last stay at the hospital when he was 18 that he made two critical decisions that changed his life forever.
'I always wanted to be a doctor, and I knew what was going to be important about my medical career -- that I serve the poor, so I made the decision to serve humanity and medicine,' said Adams.
He also made decisions about his political beliefs.
'I didn''t know any activists and I felt alone ... and as a political act, I decided to never have another bad day. I was going to be happy everyday, all day long, for the rest of my life.'
Adams said it has been 41 years since he made that decision and he wouldn''t have it any other way.
'I''m hell to be around if you''re miserable,' he said.
When about politics and the United States government, Adams'' tone changed from humorous to serious.
'I am a political activist, I want things different, I think we have the most dangerous government in our history,' he said.
Adams said throughout his speech that the government is corrupted, President George W. Bush and Vice-President Richard Cheney are pure evil and he wants a world where everybody cares for everybody.
'I am against war ... there should be no enemies, no others, no thems,' he said.
Adams, whose waist-length gray hair is dyed blue on one side of his head, said he it was those two decisions at 18 that led him to being a clown and a doctor.
'I believe I am a clown that is a doctor not a doctor that is a clown,' Adams said.
'The job of a doctor and a clown is the same, to walk towards suffering -- we want to walk towards suffering,' said Adams.
Asking for permission to get up onto the table, he said, 'I want to show you that I am a different type of clown, not a birthday clown, but one who likes to create a disturbance.'
He removed his heavy, leather work boots to reveal one orange sock and one purple sock. He jumped on a table, pointed to his yellow pants, designed with multi-colored squares and said, 'I want to show you what I can do with my pants.'
He calls it the five stations of the pants, which had Adams doing everything from pulling pants up over his black shirt decorated with fish and lettuce and a hot pink flamingo tie up to his chest to tucking his whole body, including a fork earring in his left ear, into his pants, where he fared out his arms and said, 'I am a piece of human art and this is what I do at bus stops, and the people think when I am like this, that I can''t hear them.'
Adams said he is firmly against being a business doctor and because of his belief, in 1972, he started the Gesundheit clinic where anyone can go to find free medical care.
'In my years as a doctor I have never charged a penny to anyone for anything,' he said.
With money from his mother and a few others, he said, he bought 310 acres of land in West Virginia to start the clinic. Twenty people with their families made up the first medical team at the clinic, Adams said.
'For the first nine years, no one left. We were a silly hospital. We played with life, we played with death. We played with suffering, struggle and always for love,' Adams said.
He said they dealt with all forms of illness with laughter.
'We made everything funny, we did barf-a-thons with bulimics ... it was like Monty Python took over,' he said.
'The movie was a gross understatement, over everything that really happened.'
After some time as a small clinic, an expansion broke one rule, the only rule Adams had.
'We stopped taking patients ... we needed to change the system, so we went public to raise money, so we could fund a bigger hospital that could help more people,' Adams said.
Adams, who tours from city to city and countries all over the world, talks about his non-violent and unusual practice of medicine.
He makes over $1 million a year.
'I don''t have any property, I don''t own anything. I just use the money to save lives,' Adams said.
Adams said he doesn''t believe in government and he doesn''t believe in Bush or Cheney. He said he doesn''t believe in war or violence, but he does believe that love is the solution to all of life''s problems.
'I don''t believe in accomplishments ... but I think the great one I could have would be to go around the world visiting people in camps and hospitals with my partner and two children,' Adams said.