Love for humanity is the greatest cure

Dr. Gene Bolles, a retired neurosurgeon from Boulder, Colorado, was the first guest of the 2024 Tuesday Talks at the Platte Valley Community Center.

Bolles is a graduate of the University of Michigan School of Medicine and completed his residency in neurosurgery at the University of Colorado. He has been practicing medicine for over 60 years, with 32 years of those in private practice in Boulder, Colorado.

He has traveled around the world doing volunteer humanitarian work in countries such as Albania, Cambodia, Kurdistan Iraq, Laos, Ethiopia, Haiti and Yemen. In North Korea, he was a guest of the World Federation of Neurosurgical Societies. He also spent 10 years in Belize as a neurosurgeon consultant during the 1980s.

Bolles spoke with the audience about how traveling the globe teaches us to see the world differently. in many of the places Bolles traveled, he had the opportunity to make a lot of friends. He said that the world we live in can be chaotic, especially with the disturbing violence that we read about or see in the media.

“I have found that the most important part in what I do over these years is that you get to become an ambassador for yourself in your profession and your country,” Bolles said. “Most importantly, just being human and meeting people of different colors, cultures, and religions with similar emotions.”

Bolles said some people might look negatively at some other countries because of what they hear or what they see on television. He said people would be surprised by what they will see when traveling.

“Traveling is the best way to understand the world,” Bolles said. “Everyone should be non-judgemental and put their biases aside and look at people as people. We should take our time see what our common denominators are. You will find that what we have in common is that we truly love our families despite our different religious beliefs and cultures. I have friends who are doctors that work in Ukraine as trauma surgeons and I get a better feel talking to them then what I hear or see in the media”.

Bolles’ message was that there is more to practicing medicine than making it a career, it’s about making the world a better place by spreading kindness. He wanted to make his parents proud by becoming a medical Doctor. He said that he was glad he could make his parents’ dream a reality even though his mother did not live to see him achieve his accomplishment of graduating from medical school.

“I thank my parents for telling people that they wanted their son to become a doctor,” Bolles said. “My mother died when I was 14 years old and I did not want to disappoint her as far as getting an education”.

During his youth, Bolles was influenced by Dr. Edwards A. Park to get involved in humanitarian work. He knew he wanted to set the same standards as.Park by helping around the world.

“Dr. Park had won the Nobel prize in 1952 and was a well-known physician,” Bolles said. “Once he became a doctor, he devoted the rest of his life to caring for a group of people that lived out in the middle of Africa without any roads. He dedicated himself to working in missionary medicine and to building hospitals to work and to help people. That intrigued me on how that took precedence over so many other things he had the opportunity to do”.

In 1964, Bolles was drafted into the Vietnam war, was trained in aviation medicine and was part of the area evacuations unit. He said he experienced firsthand that “war is hell,” especially what he had witnessed from soldiers on the battlefield. After the Vietnam War,. Bolles continued to see other wars around the world as he provided medical care to victims of war in other countries such as Albania. It also gave him an opportunity to learn other fields of medicine.

“I find that there are exceptional medicine practices not in America but elsewhere,” Bolles said. “I do not feel we have a right to be arrogant and say we are the best by any means because I find excellent doctors who have knowledge in research and medicine in many different parts of our world. So when we go there to teach we also go there to allow them to teach us.”