Finding a fascinating and gratifying medical practice in Kathmandu saved his medical career, but befriending a reincarnate Tibetan lama transformed his life.
This compellingly written memoir is a grand adventure tale of travel in Nepal and Tibet, tense and highly emotional medical encounters, new romances, and ground-breaking medical research. But all these eventually take a back seat to what the author learns about Tibetan Buddhism and the ability to train in compassion. The author reveals the details of his personal tutoring in Buddhism and his gradual exposure to mysteries and hard-to-explain events that he personally witnesses. For all the readers who dream about what it might be like to travel to the Himalayas and achieve a genuine spiritual connection, this book is the story of how that dream can come true.
David R Shlim M.D. was born in Portland, Oregon in 1949. He earned a B.A. in English literature at Pomona College and his M.D. degree from Rush Medical College. After completing one year of internship and working briefly in family practice and emergency medicine, he travelled to Nepal to volunteer at a high-altitude rescue post near the base of Mt. Everest and returned for two more three-month stints over the next three years. In 1983, he joined a clinic in Kathmandu that specialized in the care of foreigners in Nepal. He became the director of the clinic and worked in Nepal for the next fifteen years.
The CIWEC clinic was the first clinic in the world that saw large numbers of travelers at their destination, creating a unique opportunity to study the diseases of travelers. Research conducted at the clinic helped it become the most famous travel medicine clinic in the world. Dr. Shlim has published over 55 original papers on travel-medicine topics in peer-reviewed journals and authored more than two dozen chapters in authoritative travel medicine and tropical medicine textbooks. He’s given hundreds of lectures in venues all over the world. In 1989, he helped discover a new intestinal protozoal pathogen, Cyclospora, the first to be discovered in seventy-eight years. In 2013, he was elected president of the International Society of Travel Medicine (ISTM).
During his time in Nepal, Dr. Shlim served ten years as the Medical Director of the Himalayan Rescue Association and was given an award by the Prime Minister of Nepal for his lifetime contribution to rescue in Nepal. For 20 years he wrote the “Health and Safety” chapter in Trekking in the Nepal Himalaya, published by Lonely Planet. He was working in Kathmandu in 1996 when the disaster that was memorialized in the book, Into Thin Air, took place, treating the victims that were evacuated from the mountain.
Dr. Shlim has received research awards from both the International Society of Travel Medicine and the Wilderness Medical Society (WMS) and was awarded a lifetime achievement award from the WMS. He was honoured to be inducted as a Fellow of the ISTM in the first year that the honour was created, and he was the first American travel medicine physician to be asked to become a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons (Glasgow).
In 1984, Dr. Shlim started offering a free weekly clinic at a Tibetan Buddhist monastery near Kathmandu. This led to a close relationship with the head of the monastery, Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche and his father, Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche. His relationship with Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche spans more than thirty-five years, and he served as the personal physician of Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche for 11 years, until his death in 1996. Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche is one of the most popular and influential reincarnate Tibetan lamas in the world, and Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche was widely recognized as one of the greatest meditation teachers of the past century and gave meditation instructions to His Holiness the Dalai Lama. Dr. Shlim has also had a close connection with Phakchok Rinpoche. Studying with these great Tibetan masters taught him that compassion is a quality that can be trained and thereby greatly enhance both the life and practice of caregivers.
Dr. Shlim was married to his wife, Jane, in 1990 and they have two children. In 1998, the family moved to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, where they currently reside. When he moved back to the U.S., he organized two Medicine and Compassion conferences with Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche and later transcribed and edited the teachings into the book, Medicine and Compassion, which has been continuously in print since 2004, and has sold over 13,000 copies in North America. A 10th anniversary edition was brought out in 2014. The book has also been published in six other languages.
Dr. Shlim currently practices travel medicine in Jackson Hole. He has taught an ongoing weekly course in Tibetan Buddhism for the past twenty years. He served as the head of the Teton District Board of Health for ten years, and currently serves as the President of Gomde California, Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche’s main retreat center in North America. He toured with The Rolling Stones for three years as the doctor for the band, traveling with them to Canada, the U.S., Japan, China, and Australia.
He has served on several working groups for the Centers for Disease Control that help formulate U.S. policy in relation to rabies vaccine, Japanese encephalitis vaccine, tickborne encephalitis vaccine, and yellow fever vaccine. In 2009, he was asked to become the first outside editor of the CDC’s book, Health Information for International Travel (The Yellow Book) and has remained as an editor to the present day. The book is the definitive source of travel medicine information for much of the English-speaking world.
Dr. Shlim formed a company in 2020 called Medicine and Compassion LLC to promote his efforts to demonstrate that compassion can be trained. So far, the company has produced four Medicine and Compassion Retreats, released 52 videos filmed at the retreats, taught a medical school elective at the National University of Ireland, in Galway, and created an online course for the Samye Institute called “Training in Compassion.”
