About Us

My Father, by Francisco Contreras, MD


I’ll never forget the last words my father said to me. These and many more are etched into the tablets of my mind forever. "A doctor should never tell a patient, 'there is nothing more I can do for you.' A doctor can always serve a patient, even if it is just holding his hand through a tough night." I can still picture my father’s face as he spoke these words. His eyes burned with a passionate focus. My father never lost sight of the human side of his patients. His love for people grew into a vision of a hospital that would provide care for the whole patient; body, mind, and spirit.

In the early years, he and his contemporaries were fascinated by the wave of technological advancement in the medical field. Yet, for many of his colleagues, the fascination became unhealthy. As they grew more dependent upon new technology, they cultivated an increasingly objective distance from their patients. Many of these physicians began to believe that the wisest decisions were those that were unclouded by emotional attachment.

So, while the rest of the pack worked hard to establish a healthy professional distance from their patients, my dad began to spend more time with his. He wanted to know his patients on a personal level. He needed to find out if any emotional or spiritual stress were contributing to his patients' illnesses.

In the mornings, he behaved like a conventional doctor. He prescribed lab work, x-rays, and medication. In the afternoons, he behaved quite unconventionally. He gathered his patients together to talk, sing, laugh, and pray. He offered words of encouragement and the warm hug of a man who cared. He began to combine sound medicine supported with intentional emotional and spiritual support. It was this that first caused patients to begin to refer to the Contreras Hospital as an "Oasis of Hope".

Today, the Oasis of Hope Hospital is a high-tech medical/surgical facility. The hospital employs cutting-edge technology like digital CT scanners and state-of-the-art touch screen ventilators. Doctors have access to electronic medical files through a wireless local area network, which allows them to access patient records on palmtops or tablet PCs. Patients surf the web on broadband workstations and keep in touch with loved ones via digital telephone lines. However, the hospital had very humble beginnings. This was due, in part, to my father's struggle to break free from the confines of the mainstream medical community that was rapidly driving a wedge between physician and patient.

In 1939, my father began his career in medicine. As a recent graduate of the army medical school in Mexico City, he expressed his desire to specialize in a new field of medicine, pathology. Encouraged by his professors, he applied for an internship at Boston’s Children Hospital, an extension of Harvard University. He was accepted. The challenges there were memorable, but they were nothing like the ones to come.

When he returned to Mexico, more intense challenges were waiting. The army sent him to the city of Tijuana, located at the northernmost point along the coastline of the Baja peninsula. What made the assignment so overwhelming was the scarcity of pathologists in those days. My father was the first in that region of the world.

Hospitals across the border in San Diego were desperate for the services of a qualified pathologist and were quick to contact my father. For the first few years of his practice, he would work in San Diego in the mornings and in Tijuana in the afternoons. He was working harder than he ever had.

What exactly is a pathologist, you ask? A pathologist is the specialist that analyzes blood and tissue samples to determine what type of pathology (illness) is present. For example, it is the pathologist who determines whether a tumor biopsy is benign (non-cancerous) or malignant (cancerous). During those early years, my father spent hours at his microscope each day examining tissue given to him for analysis from doctors. He began to notice that many of the organs that doctors were removing were healthy and that there were far too many unnecessary surgeries being performed. He knew these doctors well and he knew that they had the best of intentions, yet he felt there must be a way to improve the diagnostic process and thereby reduce the number of unnecessary surgeries being performed.

People were excited about his ideas and he was offered a full-time position at Mercy Hospital in San Diego, California. The job came complete with immigration documents and a probability of U.S. citizenship. It was a tempting offer, to say the least, but my father declined it. In his heart he felt called to make a contribution to his home country. So, he decided to get out from behind the microscope and start treating patients with the goal of improving the diagnostic process.

There are moments in life that change you as a person, that alter the direction you choose to travel forever. For my father, that moment occurred in 1963 when Cecile Hoffman came to see him. Cecile was a cancer patient. She had suffered several grueling rounds of conventional treatment and had been told there was no hope. Determined not to give up, she looked into alternative therapies. She found one.

My father admitted that his hopes for Cecile were not high, given the prognosis offered by the doctors she had seen. However, the alternative cancer treatments administered by my father gave her hope and she appeared to be getting stronger. As the treatments progressed, my father became absolutely astonished. Here was a woman, who had undergone conventional cancer treatments to no avail, who was given a death sentence, who was getting better. In the end, my father had no choice but to acknowledge that Cecile Hoffman had completely overcome cancer.

Soon enough, word of mouth spread and my mother and father were faced with a dilemma. The consultation office was too small and what would they do with the patients who needed to be hospitalized?

The Oasis of Hope Hospital actually started in our house. My mother, Rita Contreras Mellado always had a way of finding solutions to every challenge. When it became apparent that a patient my father was seeing needed hospital care, she would send us children across the street to stay with neighbors. Presto! Our rooms became patient rooms. She was the first Oasis of Hope nurse and administrator.

In 1966, my parents went on a trip that followed the route taken by the Apostle Paul on his missionary travels. When the tour guide discovered that my father was a physician, he took him to see an ancient healing center in Pergamum. Ernesto’s eyes were opened as he learned that the healing process in those days always involved the combination of physical, emotional, and spiritual therapies. At that moment, he realized that the problem with modern medicine was that doctors had forgotten that a person has a body, mind, and spirit. The focus had become the illness in the body.

Embracing the vision of treating the whole person, my father began his mission to improve the quality of the physical, emotional, and spiritual care of his patients. He envisioned a facility that could provide quality medical services coupled with emotional and spiritual support services. That vision is the Oasis of Hope Hospital.

To this day, the hospital is guided by his vision. We continue to blend science, compassion, and faith in all that we do. We believe that the needs of the patient should determine what therapies should be offered. We continue to incorporate a wide variety of treatment modalities, from the manufactured to the natural, from the conventional to the holistic. Yet, for all the bells and whistles that change has brought about in our facilities, the guiding principles have remained constant.

After all, everything starts and finishes with philosophy. Think about it. It doesn’t matter what field a person is in, the highest degree is a Doctor of Philosophy. There are Ph.D.’s in immunology, anthropology, mathematics, and literature. That is because philosophy shapes everything you do.

The philosophy my father established at Oasis can be defined by two guiding principles he gave to his medical staff:

1) First, do no harm.

2) Love your patient as you love yourself.

So simple yet profound. If a physician contemplates these principles each and every day, it will challenge him to find the most effective treatment with the least amount of negative side effects.

Unfortunately, oncologists often lose sight of the general condition and well-being of the patient, because so much of their attention is focused and directed toward the destruction of the tumor. Modern doctors can, and often do, unintentionally compromise the quality of a person’s life in their blind determination to eliminate disease.

The doctors at the Oasis of Hope Hospital embrace a different focus. Bound by oath to do no harm and to love our patients, we only offer therapies that have the potential to improve the patient’s health without compromising quality of life. If we determine that juice therapy will benefit a patient, we offer it. If we believe that chemotherapy will benefit a patient, we offer it. However, we will always apply a therapy in a form that will avoid the negative side effects that deteriorate quality of life.

I have come to the conclusion that my father knew what he was doing when he chose the road less traveled many years ago. His choice has made a world of difference to many people in the last forty years. So, what exactly does the treatment program at the Oasis of Hope Hospital look like? Are you curious? Keep reading.

Blessings,
Francisco Contreras, MD