Of Sound Mind
Dr. Jill Hendra Steps Into A Healing Light With Her Patients

By Nicole M. Sikora
Photos By Augusto Photography

It’s not every day that one encounters a physician who emphasizes the health connection between mind, body and spirit — and who also happens to be a pilot with a master’s degree in Strategic Studies from the Air War College at Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, Ala. Dr. Jill Hendra, emergency psychiatrist at Carolinas HealthCare System’s Behavioral Health Center, one of only eight 24-hour psychology emergency rooms in North America, is such a person.

Dr. Hendra also carries the titles of colonel in the U.S. Air National Guard, North Carolina State Air Surgeon and founder of Delta Health Foundation, an organization that promotes wellness education. Dr. Hendra received both her bachelor’s degree in microbiology and her doctorate in osteopathic medicine from Michigan State University. The medical degree marked her as unique from the start.

Michigan State has a strong background of physicians trained with an osteopathic — as opposed to allopathic — approach. The difference is in the philosophy of the disciplines. Dr. Hendra quickly defines allopathic medicine’s guiding principle as “find and fix” and osteopathic’s as “form versus function.” Today, osteopathic approaches are becoming more mainstream, and the popular terms “complementary medicine” and “integrative medicine” are synonymous with the osteopathic approach.

Choosing To Specialize
“Growing up, my physician was an osteopath,” Dr. Hendra recalls. “I didn’t think there was anything else. As long as I can remember, illness, to me, was a foreign thing. And it’s often brought on by people’s poor habits, lifestyles or environmental stress. My brain has been osteopathically inclined from early on.”

According to the Princeton Review, osteopathic physicians make up only about 6 percent of American doctors, and typically comprise less than 1 percent of the physician population in Southern states. Indeed, when Dr. Hendra relocated to Charlotte in 1990, she was the first osteopath in the city, and only the 80th in North Carolina.

Dr. Hendra’s medical school experience was unusual in other ways, as well. Generally speaking, she says, about 80 percent of osteopathic medical students stay in general care, while about 80 percent of allopathic medical students specialize. She is one of that 20-percent minority of osteopaths who specialize.

After graduating in 1985, Dr. Hendra worked to pay back the public health service scholarship that put her through medical school. She was assigned a rural medicine rotation in West Virginia, where she was asked, among other tasks, to practice psychiatry in prisons around the region. Her work took her well beyond the razor wire, as she served with Seneca Mental Health in Summersville, W.Va.

Immersed In Empathy
Dr. Hendra was unprepared for what awaited her in the Appalachian Mountains — anemia diagnosed as depression; brain tumors labeled as schizophrenia. “When I arrived,” she remembers, “I had to fill in on birth control and family planning because a doctor had just quit that morning. It was earth-shattering. Many people I treated didn’t even have running water.”

The experience was difficult, but it shaped Dr. Hendra’s approach to people. She says she finds it helps to “white light” herself in patients — psychologically immerse herself in them even as she physically enters their space — and share a half-thought, half-prayer: Help me to make happen here what you need.

Dr. Hendra recalls a fellowship during medical school that focused on craniosacral therapy, a holistic healing practice that uses very light touch to balance the body. The hands-on training convinced her that a patient’s energy is part of mental health.

“As you can imagine, there are a lot of things psychiatrists have to learn about boundaries and healthy touch,” she says. “It hasn’t really been looked at as something that is well integrated. Integration is one of my hopes. Some doctors will talk about exercise, but people don’t get encouraged much to go get massages when they have depression, for example, even though it’s hugely beneficial.”

In fact, Dr. Hendra sees integration as the most important work she can do. “We start to get out of balance in one way, and if it’s not addressed, it spills over to other systems in our bodies,” she explains. “Our bodies then go through a domino effect.

“When people end up coming to the emergency room to see me, they might be sleep-deprived badly enough to think they are hearing voices,” she continues. “My job is to help them go back, start lifting up each of those dominoes until they can account for how they started to fall apart a year ago. Lord willing, the medications I have to use to get them back there won’t have to be used again. For now, though, I need to get them sleeping; stop the voices. And hopefully, in the walk back, they get trained to recognize those early signs and symptoms.”

So Much Still To Do
Integration is also the driving force behind Dr. Hendra’s master’s degree in business administration from Queens University, as well as her creation and development of Delta Health Foundation. She explains that the mission of the Foundation is to educate consumers on the benefits of integrating traditional and alternative therapies and healing practices, such as massage, acupuncture, chiropractic treatment and others — all to improve quality of life and promote longevity. Currently, through the Foundation Web site, visitors can access information on alternative therapies. As Delta Health Foundation grows, Dr. Hendra hopes the site will provide a rating system and free education for patients who seek alternative and complementary medical care. She is working with a sociologist at Clemson University to devise a rating scale that can be used nationally.

Dr. Hendra is currently planning a 350-mile walk across North Carolina on behalf of Delta Health Foundation, as a way to open community dialogue and spread awareness of health education. In the meantime, she is helping her mother through treatments for lung cancer.

She is also investing time in bringing a preventive mental health approach to military medicine. “We need to underscore looking at things preventively,” she says. According to the American Psychiatric Association, the U.S. Army recorded a higher suicide rate in 2006 than in the previous five years, and noted military branches are searching to better identify risk factors. But the challenge isn’t exclusive to the military.

Practicing what she preaches, Dr. Hendra is careful to get regular exercise and watch her sleeping patterns. She relieves stress by jumping rope, scuba diving, sailing, flying and taking her dogs for walks. She also enjoys stimulating and feeding her mind.

“To me, learning is an antidepressant,” she reflects. “There is a sense of mastery over something and knowing it in more detail that makes my brain lighten up.”

After all, Dr. Hendra knows the work will always be there.

“Physicians are really advisors,” she notes. “That’s why what we do continues to be an art as opposed to a strict science. The brain is really the last frontier.”

To Learn More
Visit deltahealthfoundation.com.