Alumni Promote Health Holistically
Several Des Moines University alumni have creatively stretched their health care expertise into related areas to promote well-being. In addition to making a positive difference, they have embraced lifestyles connected to nature.
Healing Hands and Green Thumbs
As a child, Claudia Calabrese, D.O.’81, was her grandfather’s “little sidekick” in his work as a gardener, nursery owner and landscape architect. “I grew up in the world of growing things and had a real passion for that my whole life,” she says.
She had other mentors. A high school teacher who tutored Calabrese on the flute encouraged her to attend a weeklong band camp at Drake University, which resulted in her landing a scholarship. A Drake biology professor persuaded her to change her major to biology. His wife opened her eyes to osteopathic medicine and connected Calabrese to a friend, Bernard TePoorten, D.O., FAAO, longtime chair of osteopathic manual medicine at DMU. “You know where I went to medical school, and I’m so glad I did,” Calabrese says. “To be a D.O. fits with my worldview of life and medicine.”
She went on to practice family and occupational medicine. She also worked at a community health center in Colorado. All the while, the urge to play in the dirt kept growing. Fate intervened when she met Tim Ferrell, a retired Lutheran pastor and owner of Berry Patch Farms near Brighton, Colorado, at a food bank fundraiser. The two married and began raising a variety of vegetables and berries on land Ferrell was leasing.
“We had this little newsletter list and sent postcards to people when the berries were ready. We had this little business going, and it was fine,” Calabrese says.
A Surge in Demand
That changed when the now-defunct Rocky Mountain News published an article about that “little business” that drew an unexpected wave of eager customers.
“I thought I’d had some crazy days in medicine, but I’ve never experienced anything like that,” she recalls. “Long story short, things took off. We felt called to either get out or get bigger.”
They bought a 37.5-acre plot that turned out to be ideally fertile. Calabrese continued to work full-time while Ferrell handled most of the farm work. “It was pretty intense,” she says. By 2009, her worsening hearing loss provoked her to retire from practice.
“I really struggled with it. Many of my patients would come out to the farm to see me,” she says. “But a friend said to me, ‘You haven’t gotten out of medicine. You’ve just stepped over to the preventive side.’ That helped me get perspective, and it’s true. While I was at the community health center, I treated so many patients with diabetes and all the complications, and I began to understand the importance of prevention and healthy lifestyles.”
“Farming is very much like medicine, the thinking that’s involved. How do I keep these plants healthy? How do I diagnose when there’s a problem? What are the issues here? Are there insects, a soil deficiency or a weatherrelated phenomena? All these different factors play in. This soil and plant life are as mysterious as the human body. The research is fascinating on the interactions among plant roots and soil and bacteria and fungi.
I’m very blessed to have a biological background. It’s been a fun way to understand more about health and how our immune systems are impacted by nutrition and how plants’ immune systems are impacted by soil health.”
– Claudia Calabrese , D.O.’81
Berry Patch Farms offers a variety of produce that customers can pick themselves or purchase in its Barn Store. The business also hosts numerous events.
“It’s a blessing to be able to share this farm,” Calabrese says. “I think the Lord really had a plan and a purpose for me all along. And now I’m waiting to see what the next page looks like.”
Promoting “Food as Medicine”
According to the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, an estimated 90% of the $4.1 trillion annual cost of health care in the United States is spent on care for chronic disease. For many of these diseases, diet is a major risk factor, so even modest improvements in diet could have a big impact. Yet about 90% of Americans eat less than the amounts of fruits and vegetables recommended by the USDA’s Dietary Guidelines for Americans.
Two DMU alumni are among the health professionals who are working to counter that.
“If you put the wrong kind of gasoline in your car, your car doesn’t function very well. If you put the wrong type of food in your body, your body doesn’t function very well,” says Jami Haberl, M.P.H.’03, M.H.A.’03, executive director of the Iowa Healthiest State Initiative and a member of the DMU Alumni Board. “Food as medicine is the intersection between traditional health care and food-based practices that promote prevention.”
As a DMU student, Catie Dysert, M.P.H.’23, worked with IHSI to create her required integrative learning experience that evolved into the Iowa Produce Prescription Program, a six-month pilot in collaboration with Broadlawns Medical Center in Des Moines. The pilot connected food-insecure patients with diet-related diseases to medical providers who wrote prescriptions for free fruits and vegetables, gave nutrition education and collected their biometrics every month.
The program succeeded in three major ways: Patient data showed a significant decrease in blood sugar levels and cholesterol; food insecurity among participants fell; and more than 90% of participants reported they had a positive or very positive experience in the program. Funded initially by the Community Foundation of Greater Des Moines and the Mid-Iowa Health Foundation, the IPPP landed two additional awards that added a pediatric component, five new locations across Iowa and a mobile app to deliver the nutrition education.
One more bonus: The program led to Dysert joining IHSI as its healthy incentives coordinator. “I’m so thankful for the opportunity to see the program at the beginning and then see where it’s going,” she says. “We have so many partners with us, including our health care partners who are recruiting patients and advocating for the program. It takes a village, and we are very grateful for ours.”
Another IHSI “food as medicine” program is its Double Up Food Bucks program, which began in 2016 for participants in the USDA’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. For every SNAP dollar they spend on fruits and vegetables at participating grocery stores and farmers markets, they get another dollar to spend on produce. The program matches up to $10 per day.
Programs like these, Haberl says, give participants access to produce and an incentive to “use their food dollars differently.” Bigger picture, they bring together patient care and public health in ways that benefit individuals as well as medical professionals.
“A lot of these preventive opportunities haven’t been funded like we fund the treatment side of health care. Medical treatment is always going to be needed, but we have opportunities on the prevention side to actually prolong people’s lives in a healthier, more productive way,” she says. “These programs demonstrate collaboration from public health to providers to patients.
“That brings another benefit,” she says. “We have such high burnout rates in health care. How can we provide some optimism and hope to providers? These programs are ways they can help patients before they come in with a worst-case scenario. I think that can give new grads something to be excited about, having our health care system wrapped around programs like these.”
Lifestyle Medicine and Lettuce
When people have an appointment with Jengyu Lai, D.P.M.’98, and his colleagues at the Rochester Clinic PLC in Rochester, Minnesota, they’re as likely to come away with bags brimming with fresh produce as they are prescriptions. That’s thanks to the clinic’s holistic approach and the Lotus Health Foundation, the nonprofit organization founded by Mei Liu, M.H.A.’95, M.B.A., Lai’s wife. The clinic and foundation fulfill the couple’s focus on lifestyle medicine, which uses therapeutic lifestyle interventions as a primary modality to treat chronic conditions.
Lai established the Rochester Clinic in 2010. Liu is the chief financial officer. Its clinicians provide primary and podiatric care to ensure holistic, integrated patient services.
“Lifestyle medicine is a whole-person approach regardless of your specialty. You educate and empower the patient to take charge of their own health,” Lai says. “Our providers have the mindset that just like taking the oath before you leave medical school, their work is for the better good of humanity, not for financial gain.”
Still, the couple saw the need to better equip patients to take charge of their health. In 2014, they attended an American College of Lifestyle Medicine conference, which fueled their desire to practice the concept.
The following year, in partnership with the Rochester Clinic, Liu founded the Lotus Health Foundation with a mission to improve the health of individuals and the community through education, research and collaborations with local partners. Its name reflects that lotus flowers emerge from muddy water as gorgeous blooms. “What drives us is when we see positive outcomes among the people we help, and they share their gratitude and tell us that the changes they made changed their whole family,” Liu says.
Life Is a Garden
The foundation offers numerous educational events, healthy cooking demonstrations and evidence-based health information. Participants include community members as well as medical students and residents from the Mayo Clinic and the University of Minnesota who want to learn how to incorporate lifestyle medicine in patient care. The foundation will host its sixth annual Community of Wellness Symposium and Gala in May, featuring lifestyle medicine practitioners as speakers.
In 2020, Liu and Lai transformed an empty lot by the Rochester Clinic into the FarmacyRx Community Garden. This volunteer effort generated 3,000 pounds of produce last year. All of it was given to clinic patients and donated to several community organizations, including a local food bank. In 2023, the foundation received a Statewide Health Improvement Partnership grant to expand the garden with raised beds to enhance accessibility.
“The garden allows people from 2 to 100 years old to participate within their physical body capacity,” Liu says. “If we can save our nation’s health care dollars with prevention, there is so much we can do for everybody on this planet. That’s why we are so passionate about coming to the root cause of health issues — not just for the patient, but also for our health system. It’s an ethical approach. It’s karma that will come back to you.”
Creating a Sanctuary to Share the Planet
In 2021, the South Florida Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals undertook a heartbreaking rescue mission, saving 40 starving cows, many of them new mothers, from a desolate field filled with the carcasses of other dead cows. In another case, the SFSPCA saved two cows that authorities believed were destined for use in Santeria rituals involving live animal sacrifice.
In 2023, Sisu Refuge in North Carolina received a distressed call about a piglet discovered by the sheriff’s office during a meth lab bust. Unfortunately, the refuge was so full it couldn’t take in the animal.
So…Who You Gonna Call?
If you’re in the Southeastern United States, you call Erin Amerman, D.P.M.’01, and Chris Amerman, D.P.M.’00, owners of Critter Creek Farm Sanctuary outside Gainesville, Florida.
Founded in 2016, CCFS has grown to become the largest bovine sanctuary in the nation. Today, it is home to more than 220 rescued animals, including cows, pigs, donkeys, chickens, horses, rats and one “very demanding water buffalo” named Seymour.
The idea for the sanctuary may have been planted by a rat named Templeton, whom 7-year-old Erin had as a pet. She was distressed by the repulsion other kids and adults — including teachers — expressed toward the rodent. “We love hamsters, but we kill rats. We love horses, but we eat cows. My rat experience illustrated to me how even animal lovers can stratify different species,” she says. “That left a mark and drove the rest of my life.”
“Rescuing animals is something that I’ve done since I was a teenager. My aim all the way back in 1997 was that I was going to open an animal sanctuary that was going to be called Critter Creek. I don’t know where that name came from. It just popped into my head, and I liked it.”
– Erin Amerman, D.P.M.’01
Growing up, Erin accompanied her mother, a nurse practitioner, to many of her master’s degree classes and “picked stuff up.”
“Going to medical school was always my aim,” she says. She and Chris met in college. He was bound for DMU, so she decided to join him. As a student, she taught human physiology classes at Des Moines Area Community College and “loved it — and was really good at it.” Unfortunately, her severe asthma, which had sent her to intensive care more than once, prohibited a career in patient care.
Authoring Change
“I can’t help people or animals if I’m not alive,” she says. After she and Chris moved back to Florida, she landed a full-time job as a professor at Santa Fe College, teaching human anatomy, physiology, pharmacology and other subjects. She soon observed that students struggled with the textbooks, so she wrote her own versions of the lessons. She did the same for lab exercises.
“The students liked it and wanted more. They had a word for it. They would say, ‘When are you going to Amermanize Chapter 14 for us?’” she says.
In 2003, Erin, then 25, attended a conference of the Human Anatomy and Physiology Society, where she met an editor with Morton Publishing Company. It wanted to publish a manual of laboratory exercises, so she offered to share with the editor the materials she had produced. “Before I knew it, I had a contract,” she says.
Since then, she’s written six textbooks for Morton and Pearson Education, recently finishing the third edition of a textbook and the fourth edition of a lab manual.
“The nice thing about this career path is that I’ve been able to use all my wonderful science and clinical experience from Des Moines University and apply it in a way that is still helping people, even though I’m not practicing medicine,” she says.
“In the minds of a lot of people, farm animals are food. Why would you rescue food? You may as well have a carrot sanctuary. We have to really work to convince people that these animals are just like the animals we love.”
– Erin Amerman, D.P.M.’01
Looking ahead, Erin and Chris — who serves as Critter Creek’s executive director — want to continue to “go big” with the nonprofit organization. They have two properties, the original 210-acre Critter Creek in Gainesville and Critter Hills, a 200-acre ranch and hay farm up the road in Alachua, Florida. They host monthly “Farmers Moo-kets” that draw up to 40 produce and crafts vendors and often more than 1,500 visitors.
“They eat all kinds of plant-based foods and meet our rescued animals. It’s a really good community outreach thing,” Erin says. “We bring probably 15,000 people through the sanctuary per year, and we have a small but great team. We’re all driven by that same need to do more to help animals and reach more people. We will reach for the stars. Or maybe the moon since the cow jumped over the moon.”