The chance of a lifetime: 50-year M.D. grad and INMED alum Mike Vandall reflects on a career in medicine

To hear Dr. Mike Vandall tell it, he almost missed the chance of a lifetime 50 years ago.

“I was a freshman in medical school when I saw this elderly guy sitting in the back of our classroom – he was Native American,” Vandall explained. “I went back and talked to him before class started one day, and he told me about the INMED program. He said, ‘Mike, we’ve only got four slots filled, but we have space for five.’”

The observer was Dr. Ralph Dru, who was faculty at the UND School of Medicine & Health Sciences (SMHS) for a short time in the 1970s.

Recruiting for the School’s Indians Into Medicine (INMED) program – one of the world’s first Indigenous medical training programs – Dru told Vandall, whose father grew up in Wagner, S.D., on the Yankton Lakota Reservation, that the final spot in the cohort was his. If he wanted it.

“He encouraged me to apply, and I’m really glad I did,” Vandall smiled, sitting in the INMED suite on the UND campus in Grand Forks in July. “I would have had a different journey if I had never participated in INMED. I don’t know what my life would have been like.”

Back in my day…

Whatever direction his life would have gone without INMED, chances are that the 1976 grad of UND’s medical doctor program, now in his 70s, would still be bouncing around the country. Having lost hardly a step, the quick-moving Vandall still travels extensively, he said, including flying when he gets the chance.

And he’s tremendously grateful for the life he’s been given.

Vandall was back in Grand Forks this summer not only to talk about the 50th anniversary of his own medical school graduation, but to speak with middle and high school students at the INMED Summer Institute.

Designed for kiddos in grades 7-12 who are interested in healthcare careers, the Summer Institute (SI) provides Indigenous students with enhanced training in biology, chemistry, study skills, basic life support (first aid), math, and physics.

Think of SI as a mini college prep course.

Vandall was scheduled to speak at the month-long Institute’s closing banquet.

Before the banquet, though, he sat down with North Dakota Medicine to muse on how different health education is today relative to when he was a student.

“There’s been tremendous change in all those decades, starting with medical curriculum,” he said. “Patient care starts much sooner. And the technology – it’s been mind-boggling how it changes every couple-three years. Then there’s more attention given to our Indigenous people, more focusing on them to make sure they can get into medical school and stay there to become good quality providers.”

The politics of medicine

Because it wasn’t always this way.

Despite his own Indigenous background, Vandall confessed to not having heard of INMED, which was founded in 1972, when he was applying to medical school.

Attending a university-based medical school just wasn’t something most American Indians interested in helping others heal did back then.

After graduating from UND in 1976, Vandall ended up at the U.S. Public Health Service hospital in San Francisco.

Although he matched into obstetrics & gynecology, Vandall said that he always had a place in his heart for underserved populations facing challenges brought on by what are now known as the social drivers of health. This, he said, gave him something of a front-row seat to witnessing the health challenges facing much of the country.

“That was the hospital for a lot of merchant seamen who would travel through San Francisco and travel all around the world,” he reflected. “It was also the hospital for the U.S. Coast Guard, and we had a fair amount of urban Indians and indigent people there. I treated leprosy and a case of disseminated fungal disease called Coccidioidomycosis. I had a beautiful experience with a lot of interesting pathology.”

Vandall was also a stone’s throw from where the American Indian Movement (AIM) had staged its Alcatraz Island occupation only a few years earlier – and practiced on an often Indigenous population in the wake of AIM actions in Wounded Knee, S.D., and news that a shootout with federal agents had taken place near Pine Ridge, S.D., not far from where he’d grown up.

“Yeah, I remember Russell Means and Dennis Banks… Leonard Peltier,” Vandall trailed off, referencing a series of AIM activists whose names were national news in the middle 1970s. “I didn’t have much time to pay attention to it, though, because we were way too busy – either in medical school or in the residency. You just showed up for work. You didn’t have time to read a newspaper or watch a lot of TV.

“You just did what you had to do and tried to maybe keep your marriage together because your wife never saw you,” he laughed.

Despite his efforts to tune out the news, such experiences influenced Vandall’s decision to spend a career practicing in underserved rural areas on and off the reservation – from Tuba City, Ariz., and Ada, Okla., to Minot, N.D., and, yes, Wagner and Pine Ridge – not only as an Ob/Gyn but later as a locum tenens physician.

In this capacity he often practiced at Indian Health Service (IHS) clinics.

“Traditionally, the Indian Health Service – 60 or 70 years ago – was seen as somewhat inferior,” Vandall admitted. “It got better starting 30 years ago. That was really because of things like INMED. This program is one factor as to why the quality of medicine has improved on reservations.”

And what a factor it has been. According to UND officials, UND INMED has had a hand in producing at least 20% of all American Indian / Alaska Native physicians practicing today. Nearly 4,000 indigenous students from grade school through a variety of professional training programs have come through INMED since 1973.

‘I’m sure you’ll orient well’

Back in North Dakota, the cycle of improved care for and by the next generation of Indigenous providers continues.

“INMED is one factor as to why the quality of medicine has improved on reservations.”

On his way out of the INMED suite, Vandall bumped into Skye Bernstein, a first-year M.D. student who is part of the INMED Class of 2029.

Explaining to Vandall how her parents moved from the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma to Siskiyou County in Northern California decades ago, Bernstein confirmed that she grew up an easy 15 minutes from Mount Shasta.

Vandall was more than familiar with the area. As an instrument-rated commercial pilot, he’d flown over Mt. Shasta – a long time ago.

“Well, congratulations,” Vandall smiled at Bernstein. “I’m sure you’ll orient well.”

It was a poignant scene: the INMED veteran who had practiced in both San Francisco and Pine Ridge counseling the newcomer back in North Dakota on the cusp of the UND M.D. program’s 50th anniversary.

Almost as if the circle was now complete.

“Will you be here all day?” Bernstein asked.

Shaking his head, Vandall explained his busy schedule to Bernstein, who just smiled.

And with another congratulations to the young student, the obstetrician-gynecologist who never stops moving was out the door.