Fargo doctor retiring after 52-year career

FARGO – Jack Lind felt ready for a new challenge after 25 years of practicing family medicine when he opted for a midcareer change.
At age 53, he decided to return to medical school for a residency in psychiatry, which he finished three years later, launching the second phase of a career in medicine that has lasted 52 years.
“I guess you could say I was burned out,” he said, recalling the impulse for a switch in focus after years of mulling the possibility. “I don’t jump into things quickly.”
His more than half century of medicine will come to an end Wednesday when he sees his last patient, heeding his wife’s prescription to retire.
The switch from family practice to psychiatry wasn’t as dramatic as he might have expected, since he always tried to take a holistic approach with his patients.
“I found in general practice I really was doing a lot of low-level psychiatry without realizing it,” Lind said.
He initially expected his psychiatry practice would last 10 or 12 years, but when those milestones came along he still enjoyed the involvement with patients.
“Why not stick with it?” he said, until he decided it was time to retire.
Dr. Thomas Peterson, founding partner and medical director of the Center for Psychiatric Care, based in Grand Forks, praised Lind for his decades of dedication.
“His commitment to medicine and his patients has been outstanding,” said Peterson, whose psychiatric residency overlapped with Lind’s at the University of North Dakota School of Medicine.
“He was older and wiser,” Peterson said, recalling Lind’s years of medical experience from general practice preceding his training in psychiatry.
“He looked at the whole individual completely and treated them with respect,” he added.
After completing his residency in psychiatry, Lind established an independent practice. With a couple of fellow psychiatrists, he was one of the founders of what became Prairie St. John’s, and served as medical director of St. John’s Crossroads Center, a chemical dependency treatment program.
Throughout his career, Lind has practiced general psychiatry along with addiction treatment and “dual diagnosis” patients dealing with both.
Over the past few weeks, Lind has been winding down his practice and handling the transition of his patients to other psychiatrists in the area, including his colleagues at the Center for Psychiatric Care.
During his long career in behavioral medicine, Lind has seen significant changes in the treatment of patients.
When he started in psychiatry in 1992, he had just a handful of medicines to prescribe and lengthy hospital stays were common, both for psychiatric and substance abuse therapies.
Now dozens of medications are available, often with fewer side effects and greater effectiveness. As a result, many patients can avoid hospitalization, or can be treated with shorter stays, Lind said.
“It’s more of a scientific approach,” he said. Increasingly, he added, medicine is guided by evidence from scientific research.
As with other areas of medicine, as researchers unravel the mysteries of the genome, more medications can be tailored to account for patients’ variable response based on genetics.
Lind, whose office includes a bookcase filled with psychiatry texts mingled with gifts from patients, is finding it difficult to say goodbye to his patients, many of whom he’s seen for years and even decades.
“Some of them go back to my family practice days,” he said. “That’s hard, it really is. But people are pretty understanding, especially when I tell them how old I am.”
In retirement, Lind plans to spend more time with his family and at his lake place. He also has some land near his hometown, Aneta, where he likes to hunt pheasants.
In his spare time, he also collects frontier Americana, including guns, cartridges and leather goods, relics of the Old West.
He plans to consult with Drake Counseling in Fargo, where he will meet twice a month, helping with patient referrals. He will not meet with patients, however, but finds it difficult to completely retire.
“After 50 years,” he said, “it’s a large part of your identity.”
Readers can reach Forum reporter Patrick Springer at (701) 241-5522