A Walmart heir has opened a medical school

ON JULY 14, 48 STUDENTS WALKED THROUGH THE DOORS of the Alice L. Walton School of Medicine in Bentonville, Ark., to become its inaugural class. Some came from neighboring cities, others from urban centers in Michigan and New York. Almost all had a choice in where they could become doctors but took a chance on the new school because of its unique approach to rethinking medical education.

- BY ALICE PARK

Named after its founder—the world’s richest woman and an heir to the Walmart fortune—the school will train students over the next four years in a radically different way from the method most traditional medical schools use. Instead of drilling young physicians to chase symptom after symptom and perform test after test, Walton wants her school’s graduates to keep patients healthy by practicing something that most doctors today don’t prioritize: preventive medicine and whole-health principles, which involve caring for (and not just treating) the entire person and all of the factors—from mental health to living conditions and lifestyle choices—that contribute to well-being.

Those aren’t new ideas, of course, but traditional medicine has only paid lip service to them. Experts have noted that while as much as 80% of medical education focuses on biology, about 60% of premature deaths are due to behavioral factors including lifestyle habits like diet, exercise, and smoking. “I applied to 34 schools, and nowhere else are they doing this,” says Ellie Andrew-Vaughn, who arrived in Bentonville from Ann Arbor, Mich.

Visually, the school lives up to its acronym: AWSOM. The building, with soaring glass walls, is located on Walton family property and includes not just a wellness studio and gym, but also a rooftop park, healing gardens where students can study, growing gardens for producing healthy foods, and a reflection pond. A path from the rooftop park leads through the Ozark forest directly to the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, which Walton built in 2011, as a reminder to the students about the link between healing, art, science, and humanity.