Doctor Van Orden has worked in several areas of both clinical medicine and basic medical science. He considers himself a psychotherapist and a wounded healer, having had to struggle with his own demons in order to become able to help others. Through his formative years he became disillusioned about the ways that doctors in training become emotionally hardened. He then found that psychiatric training largely failed to produce healers who were emotionally healthy themselves. As medicine became more commercialized he rebelled at the depersonalization of services provided to medical customers.