A Natural Healer.

• Author: ESS, CHARLIE

Lila McEwen can help you get over that sneeze or a scratchy throat, and if you have a bigger affliction--say, stress is crushing your chest, or you just need to make sense of life here on earth--well, she can help with that too.

There is an energy about Lila McEwen, a feeling you can pick up on when you talk with her on the phone or walk into her medical office. McEwen, the Alaska Nurse Practitioner of the Year for 1999, speaks in an easy voice yet with a conviction that implies that this healer is going to stay in the business of healing a long time.

Ask McEwen, 56, how she became one of the state's first independent nurse practitioners--one of a handful not operating under the direction of a physician--and she'll say that it's all part of a divine plan to go about curing God's people. "I have such a spirit of my own philosophy in caring for patients that I really had to become independent."

That spirit has been the impetus behind the Family Health Center, an Eagle River-based practice that has grown to more than 3,400 patients, from all points in Alaska and elsewhere around the globe.

Then again, there is a chronology to her success, a serious chronology that stems back to her childhood on a dairy farm in Thorp, WI, where she learned the virtues of hard work and confidence from her parents.

She finished high school then went to the St. Mary's School of Nursing in Wisconsin, which took three years to complete and ironically didn't award a degree. That isn't to say there wasn't plenty of hard work. "We were taking care of whole floors as an RN before they would even let us graduate," she says of the diploma school.

In the following years she worked as a registered nurse under various physicians in the Midwest. Eventually she was accepted into a nursing school where she taught student nurses in obstetrics.

"I kept going to school," McEwen says. "I moved to the state of Washington and worked in private offices and with a physician at a rural medical office."

But it wasn't until she worked in an emergency room in Arlington, Wash., that McEwen met her first nurse practitioner and decided this was her calling, her primary focus in life. At the same time she felt the urge to move north to Alaska.

"That was a turning point for me," she says, of the decisions 30 years ago. Over the next two decades she worked with various medical institutions in Anchorage, including the Alaska Native Hospital. She also entered the University of Alaska Anchorage's...