Santiago Rojas Posada

He graduated as a physician and surgeon from Universidad Militar Nueva Granada in 1986. His first years were spent where medicine is most urgent and least debatable: the intensive care unit of the Hospital Militar Central and, later, the Instituto Nacional de Cancerología.

It was there that the question guiding the rest of his work first appeared. The medicine he had studied could name the illness precisely, but said little about the person living through it, and almost nothing about how health is created before a diagnosis arrives.

He looked for answers at the Edward Bach School in Buenos Aires in 1990. He went on to study Homeopathy at the Instituto Luis G. Páez and, in 1996, trained in Oncological Palliative Care at the Institut Català d'Oncologia in Barcelona.

From that crossing came a way of practising that looks at the patient in three dimensions — physical, emotional and spiritual — and from that practice came, over the years, the books, the training programmes and, finally, Siu.

And although that path has borne fruit in many forms, his vocation remains the same. More than 36 years later, he still sees patients in Bogotá.