Kelley Wear is an American author, surgeon, life coach and the founder and CEO of The Hand Center, a hand and wrist subspecialty clinic in Colorado. She is published in multiple peer-reviewed journals and is now publishing her first memoir, Paper Airplanes.
She wrote this memoir for two reasons. She wanted to give a voice to her younger brother, Maury, who died without being able to fully express his own. In addition, the memoir delivers the lost truth that as human beings we can take our most debilitating life traumas and, like alchemists, use them instead to fuel our own empowerment.
Paper Airplanes is a reminder to those who have endured tremendous suffering what will be immediately recognized on the deepest levels of consciousness. Our human hearts are indestructible. We are only broken in as much as we believe this ruinous message that can only work its poison if we adopt it as reality.
Dr. Wear has been a lifelong advocate for victims of domestic violence and sexual assault. In January, 2022, she founded The Survival Integration Institute as a means to empower the victims of stalking, gender-based and domestic violence. In the late eighties, she counseled women prisoners who were incarcerated for drug crimes, finding that virtually all of them had experienced domestic violence and/or sexual abuse prior to adulthood and had become addicted to drugs as a way to cope with the trauma. During medical school at Saint Louis University, she was an active part of the Child Abuse Task Force, a team that visited elementary schools and taught children how to know if they were being abused as well as where they could seek help. Through this program, many children were rescued from traumatizing abuse at home.
Today she is a member of HEAL Trafficking, an integrated network of physicians of multidisciplinary professionals. As a survivor of predatory stalking herself, she is active in finding safe houses for women and children who are in dangerous situations and cannot find relief in the court system.
She is a fitness enthusiast with six marathons and several fourteeners under her belt. In her spare time, you can usually find her on a hiking trail or mountain biking, running, climbing, traveling, or scuba diving. She currently resides in Colorado.