Physicians Need Help Too: An Interview…

Episode 71: Listen to this live Mastermind Webinar with rural physician, Dr. David Yale. Learn, first-hand, what it takes to practice rural medicine in the 21st Century.

In this episode we are going to meet a rural physician. He is the real deal. He practices rural primary care. And when I say rural, I mean rural. When he goes to the grocery store, he says it’s like rounding on his patients. You got to hear this. What I specially appreciate is he takes us back to that first year of medical school, and what his experience was like. And comes away with a few gems. For those of you that care about community service and communities in the United States and abroad that are medically under served, you definitely want to tune in to this guy’s vibrations because he knows what it takes to serve the underserved. Last thing I want to say, is that this is a physician member of the mastermind community that finds support and strength in community through the regular teleconferences that we have on a weekly and monthly basis for different topics including a new bi-monthly Imcat series. Without any further adieu, I give you Dr. David Yale.

MEET DR. DAVID YALE

David Yale:                  My name is Dave Yale. I’m a family physician. I’ve been working in a kind of the rural mountains in North Carolina for almost four years now. It’s kind of my hometown. It’s warm so – I sort of, you know, just came back home and practiced medicine here where, you know, I essentially sort of do full practice, you know, full spectrum family medicine. I deliver babies, and take care of kids, and take care of adults and stuff like that. There’s not a lot of specialists a lot here. So we end up doing a lot of the stuff ourselves. And, you know, one of the biggest things that you deal with as a rural doc is, there’s just not a lot of camaraderie, or there’s not a lot of other doctors around. And you’re always looking for, you know, to get around other medical type people and just bounce ideas off of each other and things like that.

And you know, that’s really kind of where I got in touch with the Dan, through the email, just trying to get you know, get involved in a group of docs or you know, pre med students or med students things like that just to, you know, kind of open my horizons a little bit, because it kind of gets lonely up here sometimes. So he had mentioned, you know, just kind of being in med talking about, you know, my medical school years, and resident years, and kind of what it’s like being a doc and being a family doc and things like that. And I’m happy to, you know, answer any questions or you know, just kind of talk about the different things that I’ve don through the years and things like that if you’d like me to.

Interviewer:                That will be great. Please do.

Rural Physician Background

David Yale:                  Okay. So I’m sort of a non-traditional student. I grew up – I don’t have – you know, my family is not – wasn’t – none of my family members had really even gone to college or even really graduated from high school. So I was kind of the first person in our family to get into college much less be able to get into medical school. And there are all kinds of you know, problems and things that you run into as sort of a non-traditional student, you know, that go along with that. You’re not used to the kind of the education workload that a lot of these kids, you know, who were second or third generation doctors or medical students are used to. You know, you’re more used to sort of a hands-on approach to things.

And that was a big – that a huge – that was a huge stumbling block for me. I ended up taking a lot of Kaplan courses when I was studying for m...