Doctors are teachers, in a way.
They educate patients about their diseases, how medications work and lifestyle changes that could improve their condition.
For Dr. Sam Wilcox, a new physician for the Allen County Regional Hospital’s family clinic, practicing medicine gives him a chance to enjoy the best of both worlds.
He always expected to become a teacher, as both parents are teachers. They’re also Kansas State University fans, so he attended K-State to study kinesiology with the intention of becoming a teacher.
His thinking started to change, though, while student teaching.
“Students would get sick or have things come up and I realized that if people don’t have their health, they can’t pursue an education,” Wilcox said.
That’s when he started to study medicine and realized he could still teach, just in a different way.
“It empowers patients to know what’s going on. A lot of suffering comes when people don’t understand what’s causing the disease or the pain. Not knowing is difficult.”
The difficult part, of course, was telling his family of K-State fanatics that he would be attending the University of Kansas School of Medicine at Wichita.
“Everybody understood,” he said, laughing.
Still, he tries to wear purple as often as he can.
WILCOX grew up in De Soto.
He met his wife, Liz, in graduate school. She received a master’s degree in public health and was working in the field until the couple welcomed their son, Sutton, now age 1½.
Wilcox completed his residency training over the summer at Northwest Washington Family Medicine Residency in Bremerton, Wash.
The couple knew they wanted to return to Kansas to be closer to family. They also were drawn by the challenges facing public health care in Southeast Kansas, and were impressed by efforts of organizations such as Thrive Allen County to address those concerns.
“We liked the trails system. The new school. G&W Foods,” he said. “Our house is walking distance to downtown.”
He also was impressed that the ACRH facilities board agreed to remodel the Medical Arts Building at 826 E. Madison, where his office is located along with Dr. Brian Neely.
“It shows there’s a group that cares enough about the health of this community to invest money into trying to make things better,” he said.
He sees opportunities to help the community not just as a family physician but in numerous other ways.
Wilcox has special interest in sports medicine, diagnosing and treating musculoskeletal injuries, and obesity. He looks forward to finding opportunities to help in those areas.
Again, it comes back to education.
“On the obesity side, keeping people moving is so important for their health,” he said.
“And with sports, there’s a connection that people form with their peers, their coaches, their trainers. I think COVID taught us how important these connections are.”
Because much of his training came during the COVID era, Wilcox has seen the impact of that disease on the way medicine is delivered. Telehealth services are much more common.
“Telemedicine and video visits became much more normal. It’s not great for everything, but for some things it’s a really nice tool,” he said.
The pandemic also pushed public health to the forefront of people’s minds, which Wilcox also sees as an advantage.
“I spend a lot of time thinking about how things are connected. In family medicine, you think about the whole person but you also think about the whole family. You see how children affect the parents and vice versa. And you think beyond the family, to the city, the weather, the politics and how it all affects a person’s health. I enjoy all the different aspects of those connections and to me that’s the role of family medicine.”
FOR MORE information, call the Iola Clinic at the Medical Arts Building, 620-365-6933.
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