Still Not a Job Pioneer Ed Stiles continues to train the next generation By Mark Baggett
E
d Stiles was one of the first five physicians to come to KYCOM (Kentucky College of Osteopathic Medicine) in 1997, and he was the oldest of the five by 10 years. Most figured he would be the first to leave. Instead, as he says today, “I’m the last one standing.” Stiles, professor of Osteopathic Principles and Practices (OPP) and chair of Musculoskeletal Medicine at Pikeville Medical Center, doesn’t stand around very much. He’s a busy medical doctor, a highly-respected educator, and a pioneer in osteopathic medicine and in training the next generation. “It’s much more than a full-time job,” he says. “But it’s still not a job.” What he has accomplished at Pikeville in the last two decades is impressive, but very much the tip of an iceberg of lifetime achievement.
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UPIKE MAGAZINE | FALL 2018
Before he came to Pikeville in 1997, he had already established practices and taught in Maine, Massachusetts, Oklahoma and Michigan. One of his mentors was George Andrew Laughlin, who was a grandson of A.T. Still, the founder of osteopathic medicine. By 1970, Stiles had founded the first hospital-based OMT in the country in Waterville (Maine) Osteopathic Hospital. Back in 1997, a Kaiser Permanente study said it would be impossible to effectively start a medical school in Appalachia, but Stiles saw the potential for doing it. “I had been doing a lot of post-graduate teaching out of Michigan State, and I had developed my own ideas of how osteopathic medicine should be practiced and taught,” he remembers. “I saw Pikeville as a place where I could put these ideas into practice and start from scratch.
