Still Not a Job

Still Not a Job

Pioneer Ed Stiles continues to train the next generation

By Mark Baggett

Ed 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.

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.

“What clenched it for me was reading about how the board of trustees had set up a day-care center for single mothers to allow them to take care of their kids while they got an education. One of the board members supported it with his own money. I said, ‘Boy, that’s an institution that’s looking out for the people of the community. That’s the kind of place I want to be involved with.’”

Stiles, who went to college at Bates College in Maine, had been to Lexington, Ky., where he planned to retire, but in 1996, he knew little about the Pikeville area. Most of his colleagues thought it was impossible to build an osteopathic college unless there were a large number of D.O.s (Doctors of Osteopathic Medicine) and osteopathic hospitals. Kentucky did not have those resources. The assumption was that local students, even if they studied there, would not practice locally, but would go on to the big cities.

“But people were ignoring the data,” says Stiles. “Two things determine where physicians practice: close to the place where they got their last training or close to the place where their spouse or significant other is from. Take a student from Pikeville. They would willingly stay in the area if we developed a hospital to train them.”

Today, the model adopted at the University of Pikeville has been copied by other schools — both osteopathic and allopathic — for training primary care physicians for rural areas. Medical schools throughout the country are following the Pikeville model by training primary care physicians who are not threatened by “rural areas.” When Stiles went to osteopathic school, there were five of these schools. University of Pikeville was the nineteenth. Now, counting colleges and satellite branches, there are approximately 40 schools.

“Our local students are very committed to the region, and when we got here, they not only decided to apply to medical school here, but then they decided they might as well attend Pikeville College to study premed. And then they might have a better chance of getting into medical school at Pikeville. This has had a profound effect on our community and region. Once the medical school was established, Pikeville added more schools in the college and became a university, which today is thriving.”

Dr. Stiles (left) was presented as the John A. Strosnider, D.O. Memorial Lecturer during KYCOM's 2018 Founders Dinner by KYCOM Dean, Dana Shaffer (right).

Stiles’ own loyalty to the region and to his students sometimes obscures that he is a world-renowned physician in osteopathic medicine and has received numerous professional awards including the American Academy of Osteopathy Distinguished Service Award, the American Osteopathic Association Great Pioneer of Osteopathic Medicine Award and the A.T. Still Lecture Award by the AOA House of Delegates. He may be the only person to have won all three awards.

On September 14, 2018, at the annual KYCOM Founders Dinner, Stiles was honored for his service to the college and to the osteopathic profession. In November 2018, he was selected to have a poster presented at the prestigious FASCIA Research Congress in Berlin, one of a few global applicants to have their abstracts accepted.

His more-than-full-time work doesn’t allow him a wide travel schedule, or the time to ski, play golf, or enjoy his five grandchildren, but his 300 conference presentations, including a recent presentation at the AAO last March, and his trip to Germany show that his approach to evaluation and treatment are respected internationally.

Stiles sees his legacy tied to his students’ legacies. “When we first started here, we took local students who often had low GPAs and low MCAT scores, and we committed ourselves to booting up our teaching to get them through. The growth of these students has been amazing. Now we have students from all over the United States.”