Rheumatologists on the Move, May 2016

When it was time to decide where to start practicing, Dr. Van Dyke carefully explored his options. He narrowed the geography down to three states. Then there was the decision whether to go into private practice or work at a university or a hospital. Yet another consideration was if he wanted to work in a rural or urban environment. The ACR job search tool, Career Connection, helped him with research.

More than six months into his private practice with Adena Medical Group, which provides medical care to a rural area in Ohio, he’s quite sure he made all the right decisions. “Working in a multispecialty group is going well,” he says. “The staff are supportive, and that makes the transition [from student to provider] easier than it might have been.”

He goes on to say, “Growing up in a small town myself, I know it’s never the easiest thing to get certain specialties close by. In a way, it’s kind of gratifying to be available for a population that didn’t necessarily have the help they needed before.”

Move Is Lifestyle Change

After almost three decades of practicing medicine in the Chicago suburbs, Mary Moran, MD, has returned to New England.

For four years while a college and med student, Dr. Moran taught sailing with Outward Bound on Hurricane Island in Maine. After her internship, a residency in internal medicine and a fellowship in rheumatology at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon, N.H., she went back to Chicago, where she’d received her medical degree from Rush Medical College, to start her medical practice. She taught at the Chicago Medical School, University of Chicago and Dartmouth Medical School.

Dr. Moran practices general rheumatology. She left private practice at the Center for Arthritis and Osteoporosis of the Illinois Bone and Joint Institute LLC in Morton Grove, Ill., to join the staff of Waldo County General Hospital in Belfast, Maine.

Since her Outward Bound days, “I’ve always, always wanted to come back to Maine,” she says. She and her husband built a vacation house in Maine about 10 years ago. Now they live there year round. There is on a lake, 10 miles from the coast down a mile-long dirt road.

Working as hospital staff is definitely different from private practice. “You’re not as much in charge of your own destiny,” she says. “I plan to work another five to 10 years, because I love what I do.” She’ll spend those five to 10 years with a new balance in her life. She now works three days a week and spends the other four enjoying all that life in northern New England has to offer.