Rodney Young, MD,
(Medicine ’97)

When you ask Rodney Young, MD, what he does for a living, he responds with a bit of a joke.

He gets up in the morning, goes to the office (in this case a continuity clinic, where he’s seen the same patients for many years), chats with friends and then gives them advice, and they give him money. “That’s not an entirely inaccurate characterization,” he says. “That’s how it feels when I go to my continuity clinic.”

Young continues to practice as a family medicine physician in Amarillo, Texas, where he is also the regional chair and a professor for the TTUHSC Amarillo School of Medicine Department of Family Medicine. Last year, he was elected to the Texas Medical Association (TMA) board of trustees.

The association is an advocacy group that promotes state and federal changes to benefit practicing physicians and their patients. He is one of nine at-large members and is also believed to be the first physician from Amarillo elected as a trustee. Additionally, as one of three physicians not from a major metropolitan area, he can serve as a voice for the physicians of the Panhandle and other rural areas.

“I’m in the best supporting actor role in that sense because my work through TMA helps nudge change along,” Young says.

Before his election to the TMA board, Young was involved with the association through its student, resident and young physician sections, and various councils and committees. He helped draft legislation reworking a loan repayment program, incentivizing new physicians to practice in rural areas. He also worked through TMA to allow international graduates to receive a Texas medical license during their final year of training, to speed up credentialing and help keep them in Texas.

He feels he can serve as an amplifying voice to address the needs of family medicine physicians – who he calls “the Swiss Army Knife of doctors” because of their broad skill set and community influence.

“In a place like Texas, we have a very distributed population, and sometimes people are quite rural. This challenge of, ‘How do you educate a workforce for these places?’ has been a steady theme for me,” Young adds.

From his perspective lawmakers are also ready to hear more about it.

“We have a motherhood and apple pie sort of mission out here in West Texas,” he says, using an idiom that refers to something that is universally good. “(Lawmakers) are eager for that.”