Episode 13: Building Hope Through Medicine: Dr. Daniel Whitcomb and Relias On Mission

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Reliably Well brings you thoughtful conversations from those who are shaping the future of healthcare, focusing not just on the technical side of the industry, but on the human element, the stories, the struggles and triumphs of individuals who are driving change. Join us for candid discussions that highlight both the challenges and rewards of working in a field where humanity and healthcare intersect.

Dr. Daniel Whitcomb’s journey has taken him from small town, Indiana to rural Mississippi, where he’s now an emergency medicine physician at Highland Community Hospital. He’s a 2024 graduate of Relias’s fellowship program, and he’s deeply committed to caring for underserved communities leading with a purpose. He’s married, now has four children. Dr. Whitcomb also guides our Relias On Mission initiative, reflecting his

Heart for Service, Family, and Faith in Action. Dr. Whitcomb, thanks for joining us today on our Reliably Well podcast. We’ve been looking forward to hearing you and hearing how ⁓ your faith intersects with your clinical ⁓ service to your community. ⁓ thanks for taking some time out to ⁓ join us today. Absolutely. Glad to be here. Yeah. So Dr. Whitcomb, we…

We’re so thankful that you’re a part of our organization. And I would love for the listeners to hear your story from the horse’s mouth. So how did you get from small town Indiana to where you’re sitting today and helping us lead, rely us on mission that we’ll talk about in a little bit? Yeah, so my stepdad was a fireman in the EMC my whole life. So that was kind of exposed to the world of first responders.

So took an EMT class, senior high school, and then went on to paramedic school in 2009. I ended up working EMS from 2007 to 2016. Kind of a theme of my story is that I have a plan and the Lord says, no, it’s going to be something different. So I thought I was going to be a paramedic fireman and the Lord said, no, you’re going to medical school. So I ended up going to medical school at Liberty University. Not where I planned to go, pretty far from family, but a great experience and really good for my wife and I.

I thought I was going to do general surgery. I toyed with emergency medicine, OB, kind of with our future plans in mind, ended up doing family medicine. In his image, family medicine residency in Tulsa, Oklahoma is where we ended up going. Again, not where I wanted to go, but it was so good. And it was definitely where the Lord wanted us to go. And it was a great experience. Decided I wanted to do an emergency medicine fellowship. I wanted to go to Fort Wayne, Indiana, nothing personal, but

wasn’t planning on Mississippi and the Lord brought us here. ⁓ Now more clearly understanding why the Proverbs says the heart of man plans his way, but the Lord establishes steps and kind of throughout our journey. That’s been really clear. So then I think we’ll get into it a little more, but ⁓ ended up staying with Relias and glad to be here. Dr. Wickham, we have ⁓ passions at Relias. have passions for people, excellence, quality.

⁓ innovation, value, what of those passions kind of speaks to you more than the others? What resonates ⁓ when you think about those passions that sort of sings to what aligns with what you’re focusing on day in and day out? I think the one that stands out to me is excellence. Obviously, ⁓ the people are very important part of medicine.

And the reason that I do medicine is for the opportunity to share my faith with people and to point them towards eternity. But if you don’t do it well, then you actually hurt the name of Jesus. So, you know, I think that excellence is kind of the foundation on which each of those other attributes are built. I kind of my life by the motto that if it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing right. And I think that excellence kind of goes right along with that. With that kind of strong conviction of excellence, which I certainly respect and

a very kind of clear vision on your life. I’d love for you to talk about the people that you’ve interacted with. Dr. Johnsey loves to use the saying that might have been attributed to Dave Ramsey or somebody that you’re the same person in five years, except for the people you meet in the books you read. So we always like to talk about the people that have impacted us ⁓ over our life, but who’s had the greatest influence on your life over the last few years?

Yeah, obviously there’s a lot of people who have really ⁓ helped us along this journey, you parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles. But as far as the last few years and have really people who have shaped kind of our trajectory for life, I think of my attendings in residency, Dr. Dunnick, Dr. ⁓ Rylander, Dr. Ledbetter, Dr. Hildebrand, there’s all of them, a lot of them. ⁓ But they’re people who are, in my opinion, modern day heroes of the faith. ⁓

People who, if the Bible were written today, there’d be stories about them in there. People are just doing really cool things for the gospel. A recent example is the earthquake in Burma. Burma is a country not friendly towards Americans, not friendly towards Christians. They’ve been in civil war for decades now. It’s just not really a safe place to go. And as soon as they heard about the earthquake, they were doing everything in their power to try to get there. Ultimately, they weren’t able to get in the country. The Burmese government wouldn’t allow Americans to come in.

Throughout the years they’ve they’ve been able to go to really hard places and take the name of Jesus there whether it be the genocide in Rwanda or more recently the Ukraine War or the earthquake in Haiti so I think that these people and the way they live their lives is just an awesome example and a testament to The goodness of God in their lives and they’re able to share with others and it’s it’s just really inspiring to me So you talk about people? going in and facing challenges

going into challenging situations, trying to face them and that kind of showing who they really are. know, today’s clinicians face a number of different challenges, whether it be, you know, from outside influences in the way we do medicine, from the limitation of the resources that we have, from simply the interaction that we face ⁓ from ⁓

clinician and patient ⁓ engagement. ⁓ I think there’s a lot more suspicion that goes on in that today than did a generation ago. What would you say is the biggest challenge that a clinician faces today? I think the biggest challenge for me personally and probably for a lot of other providers is imposter syndrome. ⁓ Every shift that I’m walking to the hospital, I feel like it’s a mountain that I’m not able to climb.

something that I’m not capable of doing on my own. And I kind of counteract, I fight that with my faith in God. John Piper says, you take the truth and you preach it to yourself until you actually believe it. So I do that every time I walk into the hospital, I say a prayer, ⁓ Lord help me, help me to care for these people physically, emotionally, spiritually, give me the strength I need. And obviously I do things to prepare as well. You know, I listen to podcasts and I study and I ask.

ask lots of questions, whether it be specialists or I talk to your cases with providers. But after you prepare so much, there’s only so much you can give. And at the end of the day, you just kind of got to trust the Lord with it. And I think, yeah, I think it’s sometimes hard to talk about that because we’re supposed to be the one has all the answers, but we don’t have to have the answers. We have to do our best. And that’s all the Lord asked of us. I’ve employed that myself throughout my career as well. There’s only so much strength in me.

myself, but there’s a whole lot more when I employ God there. I’ve always admired, you know, you hear the stories of the surgeons or others that pray with their patients before they perform a procedure, and I’ve always admired that as well in those that feel that relationship with their patients to employ that. ⁓

relay that bad news to a patient or a family to let them know that I’m carrying them into my prayers as well. ⁓ You know, there’s only one great physician and he’s not me. ⁓ And so I want to employ him whenever I can. Yeah, and just this whole ⁓ Stanley Hauerwas is somebody that I read a lot.

Dr. Whitcomb, a little bit of a different flavor than John Piper, but both of those guys are extraordinary thinkers. And he talks a lot about this idea that prayer is dispossession. You’re going outside of yourself, you’re dispossessing yourself from what you feel like that you need to control and that how healthy that is.

really in any situation, but certainly when you care for patients and their families. ⁓ And I think that that humility translates with patients, right? I think that we’re all afraid that if we don’t have the ⁓ Dr. House or Sherlock Holmes diagnosis that we come up with that we failed, but ultimately ⁓ I think we’re really called to do little things with great love, right?

And sometimes that’s a warm blanket as you’re waiting on a specialist to help take care of a patient and something that small. I think sometimes it’s more important than the most robust differential diagnosis. But we trick ourselves into thinking that we have to have this 17 different items on our differential to be a good doctor when really being a good doctor is

being a human and recognizing our fallibility. Based off of your worldview and ⁓ your personality, you’re not one to brag on yourself. I think that you give glory ⁓ elsewhere. But I would ask you, what of all the accomplishments that you’ve had, what is it that you’re the most proud of with all that you have accomplished thus far in your life?

I think that my marriage is probably what I’m most proud of. We just celebrated 14 years and I think that I can speak for my wife and I both when we say we both love being married and we love each other and just have a great relationship. And I think that probably speaks more to ⁓ that I married a great woman rather than anything I’ve done that the Lord’s mercy in our lives. But yeah, I think that ⁓ that’s also can be a way to show your faith is that ⁓ marriage reflects ⁓ Christ’s relationship with the church and that

Hopefully people can see how awesome marriage is. I see our lives and I’m just really thankful for it. It’s been quite a journey, but it’s been good. Dr. Whitcomb, ⁓ we normally kind of close up our podcast with a ⁓ question about your humanity and improving that for our guests. We’re gonna switch this up ⁓ a little bit for you because we wanna shamelessly plug

an effort that you’re leading for Relias and let people know a little bit more about that Relias own mission effort that you’re heading up. So tell us a little bit more about how that came to came about and maybe what is happening coming up in November, if you will. So I October of 2023, I was doing the fellowship and Luke West reached out, wanted to talk about medical missions.

knowing that I’d done several trips in the past. So we had dinner, had a great conversation. ⁓ I think I reached out to some people and tried to put them into touch with some resources and didn’t think much about it otherwise. Yeah, that’s a cool idea. Luke mentioned that he had some ideas for relies through international trips. ⁓ That was kind of that, didn’t really think much more. A couple months later, I reached out to one of the recruiters and said, hey, ⁓ what are the positions that are gonna be open next year when I graduate?

just kind of trying to explore the options, not really thinking that I would stay in Mississippi. But rather than a list of options, I got a response back with a contract and asked that I would consider helping get Reliason Mission off the ground. So we prayed about it, thought about it, and it seemed like a clear direction from the Lord again, not our plans, but His. And so yeah, over the last several months, several, over the last year or so, we’ve been…

knocking on lot of doors trying to figure out what’s the best option, what’s the best fit, where can rely on Mission Go, where can we kind of make a connection. But this November, we’re excited that we’re going to be taking the vision trip to Liwangwe, Africa, Liwangwe, Malawi in Africa. And we’re going to be working with African Bible colleges. African Bible colleges does a lot of things. But the health care aspect of it is they have a admissions hospital. They do surgery, inpatient medicine, outpatient medicine, maternity.

and they recently opened an emergency department, which is pretty fitting that we can kind of come in hopefully at the ground level of that. They see about 70,000 patients a year. And from what I can tell, it seems like they’re doing really good work. Kind of the mission and vision of Relias on Mission is that we can take the great things that Relias is doing here and hopefully share them internationally. We think this can be good for both the international community as well as for our providers here. Whatever we do, we want to make sure that we’re doing it in a meaningful way.

not just to make ourselves feel better. So this first trip is really about trying to explore where we fit ⁓ into the African Bible College system and to make sure that it’s a good fit, that we can work well together. Kind of as we think about the future and dream bigger, ⁓ we hope to take more trips with our providers and then maybe even incorporate family, maybe even nurses from our local sites as we can kind of get our community involved.

Malawi medicine in Africa, medicine in Malawi is a lot different than medicine in the United States. For every physician, for every person, for every 100,000 people in Africa, there’s one to two physicians. In the U.S., that’s 300 for every 100,000. So I tried to make that more meaningful. Those numbers didn’t really make sense to me. So the population of Malawi is 21 million people, roughly. The population of Florida is roughly 21 million.

In Malawi, there are most 650 physicians. ⁓ In Florida, there are 95,000 licensed physicians, maybe 60,000 providing direct patient care. So three to 600 physicians versus 60,000. It’s a pretty significant difference. I was talking with a graduate from the program, someone I know in Malawi has been working there a long time. And I asked her her opinion of African Bible colleges and her response was, yeah, I think they have one of the only CT scanners in the country, Malawi.

And if you’ve ever worked a shift where your CT scanner went down, you know how hard that would be to imagine not having a CT scanner even for a shift is pretty rough. So I think that as we go and experience how different the world is, it’ll change us. And I also think that we have great things to offer them as well. My attendings in Tupelo were incredible. They’re without exception. I loved working with every single one of them and learned so much from each of them. And I think a lot of great people here have great things to offer and share.

So we’re really excited to see what the Lord does with this and to get this relies on mission off the ground. Yeah. And Dr. Whitcomb, I selfishly am ⁓ thrilled about the potential partnership with the ABC Mission Hospital. had the opportunity to work there ⁓ back as they call the rainy season. have rainy season and dry season as we’re used to talking about our four seasons in the deep South.

⁓ which I guess in the deep South, we can relate that we have two seasons as well. It’s either so hot or not so hot, right? but certainly an extraordinary organization and the idea that as clinicians, we get so bogged down in the electronic medical record and these patients, they bring a notebook that is their medical record. And it just the opportunity to participate in that even

Even if there was nothing else, but just this idea that I can use the skills that I have with a sheet of paper and a pen through a translator is an amazing thing. And so I really respect you for answering the call to help us do this ⁓ with a lot of uncertainty and a lot of, dare I say, naivety about kind of what we’re about to get into. But really thankful that

You and Dr. Johnsey and Luke, among others, are going to lead the way for us to have an impact that we won’t even really be able to quantify. Yeah. So, so appreciate your heart and your desire for this sort of work and for continuing to provoke us in this direction. It takes somebody to be that spark to keep the

the fire alive and so thank you for ⁓ being there to ⁓ initiate this. I’m very excited about what this ⁓ is and what it leads to for ⁓ the folks there and for ⁓ our people who can be involved and can see ⁓ what that ⁓ impact is for others. ⁓ So thank you so much for today and thank you so much for ⁓ what you do.

⁓ with us and own mission in the future. Awesome. Thank you.

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