Spokane medical student Garrett Yarter thinks it might be cool to be a small-town family doctor. He comes by it naturally.
Garrett Yarter: I grew up in Chehalis, Washington, and my dad was a small-town primary care physician that kind of served the Chehalis and Centralia area and so I had Dr. Dad growing up, essentially, and I got to see his impact on our community, and that's really what kind of kickstarted and inspired me to go into, especially, family medicine specifically.
I mean, there are times growing up where I have little t-ball and little league baseball jerseys that have my last name on the back, and I walk into our local grocery store, and I have some random person come up to me and say, oh, Yarter, on the back of your jersey, your dad's my doctor. I need to come in to see him for something, and so cool to see you. That was the kind of the community feel that I had growing up.
Doug Nadvornick: Do you have that yearning yourself to be a small town doctor?
GY: I do. I love small town USA. I still, to this day, am intimidated by big cities and public transportation and those kind of things, and I've tried to avoid those if I can in medical school. But I loved the way I grew up in a small town and have been trying to talk my wife into moving to small towns.
DN: Yarter will graduate from the University of Washington medical school in just a few weeks. He learned last Friday that his first assignment as a family medicine doctor will be at Providence St. Peter Hospital in Olympia.
GY: It was a huge relief. My wife's entire family lives in the Olympia area and so not only will I know that I'll get great training there from that program, but I'll have a lot of family support. Especially with a now three-week-old newborn at home, it's going to be a huge benefit to have some extra help too.
DN: Does your father have that fantasy that you'll come and be the next Dr. Yarter in Chehalis?
GY: It's possible. I'm not exactly sure where my career is going to take me, and it certainly has to do with job openings and the right fit. But my dad actually had to close his practice back in about 2018, 2019 just because of the financial situation that it is to run a small private practice nowadays. So he's actually relocated to Spokane, ironically, over the past five or six years. So he's still practicing here in Spokane now. But I still kind of have that small town draw, so we'll kind of see what jobs look like when I get to that stage.
DN: Was that one reason you ended up in Spokane for medical school?
GY: Absolutely. I think the other reason is because UW is such a good program to be at, especially if you're interested in family medicine. And I'm just not a big city Seattle person. So Spokane seemed like a slam dunk for me just because it's a little bit more of a tolerable city for my taste.
DN: Yarter is part of the UW’s rural medicine track. He spent some of his time caring for patients at the hospital in Grand Coulee.
GY: One thing that kind of struck me initially, and I really think it comes out of kind of leaving the tail of COVID and things like that, was I think small towns especially got their trust taken away from the medical community. I watched my preceptors and attendings in Grand Coulee take extra time, and whether it was give extra explanations or just give patients more space to think and reason through things, to try to take back some of that trust that was once with our beloved doctors in that of historic America, essentially.
I feel like, you know, going back five, 10, 15 years ago, the way I saw my dad have trust from our community, I saw some of the doctors out in Grand Coulee trying to work on getting that back after kind of the wake of COVID happened. So that was a really interesting kind of learning point for me and trying to meet your patients where they're at in terms of their trust and comfortability and having those kinds of difficult conversations.
Obviously, every physician's goal is to be a well-informed, you know, practicing evidence-based medicine and things. I think sometimes patients don't always see that side of things, but that's kind of the way we're trained to think and with the best evidence that we have. So taking the time to try to help patients in on that side of things, I think is super beneficial. And that was a huge challenge.
DN: Garrett Yarter is a Spokane-based UW medical student. His classmate, Nathaniel Lohman, took an indirect path to medical school. He was a teacher after college, then enrolled in the Peace Corps, studied in the public health program at the University of Washington, then worked in the African nation of Mozambique.
Nathaniel Lohman: I thought I'd go for six months, come back, go to medical school and that turned into about seven years. COVID, had a kid, and then kind of woke up, you know, looking down the barrel at 40 years old and still with this feeling like medicine was something I had to do and the path I needed to take and it was now or never. So, thankfully, it worked out to come back to Washington and study here. Came to Spokane, kind of sight unseen.
DN: And now he’s staying in Spokane. Lohman is specializing in psychiatry. He matched to the Providence psychiatry residency program at Sacred Heart.
DN: How does being an older medical student help you be a better doctor?
NL: I think that kind of complicated conversations are kind of real consequences and health issues that patients are going through or that kind of colleagues are going through or that working within a large bureaucracy that can accomplish big things that smaller institutions can't, but that also kind of come with their own frustrations. I feel like having lived some of that helps to kind of keep all things in perspective a bit. Particularly going into psychiatry, hopefully have a more honest and even conversation with folks in times of kind of emotional or physical distress.
Psychiatry kind of surprised me as being the path that I was going to take, but I think it was leaning into those conversations and then watching the folks who I thought did it well and the amount of kind of honesty and openness that they had and kind of feeling like, really, that was a skill that I wanted to continue to develop. I don't know that I would have gotten to this point had I not had more life prior to this and, yeah, honed my interest in kind of just the importance of those real conversations.
