Life History Narrative
A.
Robert Sheppard, M.D.
Facets of my personal and professional life are woven into this narrative because
only together do they accurately reflect my accomplishments and depict who I
am.
I grew up on a farm in south east Alabama, born on October 28th, 1950, the
son of tenant farmers, the youngest of three children. My parents survived both
world wars and endured the Great Depression of the 1930's and these events cast
a heavy shadow across their southern agrarian life and molded much of who they
would become. I have always been very close to them both. I descended from a
long line of fishermen and hunters, my grandfather and father being avid
outdoorsmen. Because I worked in the fields to help sustain our family farm
during most of my high school years, I had little time to read. This was to
become a nemesis for me later in college, but not one that I would not finally
master. Because of their poverty, my parents had no formal education, but they
were nevertheless brilliant and wise people. They understood well that
education was supremely important in American culture.
Though it was an almost unbearable financial burden for my parents, they
insisted that I pursue college. I attended the University of Alabama, held a
full time job while carrying a full academic load, and graduated with the
necessary credentials to enter medical school at the University of Alabama
School of Medicine (UAB) in Birmingham, Alabama. Because I had finally overcome
much of my reading deficit, I did considerably better in medical school than in
college, somewhat a different experience than most, I believe. I continued my
education in a Categorical Internal Medicine residency at the University of
South Alabama Medical College in Mobile, Alabama, and was asked by the Dean to
remain a fourth year as a Chief Medical Resident, an honor offered but only a
few Internal Medicine physicians. I focused this additional year of training on
cardiovascular diseases and medical sonology.
I began a writing career in the outdoor field
during the years of my medical school and residency training. I became a staff
writer for an Alabama based magazine called the Alabama Sportsman (later to
become one of Game & Fish Publication's periodicals, Alabama Game &
Fish). Over the next fifteen years, I placed articles in Outdoor Life, Field
& Stream, Sports Afield, Bowhunter Magazine, Harris Publication's books and
annuals, Deer & Deer Hunting, Progressive Farmer, Southern Outdoors, Game
& Fish Publications and a host of others. I subsequently earned the
credentials to become an active member of OWAA (Outdoor Writer's Association of America) and SEOPA (Southeastern
Outdoor Press Association), two of the largest organizations of outdoor writers
in the nation.
In 1979 I began instructing in a series of outdoor
skills schools, the most successful of which became a continuous line of bowhunting schools held at
commercial hunting lodges across the South. Since then, we have added more
variety to these including hunter safety, black powder hunting schools,
advanced rifle hunting schools, trophy whitetail hunting schools, ballistics
schools and a host of others. These schools have become the nation's oldest
continuous line (more than twenty years) of outdoor skills schools in
existence.
In 1980 at the end of my formal training, I moved
to Carrollton, Alabama where I began a private practice in Internal Medicine
and Cardiology. Here I remained to the present continuing to practice medicine,
but having taken on a host of other responsibilities as well. In 1986 I,
in a joint effort with other local physicians, formed a not-for-profit
corporation (Pickens County Medical Center, Inc... PCMC) through which we very
successfully managed the local hospital from 1986 to 2002. I was Chairman of
the Board of Directors of PCMC for ten years from 1986 to 1996 at which point I
assumed the Chief Executive Officer's post. I continued a medical practice and
served as PCMC's CEO from 1996 to 2002. In addition to other intermittent
positions such as President of the medical staff, I also served as Director of
the Vascular Laboratory, Director of the Department of Ultrasound, Director of
the Department of Cardiology, and Director of the Intensive Care Unit of the
local hospital in Carrollton, Alabama uninterrupted from 1980 to 2002. In early
2003, I conceived and launched the first Hospitalist service at the University
of Alabama School of Medicine, Tuscaloosa Campus and remain as its Director.
By the mid 1980's personal computers were gaining in popularity and I
acquired my first in 1985. Intrigued by the power and flexibility of database
programs, by 1986, I had developed a database driven computerized medical
record (CPR) program designed to contain my office based patient records. My
partner liked the program, and I added his records to the program. Over the
next few years, other local physicians liked the way the program worked and one
by one, I added their records to the program as well. By the early 1990's I had
begun working on a similar program designed to contain all the hospital based
patient records as well. In March of 1995 I launched a hospital based CPR, the two programs of which became the
reservoir for more than half a million patient records spanning the entire
county. In preparation for launching
the Hospitalist service at the University of Alabama, I wrote and implemented a
modern point of service based EMR designed specifically for hospitalist
physicians where it remains to date.
As a physician needing Continuing Medical
Education (CME), I was always frustrated by the lack of variety in places to
earn CME accreditation. One could ski in Colorado, fight the crowds at Disney
World, or even sail to the Orient while earning CME credits. But, nowhere could
one hunt nor catch anything within half a continent of where one of these
educational activities was taking place. In 1988 I put an end to that for
myself and thousands other health professionals by founding Progressive Medical Education, Inc. (PME), a not-for-profit educational organization dedicated
to sponsoring high quality medical education programs for health
professionals... in a hunting and fishing environment. PME today is the only
private entity in Alabama to be accredited by the Medical Association of the State
of Alabama (MASA) to provide continuing medical education for physicians.
Because of my ties with the outdoor industry as an
outdoor writer, and a love of hunting and fishing, I have forged relationships
with several of the emerging commercial hunting and fishing lodges across the
South. I subsequently developed the software program utilized by Bent
Creek Lodge, Inc., one of the South's largest (45,000 acres) commercial hunting
and fishing operations, to manage their deer herd, fisheries, and land
holdings.
Bass fishing has become a major American pastime as well as a thirty billion
dollar industry. The largemouth black bass has become the most popular water
species ever to exist and is sought by millions of outdoorsmen. Because of the
popularity, growing large specimens of this species has become an intense
private and commercial pursuit across the nation. Because I also have extensive
experience in wildlife and fishery management, I have been aware for many years
what tremendous potential lies in the ability to sort largemouth black bass
offspring by sex. The females of this species grow considerably larger than the
males. Hence, stocking a lake with only females avoids competition with
offspring (called recruitment), maximizes the food supply, and produces the
greatest potential for growing trophy fish. With this in mind, I have developed
a biological technique for sorting the young of the species by sex. It achieves
a one hundred percent sensitivity and specificity (accuracy) for determining
the sex before stocking.
Although I have worked hard and played hard since childhood, I have always
known that the ultimate reason for my existence is to honor God and to love the
people around me whatever my pursuits. I have tried never to lose sight of that
bit of wisdom. Obviously by now you must realize that I have a pretty wide
array of interests, but my desire to honor God with whatever I do is paramount.
I have been intrigued by mathematics and physics since my college years,
particularly in how they are used to understand the world in which we live
(cosmology). This has caused me to see the world in an unusual,
yet God centered way. A contemporary British theoretical physicist (Stephen
Hawking, PhD) who belongs in a class with Albert Einstein wrote an immensely
popular book a few years back called, "A Brief History of Time" that
changed the way we see the universe. I believe the Bible to be the inerrant
word of the Creator of this universe, and was always bewildered how modern
science could come to the conclusions it does concerning how we got here. From
this perspective, I now refer you to a further understanding of who I am and what
drives all that I do..