William Young, M.D. - In the Spotlight

What brought this Michigan native who graduated top in his medical class at Tufts to Iowa? According to William Young, M.D., it was "purely by happenstance." Dr. Young was chief resident in 1990 in the Radiology program at the University of Michigan. The chief resident of the program in 1989 was a good friend of his who went on to take a position in Interventional Radiology with Mercy Hospital in Des Moines after interviewing around the country. When his friend called Dr. Young to say Mercy was looking for a Neuroradiologist, Dr. Young was in the midst of his neuroradiology fellowship at the University of Michigan and declined the offer to visit Des Moines. Finally, by the third phone call he relented and agreed to come to Des Moines and look at the job. The rest, as they say, is history. Married with a 1-year old daughter at the time, Des Moines appeared to be a good place to raise his family, and the opportunity at Mercy turned out to be "a situation that was exactly what I was looking for."

Dr. Young currently serves as the Chairman of the department of Radiology at Mercy and has the task of recruiting new radiologists to the area as he had been recruited years ago. While the department has had success in recruiting high-quality physicians to the area, according to Dr. Young recruiting will only get more difficult due to the extremely low reimbursement of Iowa physicians, "spearheaded by the inadequacy of the Medicare payment system. While radiologists in his department are taking less vacation and working longer days since the days when Dr. Young first started out here in 1991, income has merely been maintained. He argues that unless something is done about reimbursement, the ability to continue to attract good doctors to this state will be greatly hindered, the quality of health care will eventually go down, and "the ripple effect will be huge."

However, Dr. Young encourages young people "to not be too discouraged by all the negatives you read about medicine, with all the insurance payments, malpractice, and the hassle of credentialing, because there is still a lot of promise and it is still going to be a great career choice." As for radiology and neuroradiology, he sees an exciting future ahead. When he began medical school in 1982 "imaging was relegated to very plain films and very crude CT canning, and the concept of being able to look inside internal organs of the body, including the brain, was just beginning to blossom." Over the past 20 years the scope of impact of radiologists and neuroradiologists has widened greatly, now ranging from the assessment of the effectiveness of therapies to the detection of diseases at a much earlier stage, sometimes even before it is symptomatic. It has become an around the clock field. The future is even brighter where Dr. Young says "big breakthroughs will come with more functional and physiological studies."

No longer is imaging relegated to only studying structural and morphologic change. Now the function of the system can also be monitored. With functional-MRI, biochemical changes and, ultimately, how well an organ system is working can be detected. And Dr. Young explains that "in PET scanning we can look at what tissues of the brain are active and what tissues of the brain are degenerating at an abnormal rate, and then we can focus on what makes these tissues different and what might be therapies to fix these tissues."

So a little over a decade after coming to Des Moines, Dr. Young is still pleased with the situation he is in. Despite the increased hours, this sports-nut still finds time to enjoy a game of tennis or go on a hiking trip with his wife and two children. Just don't ask him about his newly acquired golf game. And despite the challenges physicians in Iowa face, he is still driven by the exciting changes in his field and the opportunity to watch his skills and studies "pay off in the improvement or saving of someone's life."