subject: Podiatry Journal: Meet The Masters Dr. Harvey Franklin Bunny Brown Part - 2 [print this page] BR: Dr. Bret RibotskyBR: Dr. Bret Ribotsky
HFB: Dr. Harvey Franklin "Bunny" Brown
BR: Small world. You decided to go back to Arkansas and you kind of started off from the private practice route. What was unique when you started off? What correlations can you look back almost 40 years of what"s worked, what hasn"t worked would you like?
HFB: Well, first of all, let me say why I came back to Arkansas. My wife is a New Yorker, so she wanted me to either go to New York, stay in Washington D.C., go to Chicago, or go to Dallas where I had attended some undergraduate training. But I decided to come home back to Arkansas because I had grown up here and of course my family is pretty deep on the state and deep in the city and my mother knew every"
BR: You don"t actually have to bury a relative?
HFB: No. The _____ though. (Laughs)
BR: Okay.
HFB: But anyway, I came back here and my mother had told all her friends, "Go see my son, the doctor you know." So I really had a pretty good practice as soon as I opened the doors.
BR: A lot of people might not know this, but I think at one point there were more millioners in Arkansas than anywhere else in the country.
HFB: That"s right, billion. Billion with a B.
BR: Billionaires.
HFB: Billionaires with a B.
BR: My couple of visits to Little Rock, I was pleasantly and shockingly surprised. What an incredible, modern city it is. The food was outstanding"
HFB: One of the best kept secrets in the world.
BR: People have had chance to get there, I would encourage it. It was definitely an eye opening and the people were just so friendly. So, you went back to practice there, you started off by, you know, the family helping you get patients and doing that, probably not that much different with somebody starting today.
HFB: True.
BR: Right? Over the years, were there any things that worked out really well and helping you build the practice or things you did you wish you didn"t do? What advice can you give to those who are listening?
HFB: I don"t think there"s anything that I have done that I wouldn"t do over again. I am very pleased with everything that I did. I got involved early on in podiatry. In fact, I served three or four terms as president of the Arkansas Podiatric Medical Association and finally there were just wearing me out and I said, "You know, let one of you guys take it or I was the new guy?" (Laughs) We don"t have a turnover or we didn"t have a turnover back on those days, very few podiatrists came into the state, so I think the guy that took over as president after me was 20 years my senior.
BR: Were hospital privileges something that were availabe when you started?
HFB: Absolutely not, absolutely not. That was one of the"
BR: How did the medical community look towards you as the podiatrist, and how was it changed?
HFB: Well, it has changed over the years. It took a long, long time. I fought for 17 years to get on staff with one of the hospitals here. I had one hospital administrator who happened to be a friend of mine and he said that you walk in to this hospital as a doctor, I will escort you out personally. So he said you will never see a patient in this hospital. Now they are podiatrists on the staff there, I chose not to be.
BR: What do you think the impedances, I mean, the stories is all around the country of, you know, the tremendous work that your generation of doctors did. You know, whether it was suing people or whether economically that, you know, somebody showed them that podiatry was profitable. What worked in Arkansas?
HFB: Well, I think building a good relationship with the medical community is probably the way we got in better in any way. We became close friends with some orthopedic surgeons and they were very beneficial to help us out and, you know, when you do good work, people hear about it, and they"ll take note. I don"t think that the new orthopedists coming out are quite as greedy as the ones that were out when I first got into practice. If you got into their pockets, they didn"t like it. I don"t think that"s the case as much as today. It may change again with the medical economics the way they"re going.
