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HOT SPRINGS – Dr. David Pruitt wasn’t always sure he wanted to be an oncologist.
“The service then was a bunch of people dying from the complications of immune-suppression from multiple rounds of chemotherapy,” he said. “Most of them were my age; it was pretty brutal, and that’s what I thought cancer was all about, so I changed my mind. I went into family practice.”

But Pruitt had been thinking about oncology since before medical school.
“I was very interested in the biology of cancer from when I was a college student,” he said. “When I was first starting medical school (at the University of Kansas’ medical school in Kansas City), I thought I would end up in some oncology specialty.”

But instead of a residency in oncology, Pruitt spent his time learning the intricate ways of family practice; he still found the time to keep up with oncology.

“I spent some time with the radiation oncologists where I did my family practice residency,” he said. “I found out not everyone was dying.”

As a matter of fact, Pruitt learned that the survival rate had increased significantly.

“About 65 percent of those diagnosed with cancer will be alive more than five years later,” he said. “All except for five cancers — lung, esophagus, pancreas, primary brain tumors, stomach — the rest of them caught early enough are curable, 90 percent or more of the time.”

Pruitt, a Kansas native, was recruited to St. Joseph’s Mercy Medical Center in Hot Springs six years ago after working in Pittsburg, Kan.

“I hadn’t been to Hot Springs,” Pruitt said. “Having worked in Pittsburg, in the southeast corner of Kansas, I had been to the Ozarks, but, except for maybe just a drive through, I hadn’t been to Little Rock.”

Not that Pruitt isn’t well traveled.

“I did my family practice residency in Casper, Wyoming,” he said. “At the time I was into the outdoors, into skiing, so I thought I was going to be in the inter-mountain West for the rest of my life.”

But when Pruitt decided to get back into oncology, the best residency program he could find wasn’t in Wyoming or in the West.

“I went to Detroit,” Pruitt said. “I don’t want to say much about Detroit. Well, let’s just say it was an interesting place.”

Then it was back to Kansas to be the medical director of the oncology program at Pittsburg.

“We had been there six years at least, and I had been thinking about leaving,” Pruitt said. “I probably sent a letter to every radiation oncology practice in the country and this hospital here, they needed to fill a position. They were recruiting hard, and I responded.”

Pruitt has now been in Arkansas for six years.

In that time, he has seen St. Joseph’s make some significant changes.

“They did a lot the first year I was here,” he said. “This building is a lot different. The floor space has almost tripled, and they’ve added a lot. When I started, there were only two medical oncologists; now there are six in town.”
And the growth hasn’t stopped.

“People are looking to bring in more,” Pruitt said. “With cancer care here, the (number of) people we treat has gone up significantly. I think we see a lot more cancer here on the per capita basis than average. The big explanation is that we have an older population here.”

Pruitt added that he sees about 400 new patients a year.

“We have a large referral base,” he said. “I have patients who come from as far as Murfreesboro and Nashville.”

Hot Springs itself isn’t large, maybe 40,000 people, but another 60,000 live in Garland County, and the hospital reaches a large portion of southwest Arkansas.
But that doesn’t account for all of it.

In some ways, patient volume is like traffic on the freeway. Another lane gets built and then instead of having two full lanes for your commute, you have three full lanes.

“Yeah, that’s how it works,” Pruitt said. “I can’t explain it, but the hospital administration told me that when I started. They had started other programs, and that’s what happened with them as well.”

What Pruitt didn’t expect was working in a multi-hospital town, since Hot Springs has three hospitals.

“It’s different, you have such a huge medical community here,” he said. “That’s the biggest difference. It creates some interesting dynamics and, before, I’ve always worked in single-hospital towns.”



September 2007

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