Doc Werner retires, closes practice after 41 years

PALMER — After four decades as the head of Valley Medical Center, Dr. David Werner is saying goodbye to his “paper office” and hello to the next stage of his life — outdoors.

Valley Medical Center is one of the few practices that still uses primarily paper, rather than computerized records. Since Werner has been the only doctor at the center (which he owns) for many years, and making the switch to a more technological system would be a long and arduous process, he decided “it was just time” to close up shop.

“Basically I’m a dinosaur in the medical practice arena, and dinosaurs are dying out,” Werner said. “When you get to be 71 you say, ‘you know, maybe it’s time to experience something different.’”

So he’s looking forward to having more time to climb mountains, go biking, ski in the backcountry and hunt mushrooms on the Kenai Peninsula.

Werner has always been an outdoors-y person, he said — he ran the Mayor’s Marathon, Mat Peak Challenge, Crow Pass Crossing, Lost Lake Run and Mount Marathon races for several years, once he was in Alaska. But prior to that, he found himself too focused on success in the professional world.

Werner said he never really took a break once his medical career started during his undergraduate years at Ripon College in northern Wisconsin. After completing a degree in biology and chemistry, Werner went straight to medical school at University of Wisconsin-Madison. Following that he spent a year in Spokane, Washington, on an internship, where the government told him he basically had two options when the year was up: serve in a medical capacity on an air base in North Dakota, or in rural Alaska.

“I always had been curious about Alaska and this was the perfect opportunity,” Werner said. “Once I came to Alaska I never went back to the flat, boring, humid Midwest.”

Werner said his interest came in part from reading a magazine called “The Alaska Sportsman” growing up, and the hunting and fishing stories greatly appealed to him. Soon after arriving in the Last Frontier in 1970, he began to call it home.

Werner spent his first three years in Alaska working for the Indian Health Service — two years in Aniak and one at the Alaska Native hospital in Anchorage on 3rd Avenue (since demolished). It was in those formative years that Werner learned the most about medical practice, he said — even more than in the one-year residency program he completed through the University of Minnesota in 1974.

With “tons of bad stuff rollin’ in the doors” at the Alaska Native hospital on a fairly regular basis (Werner worked in obstetrics and in the emergency room there), Werner said he “got more practical experience from that.”

After all, there were only three doctors — including him — to serve the state’s entire Alaska Native population at that hospital, he said.

“We worked, we learned, we worked a lot, we did a lot of stuff,” Werner said.

Werner’s experience in obstetrics there would later inform 11 years of delivering babies, two of whom were his own.

But in a way, delivering — and receiving — his children was no different than serving patients unrelated to him.

“You just become objective, treat it like routine,” Werner said. “It’s another patient and after it’s all done I say ‘wow, that was cool.’”

Don’t let his nonchalance fool you, though. Werner has taken his work very seriously over the years.

“Family practice is very difficult, if you’re good at it,” he said. “Somebody can walk in with chest pains and you have to figure out if it’s heartburn or a heart condition.

However, making a solid, informed evaluation is easier for a family practice doctor, rather than a “doc-in-the-box,” Werner said.

“If you go into a multi-doctor clinic, some person’ll see you originally, and the follow up might be two weeks later with somebody else (who has) the records but they don’t really have maybe the whole story,” he said.

Obviously though, it’s no small investment for a single doctor to monitor a single patient over a long period of time, checking in by phone when something changes.

“(It’s) a lot of responsibility,” Werner said. “You never quite take a vacation from that but I think you can serve people better that way.”

Now, however, it’s up to the remaining and future Valley family doctors to take up that cross.

“I will miss a lot of the patients, and I will miss the problem solving and helping people,” Werner said, reflecting on his retirement.

Still, becoming a doctor — versus a research scientist — was worth it.

“I never did get bored,” he said.

Contact Caitlin Skvorc at 352-2266 or caitlin.skvorc@frontiersman.com.