As a nurse at Michigan’s Pontiac Osteopathic Hospital, Mark Feeman, D.O.’85, was encouraged by three Des Moines University osteopathic graduates there to apply to the university. “I had all the background and patient care experience, which gave me such a good start,” he says. “As a student, I could focus on what specialty would fit the lifestyle I wanted.”
He chose physical medicine and rehabilitation and was recruited to oversee a hospital’s 25-bed unit for people with orthopedic and neurologic trauma. He led teams of physical, occupational and speech therapists, rehabilitation nurses and psychologists who treated each patient. “It was so rewarding. Patients would come in, unable to walk, and then they’d walk out on us,” he quips.
Now medical director of Rehabilitation Physicians of Georgia P.C. in the Atlanta area, he was inspired by his interprofessional team experiences to make a gift to name the Feeman Clinical Laboratory in the Innovation building on DMU’s West Des Moines campus. When he applied to medical school, he found DMU – then the University of Osteopathic Medicine and Health Sciences – to be “so ahead” of other schools in terms of technology and organization, with faculty who “wanted us to succeed.” That those qualities remain hallmarks of the university helped seal his decision to name the lab.
“I wanted to support something that connected my experiences at DMU and my years of practice,” he says. “The new campus is such a beautiful place, and what President [Angela Walker] Franklin has done is amazing.”