Hal B Woodall Interview

An Interview with Hal B. Woodall, MD Going in to this interview, I was not certain what to expect at all. I had prepared a few questions and anticipated it lasting maybe ten to fifteen minutes at the most. However, my mental image of the interview did not remotely match up to what actually occurred. My interviewee was Dr. Hal B. Woodall, a medical doctor who owns Kenly Medical Associates, his private practice, but also comes in to the Wilson Medical Center to closely follow along with his patients, although he is not employed by, paid, or charged by the hospital for his services there. He has owned this practice and followed this routine for the past 38 years, ever since he completed his residency and internship at what is now known as Virginia Commonwealth University’s medical center. He attended the University of
Woodall’s background and getting to know him a little bit, I began to direct my questions more towards the MD/DO debate. I first asked him if he had ever considered attending a school of osteopathic medicine rather than a traditional medical school. Evidently, the thought had never even crossed his mind, simply because DO schools hardly existed at the time (Woodall)! Perhaps that most important piece of information that he told me regarding osteopathic doctors with whom he has worked is that “patients and or other colleagues will not know the difference” (Woodall) between them and medical doctors! I found this to be an extraordinary claim, but he went on to say that he personally has worked with DOs whom he assumed to be MDs while working with them until ex post facto when he happened to learn more about them and their backgrounds. I think that this singular claim largely answers a good portion of my question about the issue. Indeed, I had to later skip over several of my later questions, because as I prodded him about this more later, he kept stating that he could find no tangible difference between the two