2003 Top Doctors

Featuring 210 physicians in 45 specialties

Back in 1980, one lone traffic light slowed full throttle traffic on the two mile stretch of two-lane Battlefield Boulevard that passed by Chesapeake General Hospital.

Two buildings held all of the Eastern Virginia Medical School. One, converted from a student nurses dormitory, fronted the Hague. Lewis Hall, the school’s newly built medical education building, was a winding half mile walk away.

Just a year had passed since The King’s Daughters’ Children’s Hospital had taken the more easily read and euphonious name of Children’s Hospital of the King’s Daughters.

In 1980, women without fallopian tubes—the route the egg travels from ovary to uterus—did not realistically think about conceiving a child.

But 1980 was also the year that the first graduates of EVMS—established in 1973—were finishing their residency programs and beginning to practice medicine in Hampton Roads.

On December 28, 1981, Elizabeth Jordan Carr was born in Norfolk to a woman who had no fallopian tubes. Conceived in a glass dish—the term “in vitro fertilization” comes from vitrum, the Latin word for glass—with the high-tech guidance of EVMS physicians, Elizabeth was America’s first “test tube baby.”

Today construction is underway for CHKD’s first dedicated, multi-service Health Center on the Peninsula, slated to open early next year.

The medical research, education, physicians’ office buildings and state of the art library that make up the EVMS campus span Brambleton Avenue, and the school has satellites in Portsmouth, Virginia Beach, Newport News and Northern Virginia.

In Newport News, the Riverside Regional Medical Center, the second largest in the region, is undergoing renovation. It gets a new exterior, and interior changes that include an outpatient surgery center with four surgical suites and two procedure rooms, along with a new 37,000 square foot emergency department.

Pioneering research done in Hampton Roads benefits medicine worldwide.

A new treatment for diabetes called Islet Neogenesis Associated Protein, or INGAP, discovered and tested by EVMS scientists, is in clinical trials. The Jones Institute for Reproductive Medicine stands at the forefront of what is now called Assisted Reproductive Technology. EVMS recently received a grant, of about one third of a million dollars, to research why the membrane sheath that insulates nerves breaks down in people who have the crippling, currently incurable disease multiple sclerosis.

These tangible achievements of bricks and mortar, and conceptual achievements of science, find meaning in the skills of medical professionals.

Our 2003 Hampton Roads Top Doctors feature presents the men and women of our medical community who make lives better.

We compiled this exclusive list by going straight to the people who know doctors better than anyone else—their colleagues. We asked 6,100 physicians and medical professionals one simple question: “If a loved one were sick, what doctor would you use?” in each of 45 specialties listed on our survey. Eight hundred and eight responded to our query, and the results, sorted by specialty, follow.

The doctor receiving the most votes is highlighted, while those who follow are ordered by the number of votes each received.

Some categories list more than five doctors because multiple entries received the same number of votes (indicated with an asterisk*) and two specialties name only three individuals, because we required a minimum number of votes for placement. Four specialties listed on our original survey were deleted from this list because they lacked the minimum number of responses required.

Although the doctors on this list are respected by their colleagues, the listing of a physician here is no guarantee of your satisfaction, nor does absence from our list suggest anything against any physician.

If you have good relationships with the doctors you currently see, we urge you to maintain those relationships, whether or not the doctors are on this or any other list. When you need the services of a specialist, consult your current physician first. Remember that some doctors may not take new patients, and that many specialists require a referral from your general practitioner or family practice doctor.

SPECIAL NOTE: Absent from our list are Emergency Doctors and Anesthesiologist. For an explanation, please read my Editor’s Note on page 8.

—Bonn Garrett