A small town doctor with local ties is making big news in medicine.

Dr. John C. Fleming, formerly of Meridian, has been selected 2007 Louisiana Family Doctor of the Year by the Louisiana Academy of Family Physicians.

Fleming was presented the title this week during the organization’s annual assembly and luncheon in New Orleans. Honorees are nominated by a fellow family physician who is an academy member.

“Anytime your colleague nominates you for this award, it is certainly a very big honor,” said Fleming, who, since 1992, has been in private practice in what he describes as “the small, quiet” town of Minden, La.

In addition to nomination by an associate, candidates are critiqued by their accomplishments and civic activities, letters of recommendations from other colleagues and patients are considered. A committee makes the final selection.

“To actually be selected for this honor, it really makes you feel good when your colleagues recognize you,” he said.

Fleming also was recently selected as one of “America’s Top Family Doctors” by the Consumer’s Research Council of America.



Home grown



The son of the late John C. Sr. and Ruth Fleming, Fleming is a product of the Meridian Public School District. A Meridian High School graduate, he proudly notes that he played on the Wildcat championship football teams in 1968 and 1969 under Coach Bob Tyler.

“There wasn’t anything notable about my playing, but the team did very well and had a lot of success in those two years that Coach Tyler was coach,” he said.

Fleming credits his interest in medicine to his grandmother, the late Pauline Giles, who was a licensed practical nurse for several years at the now defunct St. Joseph Hospital.

“She was a big inspiration to me — not only in terms of health care and the interesting stories that she would tell me, but she was just an inspiring person,” he said.

After attending the University of Mississippi for three years, Fleming received his doctor of medicine degree from the University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson.

He served as chief resident during the last year of his three-year residency in Family Medicine at the Naval Regional Medical Center, Camp Pendleton, Calif. During his residency, Fleming trained at the drug and alcohol treatment unit at Navy Regional Medical Center in Long Beach, Calif., which was then a pioneer in chemical dependency treatment. He is board certified in his specialty and has been recertified every several years as required by the American Board of Family Practice.

While serving in the U.S. Navy after his residency, Fleming practiced military family medicine on the Island of Guam as well as in Charleston, S.C. He served as Guam’s director of drug and alcohol treatment and chairman of the Navy’s Family Advocacy Committee for Guam from 1979-1981.



Other accomplishments



At his current practice, Fleming’s areas of emphasis have been the treatment of depression, attention span disorder and chronic disease prevention. He is also an MRO (medical review officer), a special certification for doctors to be able to administer and interpret drug testing for company employees.

In 1999, Fleming was the first physician in Louisiana to implement a fully paperless electronic medical records system.

“I really felt that we could better and more safely treat patients in terms of tracking the increasing data that comes in — we do more and more lab work, more studies, consultations. It really became very difficult to manage those in a regular paper record environment,” he said.

“Nowadays, for instance, information comes in, it goes into the computer and we can actually graph the various perimeters we are following patients with — like test on cholesterol, blood sugars, blood pressure,” he said. “This not only enables us to better manage all that data, but it is also a safer way to prescribe.”

Eight years later, Fleming said most doctors have not converted to electronic records, but knows that it is only a matter of time.

Fleming also is a published author, having recently released the book “Preventing Addiction: What Parents Must Know to Immunize Their Kids Against Drug and Alcohol Addiction.”

“This book is based on research conducted recently by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, which says that children who drink alcohol before age 15 have a five-fold risk of addiction greater than kids who begin drinking after age 15,” he said. “That’s important because the average age kids begin drinking and smoking today is 13 for girls and 11 for boys.

“What we parents think about is that we don’t want our kids, teens or young adults to get hooked on drugs, so we try to teach them to stay away from drugs,” Fleming said. “But what happens is that their brains are being reprogrammed by intoxication from alcohol at a younger age. So while we think we’re keeping them safe from drugs, they’re fooling with alcohol, which then leads to marijuana and then that leads to cocaine and other drugs.”

Fleming has been a guest on numerous national broadcast shows to talk about his book which aims to arm parents with ways to recognize potential problems in children and to educate them about ways they can prevent children from becoming life-long addicts.

Although most of his immediate family no longer resides in Meridian, Fleming does visit occasionally.

“My father was raised in Clarke County, around Quitman,” he said. “So we go once or twice a year to visit aunts, uncles and other relatives.”

Fleming and his wife, Cindy have been married since 1978. They have four children, ranging in age from 17 to 27.