Honoring the Volunteer Service of
Lynne Stockman, DO
Growing up as the daughter of an Army officer, Lynne Stockman became accustomed early on to pulling up roots and moving. “I attended 10 different schools,” she remembers, “four of them high schools.” In fact, she began her senior year at Portsmouth’s Churchland High, but finished at Nürnberg American High School.
Having lived so many different places, Dr. Stockman calls herself only a “sort of” native Virginian, although her bona fides are strong: a mother originally from Portsmouth, and great uncle and aunt among the original settlers of Bennett’s Creek.
If home base was subject to frequent change, there were two aspects of her life that remained constant no matter where she was: her dedication to service through church mission work and her commitment to becoming a physician.
“I knew from the time I was 14 that I wanted to be a doctor,” she says. “After high school, I came back to Virginia and earned my undergraduate degree from Mary Washington College in Fredericksburg.” While there, she met an osteopathic physician through her church, whose holistic approach to medical care impressed her. She applied to the same school he had attended – the Kansas City University of Medicine and Biosciences College of Osteopathic Medicine – where she earned her doctorate in osteopathy. She returned to Virginia to complete both her internship and residency in family medicine at Riverside Regional Medical Center.
Her stay was short lived, as after finishing her residency, she and her husband were called to Kentucky. “He’s a Chaplain,” she explains. “He finished his seminary training, and received his masters in divinity at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville.” But once again, the Old Dominion beckoned when she was recruited by Obici Hospital to come to Suffolk to open a family medicine practice. The year was 1995, and she and her family have lived here ever since.
Dr. Stockman is excited that Virginia is now home to a school of osteopathy at Virginia Tech, which she serves as community faculty. In addition, she is a community family medicine physician for EVMS, as preceptor for the medical students who rotate through her office several times a year. And for the past six years, she has devoted a day each month to the Western Tidewater Free Clinic in Suffolk, doing volunteer medical care.
She’s committed to working with teenage girls at her church, teaching them to find their own heart for missions, through programs like Acteens. “The girls raise monies for different projects, collecting things for CARE packages for college students, or toys and gifts for kids through Operation Christmas Child,” she says, “and they collect and deliver food and donations for the community food pantry in Hampton.”
If you know physicians who are performing good deeds – great or small – who you would like to see highlighted in this publication, please submit information on our website – www.hrphysician.com – or call our editor, Bobbie Fisher, at 757-773-7550.
