Dr. Stoney Abercrombie: Humanitarian, Teacher, Physician

It was Spring 2008, and Dr. Stoney Abercrombie, Director of Medical Education and Residency Director at AnMed Health since 2002, was about to come face to face with a thought that had never occurred to him before: It’s possible for one man to try and do too much.

For a man who oversees some 130 people who answer directly to him at various programs through AnMed Health; who was recently named national Humanitarian of the Year by the National Academy of Family Physicians; who seemingly is involved in more projects at one time than most men take on in a lifetime, it was quite a revelation.
“One thing I love to do is work in my yard,” Abercrombie said. “I love to landscape, get outside, get dirty, create, and one day I just pushed it too far. I overdid it, tore one of the muscles in my shoulder and ruptured three discs in my neck.”
For more than six months, he said, he tried to deny the seriousness of the problem until finally, in November 2008, he agreed to surgery that left him with a bit of titanium steel in his neck and an entirely new outlook on do-it-yourself home improvements.
“I was working in my yard to save $2,000 on landscaping,” he noted wryly, “and ended up spending $100,000 on surgery.”
Despite the serious nature of the surgery, Abercrombie refused to be slowed by the mishap.
“I was told I’d be out for four to six weeks,” he said. “I had the surgery on a Tuesday, went home on Wednesday, and 48 hours later I went back to the office for awhile. In more than 30 years as a doctor, it was the first two days of work I’d ever missed.”
The months of pain and the ultimate surgical repairs did little to slow his overall agenda, though. During that time, he said, he got 350 applications for 10 residency openings. He narrowed the field down to 60 and interviewed every one of them before making his choices.

An odyssey with a purpose
Abercrombie said he originally set out to be a surgeon in the mold of Dr. John “Rock” Harden of Pickens, who practiced his craft in the town a short drive from Abercrombie’s own home town of Six Mile for more than a half a century as an associate of Cannon Memorial Hospital.
But somewhere between high school and college (Clemson ’72) and his graduation from the Medical University of South Carolina (’75), his focus changed.
“Family medicine was just coming into force as a specialty when I was in college,” Abercrombie said. “It became a full certification board in 1969, and I found out that you can do a lot of things in family practice – from minor surgery to obstetrics.
“That variety offered by family practice appealed to me,” he said, “because I get bored easily if I’m not involved in a lot of different things.”
His resume certainly reads like that of a man with a variety of interests.
Following completion of his internship with Greenville Hospital Systems in 1976, he fulfilled a military commitment with two years as a U.S. Army Flight Surgeon stationed at Fort Knox, Kentucky, then returned to Greenville for a two-year residency in Family Medicine. Afterwards:
- January 1981 through December 1988 – Operated a private practice on Radio Station Road in Seneca while an associate of Oconee Hospital. He became Chief of Medical Staff for that hospital in 1988.
- January 1989 through May 1999 – Associate Residency Director for Family Medicine at Self Memorial Hospital (now Self Regional Hospital) in Greenwood, later taking on the role as Director of Medical Education.
- June 1999 through present – Joined AnMed Health as an associate and remained active despite a three-year stretch (January 2000-December 2002) as an Associate Dean at the Medical University of South Carolina who was also in charge of all residency programs statewide – eight of them – that report to MUSC as part of AHEC (Area Health Education Consortium) and four regional AHEC centers statewide charged with educating nurses, physical therapists and others.
- November 2002 through present – Residency Director and Director of Medical Education for AnMed.
Abercrombie supervises residents at AnMed and, as a result of a small $2,000 grant he managed to get in 1999, he has established a joint residency program with his old partner, Oconee Hospital, that gets to the heart of his love of Family Medicine.
“We used that grant to create a new residency program in Seneca and Oconee Hospital called ‘Seneca Lakes Rural Residency Program’ for residents who want to go into family medicine and practice in small rural communities,” Abercrombie said.
Residents complete their first year of residency at AnMed, then finish their last two years at Oconee while practicing at Abercrombie’s old office in Seneca.
The theory behind the residency program, he said, is that residents who complete the program are trained in more extensive processes than the old-time family doctor made available, including some advanced tests and surgeries.
“They can learn to do c-sections and tubal ligations, endoscopy, colonoscopy and other tests,” Abercrombie said. “We’re training them to go into small-town South Carolina and other states and be able to function without specialists.”
Since starting the program in 2001, 18 residents have entered the program – two a year for the three-year stretch – and 13 have graduated.
Of those 13, Abercrombie said, “Eleven are now practicing in rural communities, and six of them are doing family medicine obstetrics. A lot of small communities don’t have ob-gyns – nationally, under 30 percent of family doctors deliver babies.”
In addition to his duties with the residency program, Abercrombie said he still sees patients as his own practice in Anderson two half days a week; does an “intense” in-patient duty for a week six or seven times a year; spends two half-days a week in the outpatient clinic, volunteers at the Anderson Free Clinic one day four times a year, keeps up with “more paperwork than I know what to do with.”

A man on many missions
In Seneca, there is an office for a group called “Volunteers In Medical Missions” (VIMM) which has a full-time staff and is governed by a board of directors with representatives from states as diverse as Alaska, Minnesota, Tennessee and Alabama. Since 1987, VIMM has sent doctors and other health workers on more than 250 trips involving more than 3,500 volunteers and has given well over $30 million worth of medical care to underserved residents around the world.
VIMM, one of the more successful medical volunteer organizations in the world, is the brainchild of one Dr. Stoney Abercrombie. And while the genesis of the idea was the result of a confluence of seemingly random events, it’s goal – “Giving back for the blessing I’ve received,” as Abercrombie claims as one of his top goals in life - was almost predestined.
In 1980, when he was a senior resident with the Greenville Hospital Systems, Abercrombie said he went to the Dominican Republic for two weeks with a group of professionals and “caught the essence of how you can help people who are impoverished.”
For the next five or six years, while he was busy building his private practice in Seneca, he wasn’t able to get away to pursue that goal further. But, in 1986, that all changed.
“I went to Honduras again and met a young Honduran doctor named Francisco Cruz,” Abercrombie said. “He wanted to build a clinic and work in the rural areas of Honduras, so I made him a promise and told him I’d come down one trip and bring a construction crew to help out.”
The next year, Abercrombie assembled a team of volunteers from Seneca, Six Mile and Pickens and returned to keep that promise, building the clinic in one week, then joining the small medical team that accompanied the construction workers to see patients in the area.
“We all said, ‘This is cool – let’s do it again next year,’” Abercrombie said.
From his formation of the VIMM concept in 1987 to its success today, Abercrombie has accompanied teams on 51 missions – the most recent one, again to Honduras.
“The trips aren’t just to Honduras, though. I’ve been to 22 different countries and five different countries,” Abercrombie said, listing such locales as Russia, China, Vietnam, Bulgaria and Tanzania.
And the organization itself, for which he received that Humanitarian of the Year last fall, is a source of obvious pride for him.
“I birthed it 22 years ago,” he said, “and it’s still going strong. The award surprised me, and I’m proud of it, but it took a lot of people to build VIMM into what it is today.”

Changing times, changing world
Since finishing medical school in 1975, Abercrombie has seen a lot of changes in the practice of medicine and, though the goal of providing the best health care possible to the maximum number of people remains the same, the process of delivering that care has become increasingly complex.
“The medicine I went into in the 1970s and what I’m practicing today are two different entities,” Abercrombie said. “The ‘solo practitioner’ is a thing of the past. You can’t survive out there as a lone wolf nowadays.
“Back in the 1960s and 1970s, the overhead was probably 40 percent of your private practice,” he continued. “Nowadays, that’s pushing 70 to 75 percent.”
He cited statistics showing that 10 years ago, about 70 percent of physicians’ practices in the United States were one- and two-doctor practices. Today, it’s down to 30 percent and is expected to continue to decrease.
“You need group buying,” Abercrombie said. “Even hospitals now … you have to be careful about saying something about another hospital, because they may wind up being your partner tomorrow.”
He said he thinks the rural residency programs AnMed and Oconee are coordinating may be one of the keys to providing quality healthcare in the future.
“If you look at any small town, they just can’t afford to have some of these really high end things,” he said. “And you’re not going to get a lot of specialists to come to small towns. We’re trying to train those rural doctors to do more things and refer out to other doctors. The well-trained family physician should be able to handle 90 percent of everything that walks into office.”
And, without taking sides in the current national debate, he said he understands that something needs to be done to provide accessibility to healthcare.
“Our national medical health system is not doing well,” he said. “We have the most expensive healthcare system in the world, yet our outcomes such as childhood obesity, mortality – we rank somewhere between 2 and 29 among developed countries.
“It’s the most expensive in the world, but we don’t get the best outcomes,” he added. “That’s not sustainability. We can do better.”
The key, he said, is “some type” of universal healthcare, and, “If it’s going to be successful, it has to be based on a primary care emphasis – family medicine, general pediatrics, general surgery and general internal medicine. It has to be affordable, it has to be accessible, and it has to be comprehensive.”
Whatever direction the national debate – and the future of healthcare in America take – Upstate residents can be reasonably sure that Dr. Abercrombie, as usual, will be working hard to stay ahead of the curve. Or, perhaps, he’ll be semi-retired and carefully landscaping his yard while those he trained over the years carry on his impressive legacy.
“I don’t plan on fully retiring – ever,” Abercrombie said. “But I am working on ways to slow down a bit.”
- Gerald Garrett, staff writer