By Renee Hunter
For Dr. Alyson Fish, the best part of family medicine is the scope of patients that she gets to see – from preventive medicine, particularly in children, to the treatment of chronic illnesses, often in older people.

Dr. Fish is the newest doctor at the Greenbrier Family Medicine Clinic of Conway Regional Health System. She joined Dr. Gary Bowman and Dr. Charles Clifton on July 28. To accommodate Dr. Fish’s practice, three examination rooms and two offices were added to the clinic, almost doubling its size.
"The other great thing about family medicine is that our job is to get to know the whole family," Dr. Fish said. "We do a lot of counseling with the patients and their families."
When patients visit a specialist or receive other healthcare such as physical therapy or home-health visits, we are kind of the gatekeepers," coordinating the various services and drugs, she said.
Because it is the only physician-staffed clinic in the growing town of Greenbrier, all three doctors are very busy, and Dr. Fish had no problem picking up patients. Many of her patients are new residents; others simply prefer a female physician.
Dr. Fish became interested in medicine while serving one summer as a volunteer Spanish interpreter at Arkansas Children’s Hospital through the hospital’s social-work department. Her interest was sparked because of one patient who spent most of the summer in intensive care.
"I found myself being a lot more interested in the medical aspect of his care than in the social work part of his care," she said.
She spent a lot of time at Ronald McDonald House with his family, and she spent a lot of time at his bedside interpreting the doctor’s words into Spanish for his parents, not an easy job. She carried an English-Spanish medical dictionary with her all the time.
Dr. Fish began learning Spanish in junior high school at the instigation of her grandfather, who promised to take her to Mexico if she would study the language. He did. Later, while earning her biology degree at the University of Central Arkansas, she minored in Spanish.
After graduating from the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences in Little Rock in 2005, Dr. Fish did her internship and residency in family medicine through the Area Health Education Center Northeast and St. Bernard Medical Center. She chose Jonesboro because her sister was attending college there. It was a good choice in many ways.
"They have a great medical program that really nurtures a residency," Dr. Fish said. "I just felt it was the best place for me to learn my family practice."
Finding family time is a challenge for a doctor, according to Dr. Fish, especially during residency. But the edge she has is that families, the doctor’s as well as the patients’, are important for family-practice physicians.
Dr. Fish and her husband, Mike, began dating two weeks before she started medical school, and they married during her second year at UAMS. He was a C-130 load master in the Air Force at the time and made eight trips to Iraq and Afghanistan after 9/11. So he went through the stress and challenges of becoming an MD with her, and she went through all the stress of wartime military service with him. He is now in his second year at UCA, majoring in history.
The couple has a 2-year-old daughter, Elizabeth.
Dr. Fish’s decision to practice in Greenbrier can also be traced back to her grandfather. He was a small-town dentist in Missouri and was an active participant in his community. Seeing that, Dr. Fish said she always wanted to be a small-town doctor.
"I went to medical school on a rural-practice scholarship with the state of Arkansas," she said. "We found a community that we could be part of."