Home away from home

Photography by James Moore

How a rural upbringing and a love for small-town life brought a world-class cardiologist to Missouri

One might wonder how a citizen of Pakistan such as Dr. Muhammad F. Khan wound up in West Plains, Missouri, to practice medicine, especially after serving in much larger cities across America.

For Kahn himself, who practices internal medicine, cardiology/interventional cardiology, the answer is simple – coming to West Plains felt like home. 

“I grew up in Pakistan in a very rural area. It was a small town like West Plains, you know?” he said. “I was always fascinated by the small towns. My grandfather was a farmer, a grower, and he had lands and cattle and stuff. I used to go there and live with them for two to three months during summer vacation. 

“My father was an agriculturist but he was in an academic position. He teaches people how to grow crops through the government and the forest department. We moved along with him to different cities out in Pakistan, but they were not big cities. They were all small towns, so that basically gave me that background.”

Khan initially grew up wanting to be a pilot and when that didn’t pan out he set his sights on medicine. He attended King Edward Medical College in Pakistan before coming to the United States where he initially did research in vascular and cardiac pathologies and diseases of the heart. He completed his internal medicine residency at St. Luke’s Hospital in St. Louis and fellowships in echocardiography from the University of California at San Francisco and in cardiovascular medicine/interventional cardiology from the University of Utah.

Having experienced Missouri during residency, he planned to visit Ozarks Healthcare as a means of staying in the area. His interview in West Plains came against the advice of his peers at the time.

“My professor, he warned me initially. He said ‘It's a very small town, in the middle of nowhere. Why do you want to go there? You should keep yourself in the big cities,’” Khan said. 

“I was very lucky to have another mentor who told me, ‘When you enter someplace new, look at the people. If people are smiling, if they're cordial, if they're courteous and if colleagues look happy, that’s a good sign of what the community is like.’ When I first came here, I had never worked in a small hospital before, but it just felt comfortable right away.”

Khan saw the community as a place to grow his practice and also his young family and spent a decade doing both. The family moved when his son and daughter went away to school, but the pull of West Plains proved too strong. In 2023, after a couple of years away, Khan returned to community practice, splitting his time between the family home and his job. 

“After 10 years of practice I had developed a unique bound with the community and with my patients,” he said. “After I talked it over with my wife, I approached the hospital and we kind of made an arrangement to fit my schedule. Now I’m back and able to reconnect with patients and it’s all worked out very well. My heart was in West Plains.”