Nevadan at Work: From ringside and sideline, doctor built career in valley

For Dr. Edwin “Flip” Homansky, Las Vegas was supposed to be a yearlong pit stop on the way to a career as a heart doctor back east.

Homansky moved here as an emergency room doctor in the late 1970s to experience the local lifestyle for a bit, and expected to be well into a cardiology fellowship in Texas by 1980. But he fell in love with emergency medicine, for the immediacy of its results, and Las Vegas, for its job and recreation opportunities.

Homansky grew up in the South, the son of a liquor-store owner and a department-store worker, neither of whom had the opportunity to attend college. They made sure Homansky saw it as his only option. Thanks to their insistence, Homansky became one of Southern Nevada’s highest-profile doctors, spending more than two decades as a ringside physician and clearing boxers to fight for the Nevada Athletic Commission.

Homansky, who calls practicing medicine “an amazing privilege and sacred trust,” serves as chief medical officer of the five-hospital Valley Health System.

Question: What was the city’s health care industry like when you got here?

Answer: There were excellent physicians, but you had to search to find them. There were very few systems in place. Care was not coordinated. There just wasn’t any cohesiveness to medicine in Las Vegas at that time. They didn’t have the infrastructure that we have now.

Question: Why are people still critical of local health care?

Answer: People are critical of the health care establishment, but when you talk to them, those who have established primary care doctors and specialists like their doctors. They just don’t like the industry in general. Part of the problem is, this is a transient town, and so much of our population doesn’t have an established primary care doctor. It’s a system built on sickness, and not on keeping people well, but we’re working to change that.

Question: Nevada has above-average rates of cancers and health risks, such as smoking. Why are we so unhealthy?

Answer: It’s multifactoral, but people have to take responsibility for their own health care. That’s the first step. The answer isn’t (prescription) drugs. The answer isn’t the ER. We have to be responsible for eating right, exercising, not smoking and getting the pounds off. Those things haven’t been the driving force in this community.

Question: What’s the biggest change you’ve seen in local health care?

Answer: There are more specialists. Access is still difficult; we don’t have enough doctors. But we have more specialists, and we have a higher quality of physician in general. I actually am proud of the level of care in this community, and there are a lot of people in health care leadership working hard to increase quality. I also think changes in this medical community are only magnified by changes in (emergency medical services). We have one of the best EMS systems in the country. Our medics deliver a high level of paramedics every day.

Question: Your career has been heavy on sports medicine, as a ringside doctor and NFL consultant on concussions. How did you get interested in sports medicine?

Answer: When I first got to town, in my mind, what could be more exciting than boxing? The things I was interested in at that point were work and sports, whether it was boxing, baseball, when the PGA was in town, UNLV sports, whatever. It was great, and Vegas offered all of that. It was the heyday of boxing in Las Vegas. I paid once for a ticket to see a fight in the outdoor boxing pavilion at Caesars Palace around 1979, and I was hooked. I just hung around until they had to start using me (in 1980). I was lucky to be involved in so many great fights.

Question: How does the Tyson-Holyfield ear-biting rank among strange things you’ve seen in the ring?

Answer: Without question, that was the strangest. It was the wildest night, and it has lived with me. But there were other great episodes, too: the incredible first fight between Sugar Ray Leonard and Tommy Hearns, which was 15 rounds outdoors at Caesars, with Angelo Dundee as Ray’s trainer, and the incredible fight between John “The Beast” Mugabi and Tommy Hearns in the rain outdoors, both of them with steam coming off of their heads — that was one of the most brutal fights I ever saw at ringside. Both of them urinated blood for days afterward.

But anytime you had Tyson and Holyfield together, it was hard to top. (Referee) Mills Lane and I gave Tyson another chance after he bit Holyfield once, and he did it again. It was surreal. My eyes and mind saw it, but I couldn’t understand it. I dealt with it by approaching it strictly as a medical issue.

Question: What are boxers like outside the ring?

Answer: The biggest misconception about Mike Tyson was that he was animalistic, that he wasn’t that bright. Both of those couldn’t have been further from the truth. Mike was exceptionally street smart. He always knew what he was doing. He was usually a step ahead of reporters trying to write about him, and he was a fascinating person for whom I actually have a lot of respect. People don’t understand that many of the things he did and said were done for effect, and to create this aura. Fighters in general are interesting. In boxing, you don’t need to make anything up, because the whole sport is just a caricature of itself. And these characters are real.

Question: Who was the nicest boxer you ever worked with?

Answer: Oscar De La Hoya was always a gentleman, always as nice as he could be, as was Ray Leonard. They were two of the nicest guys you could want to spend an afternoon with on a golf course.

Question: What’s the biggest health crisis in sports today?

Answer: There’s not just a drive to succeed; there is this incredible push to be first, to be better than the person who ran the 100-yard dash last week. With the pressure that brings — from parents, from coaches, from promoters — it is creating an incredible reliance on performance-enhancing drugs. I do believe it is one of the greatest threats we have to sports and athletes as we know them. We have these world-class athletes, and society pushes them to where they see their only alternative as performance-enhancing drugs. We won’t know the consequences until they get older and see what they’ve done to their bodies.

You have 16-year-old girls in high school playing soccer and using performance-enhancing drugs because they see their role models doing them. We should never acquiesce to letting people artificially stimulate their bodies to improve athletic performance. It’s a horrible idea medically, intellectually and philosophically. We need more stringent tests, and education for athletes.

Question: What’s the biggest health crisis in Southern Nevada?

Answer: Access to care. There’s not enough access, and it’s going to become even more difficult with the Affordable Care Act. No. 2, systems still spend more time treating sickness rather than keeping people well. It’s more important to treat people on a continuum of care, so a hospital won’t stop caring for the patient when he’s discharged. The hospital makes sure he gets follow-up, takes his medication or loses weight. We’ll intervene earlier when he gets a fever, that rather than waiting until he deteriorates and putting him in a hospital bed.

Question: How does the Affordable Care Act help?

Answer: I think a lot of things are broken in medicine. I don’t think the Affordable Care Act is the way to fix those problems, but it is something we have to deal with, and we will. There are good elements to the act, and I think we’ll work with those elements to make it work.

Question: What’s a better solution?

Answer: A lot of people smarter than I am have worked on this and not come up with the answer. It’s a very complex situation, but we want to keep the integrity of the physician-patient relationship, and we want to get people information to make the correct medical decisions. We want to make the cost of those decisions important enough that at least it’s a consideration. I feel there’s more right with our health care than wrong, and there’s no other system I would go to if I were sick. We just need to make it safer for patients.

Question: What are your future goals at Valley Health?

Answer: Our highest priority is the Valley Health System Quality Care Alliance, a clinical integration that’s physician-led and evidence-based. We’re going to develop a data base that allows us to take care of patients safely and in the most efficient way.

Contact reporter Jennifer Robison at
jrobison@reviewjournal.com or 702-380-4512.
Follow @J_Robison1 on Twitter.