Dustin Hall, DO joins Oaklawn Medical Group – Obstetrics & Gynecology

Dustin Hall, DO is the newest addition to the Oaklawn Medical Group – Obstetrics and Gynecology office located in the Wright Medical Building at 215  E Mansion St. in Marshall.

The office can be reached at 269-558-0702.

Dr. Hall brings to Oaklawn nearly 20 years of experience since graduating from Michigan State University’s College of Osteopathic Medicine in 2007 with his Doctor of Osteopathy degree.

He did his residency in Obstetrics and Gynecology at Henry Ford Wyandotte Hospital where he served as Chief Intern in 2007-2008 and Chief Resident from 2009-2011. He was also trained in daVinci Robotic Surgery.

Since 2013, Dr. Hall has worked in South Haven and in Benton Harbor where he has delivered thousands of babies.

He said he is looking forward to this next chapter at Oaklawn

“The Oaklawn facilities are beautiful,” he said. “Everyone was so nice and so welcoming and just made it easy to feel at home… One of the selling points for me was that surgeries, deliveries and the office are all in the same facility, which is something I didn’t have before. At my last job, my office was in a different location, and I would have to drive to do surgeries and we had a separate outpatient surgery center. There was a lot of driving around and having to keep track of where I was supposed to be on what day.”

Dr. Hall grew up on the east side of Michigan near Detroit, and he said he first heard of Marshall while on the Flat Rock High School basketball team in the late 1990s.

“We played Marshall during a summer tournament at a team camp, so it wasn’t technically an official game, but they beat us soundly,” he said. “I only remember it because I later saw them playing in the state semifinals at the Breslin Center and realized that we had played them. I didn’t feel quite as bad about losing so badly after I realized just how good that team was.”

That Marshall team lost to River Rouge in the 1998 state championship game.

Dr. Hall  said as an undergraduate student at the Univresity of Michigan in the late 1990s, he was not eyeing a career in medicine.

“As a college student that wasn’t my intention at all,” he said. “I was really more involved in literature and the language arts side of things.”

After a year and a half, he said he had “this realization” that those studies was never going to pay the bills.

“I needed to come up with a real plan, so I switched my major to Biology and Chemistry and got interested in the sciences,” said Dr. Hall. “Still, even after college, my plan wasn’t medical school – I was going to do research, and I actually worked for a year with the National Cancer Institute. It was while I was there that I decided that I could make more of a difference and do more good if I went into the clinical side of things, so that is when I decided to go to medical school.”

Originally his intention was to specialize in oncology.

“But when I started doing my clinical rotations, six weeks of oncology, I realized this was not for me,” he said. “It was emotionally draining. When I rotated in OBGYN, that was the other side of the spectrum – everybody was happy, so that’s how I went into that.”

Dr. Hall notes that there is a distinct division between the obstetrics side of things and the gynecological side.

“The obstetrics side, we are delivering babies and  looking after women and making sure they stay healthy during pregnancies,” he said. “Of course, that’s very rewarding and fun. And 99.9% of the time, patients leave the hospital with a smile on their face.

“The gynecological side of things – that really is more the side where we get to tailor our practice more toward what the patient wants and there’s a lot of variety in how we approach different problems,” he continued. “That’s where we apply our training a lot more, coming up with a plan that’s going to suit a patient with a certain GYN problem, whether it’s surgical management or medical management, and determining what’s going to be best for this particular patient at this stage?

“The family planning side of things is where we make the biggest difference, especially for younger women who are not looking to start a family yet and really don’t want to be pregnant; tailoring their contraception needs to what’s going to work best for them. That’s where I feel I make the biggest impact.”

Dr. Hall and his wife, Andrea, who is a veterinarian, have two children – a daughter who is 14 and a son who is 12.

He describes himself as a “big sports guy” and enjoys watching his children play volleyball and baseball. He also enjoys watching University of Michigan sports and Detroit’s professional sports teams as well as enjoying the outdoors, boating, playing basketball, traveling with his wife, playing games with his kids, taste-testing his wife’s cooking, reading and writing poetry.

Dr. Hall noted that he and his two older siblings  were the first in their family to go to college and attributed the guidance and expectations of their mother as the catalyst for pursuing

“Our Mother put a heavy focus on academics and going to college to pursue an advanced degree,” said Dr. Hall. “She left it up to us to decide what our interests were. “My brother is a lawyer, my sister is a lawyer and I’m a doctor.”