Student doctor Mary Horban has been named to a national organization of future DOs that is tackling the country’s overdose crisis.

While most future doctors anxiously await the day they are ready for medical school, Mary Horban found herself living in Wichita, waiting for KHSC – KansasCOM to be ready for her. As the spouse of an active-duty member of the military, Horban moved quite a bit, including to Japan and Abilene, Texas. At the time Horban was looking to enter medical school, the family moved to Wichita. When they first moved to Wichita, however, there was not an osteopathic college for her to attend. “I was just waiting for the doors of KansasCOM to open up so that I could apply,” Horban says.

Horban took an unconventional route to medical school, having received her undergraduate degree in business marketing with a minor in Spanish. She worked wherever she could to find a job in a difficult economy before returning to school for a graduate degree in health administration in 2016.

While working in health administration in Abilene, Texas, where her husband was stationed, Horban was inspired to get her “long-dreamt-of” medical degree. “This was something I wanted to do since I was eight years old and saw a videocassette of my grandpa’s cataract surgery,” she said.

Horban was inspired in part to attend osteopathic medical school by her younger sister who is also a doctor of osteopathy. “She taught me about the difference between osteopathic medicine and allopathic medicine,” Horban says. “I’ve spent the past 14 years practicing yoga and was very interested in the holistic approach where the goal isn’t to diagnose, prescribe, and treat a symptom but to find a root cause and address the whole patient.”

In addition to her coursework and caring for her two young children, Horban is vice president of her chapter of the Student Osteopathic Medical Association (SOMA), which is affiliated with the National Osteopathic Medical Association and for which there is representation at every osteopathic medical school. As part of her work with the association, she has worked with the faculty and administration to help ensure the first year of operations is a smooth one. “Growing pains are normal with any new school, but I think that the student government has collaborated really well with the faculty and staff in order to make adjustments where necessary,” she says. “The flexibility on all sides has been very beneficial.”

As part of her work with SOMA, Horban has been named as administrator for the Region IV Overdose Prevention Task Force, which was created in 2019 to help reduce the rise in overdose deaths in the U.S. and to educate medical students about overdose prevention.

“At KansasCOM, our job is to treat rural Kansas, and we need to understand rural Kansas problems,” Horban says. “This organization will train our students to recognize opioid-seeking behavior—ways to treat, ways to find recovery options, and ways to reduce stigma—you would never tell a diabetic they can’t have insulin because of their life choices. I think this school is perfectly poised to address that in the Kansas area.”

Horban’s mentor, Angela Carrick, DO, agrees. “Mary serving on the overdose prevention board is important on a local and national level,” she says. “Overdose is consistently one of the leading causes of death in young adults. Mary’s work to bring awareness and solutions to this problem has the potential to save many lives.”

After graduation, Horban’s options for where to practice are wide open. “I have no idea where I’m going to end up, but I would very much like to be an emergency medicine physician,” she says. “When shadowing in the ER in rural Abilene, Texas, I saw a lot of people who were having severe side effects from doing drugs. I really want to be able to address that as an emergency physician.”

She was also inspired by a brief internship at the Veteran’s Administration, which she said is a “great resource for people dealing with mental health problems due to the nature of war.”

Wherever Horban practices, Dr. Carrick is convinced she will excel. “I am proud of both her dedication to this cause and her leadership inside and outside of KansasCOM,” she says.