MARRIED TO MEDICINE: DRS. JAMIE AND KEISHA LOWTHER
BY ZERLINE HUGHES SPRUILL
A s a medical student, Keisha Gibson heard about a fellow student named Jamie Lowther. She met him on the steps inside the Harold D. West Basic Sciences Building at Meharry Medical College and soon after, made her way to his group when her own lab partner was too afraid to cut into the cadaver they were assigned to in gross anatomy class. “I would leave our cadaver and go to Jamie’s table to force my partner to do something,” said Keisha. “From there, we ended up in the same study groups and we’d hang out. Two years later, our friends had a party and Jamie did not go. I mustered up the courage to call him and said, ‘you weren’t at the party, I missed you.’ He laughed so hard. I got off the phone and boo-hoo cried.” To hear him tell it, Jamie was only laughing from embarrassment and flattery and he quickly stepped up. Today, the former med student who cried tears is now Mrs. Keisha Lowther and the two not only share the same last name–they share the same title prefix: Dr. Jamie and Keisha are the epitome of an HBCU medical power couple whose
love story and career paths are rooted in the values, training, and community support they received at Morehouse College, Stillman College, and Meharry Medical College. “We’re a couple that HBCUs built,” said Keisha who graduated from Stillman magna cum laude in 1998. “If it were not for HBCUs, we literally would not be who we we are today. We represent the power of what ifs, what’s possible.” Love and Medicine Studying to be a medical doctor, completing residency, founding a practice and becoming chief medical officer are long- term commitments requiring dedication and altruism. As doctors in holy matrimony, the Lowthers have multiplied that dedication by two, and then divided it by three children. Their efforts have truly required a village in order for the Lowthers to serve their patients and one another. “When the kids were younger, we made sure at least one day a week was reserved for each other,” said Jamie. “ My mother- in-law was very instrumental in allowing us to have that time
together and we had friends that lived near that helped us in that endeavor. Fast forward to now, our work schedule is a little different. We both do rural medicine in two different cities. We schedule things so that we have full weeks off with each other.” Now that the kids are out of the house, they admit that they’ve become ‘the old couple that does puzzles’ though they are still hard at work. In between 90-minute work commutes to and from rural areas and making time for family, the Lowthers have worked alongside each other in their own practice from 2012 to 2021, serving their community for over nine years. Jamie is currently a hospitalist with Pinnacle Physicians Group, LLP in Demopolis and Tuscaloosa, where he served as Pinnacle’s Chief Medical Officer from 2019-2021. Keisha served as Chief Medical Officer at Whatley Health Services, Inc., serving more than 22,000 patients per year in West Alabama, including the Black Belt. She is currently a hospitalist at Northwest Regional Medical Center in Winfield, Alabama.
sounds hectic, the Lowthers said their shared expertise has always been helpful, from their days of being in study groups, doing residency, and still today “It helps us to feed off of each other,” said Keisha. “We’ll call each other and say, ‘I have this, have you seen this before,’ or ‘lemme tell you about what I saw today.’ Especially when we were in practice together, our kids were picking up on it and understanding medical terminology and asking questions. I think that makes it easier.” “In our personal lives, it helps because we have the insight of knowing potentially what we would have encountered during the day,” said Jamie. “There’s a particular understanding and empathy for how one may be emotionally reacting to what they may have seen throughout the day.” The couple says a focal point at Meharry is to provide care for underserved communities and the Lowthers have done just that. Both provide medical attention in rural Alabama’s community health centers, federal- funded organizations serving underinsured patients.
While two doctors in the family
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