Robert J. Salem, M.D., F.A.C.S.

Dr. Robert Salem has been given the “Patriot Award” for his support of National Guard and Reserve members. Dr. Larry Warmoth nominated Dr. Salem for the award.

About the Patriot Award

The National Committee for Employer Support of the Guard  and Reserve conducts an awards program designed to recognize employers who support a strong National Guard and Reserve force. Employers qualify for recognition when they practice leadership and personnel policies that support employee participation in the Guard and Reserve.
Every employer nominated for recognition will receive the Patriot Award, and will then be eligible for consideration for other awards and recognition based on their level of support.

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Watch the full story at Everything Lubbock.

KMAC 28 interviews Dr. Salem about the Larry King Foundation.

Salem has an uncanny ability in the operating room, according to colleagues who worked with him.

And he is considered the rarest type of physician - a doctor who combines extraordinary compassion with exceptional precision and skill.

You can read the rest of the article from the Lubbock-Avalanche Journal here.

”There were a large number of doctors in the community at the time who didn’t think the surgery should be performed in Lubbock,” said Dr. Donald Bricker, the cardiovascular surgeon who performed the first open-heart surgery in Lubbock at Methodist Hospital 30 years ago.

”The surgery was a new beginning, a new life,” Morales said. ”I haven’t needed any heart medication since then. … I was in the hospital for one week. When I went home, I went home with just some pain pills, no other medication.”

The rest of the article can be read here.

When doctors were contemplating performing Lubbock’s first open-heart surgery, they were met with opposition and skepticism. After all, nobody before

”We felt we had outstanding medical expertise in cardiology and our cardiac surgical staff, and we were strongly motivated to provide this type of medical care to the citizens of this area at or near their homes. It is an extreme hardship both economically, as well as emotionally, for patients from this area to have to leave their own surroundings and travel to Dallas or Houston for surgical care.”

You can read the rest of the article from the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal here

By Valerie Ullman Avery (Avalanche-Journal)

A young Bob Salem spent his childhood summers hoeing the blue weeds and tumbleweeds that snaked their way around the young cotton. But the dusty turnrows that covered the farmlands around Sudan didn’t appeal to him.

What interested him were the frogs hopping amid the green maturing, cotton. Sometimes, he would whip out his pocketknife and dissect a frog. It wasn’t out of meanness, he said.

“I just wondered what they looked like inside,” Salem said.

It didn’t take him long to realize he wanted to do something with his life.

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