Getting to Know Dr. David Johnson
Throughout his life, Dr. David Johnson has traveled extensively. It started in high school when he spent months playing soccer all over Europe on a travel team. It continued just after medical school while serving in the U.S. Army when he spent months at different military installations during his rotations. He now travels both for fun and with his wife who is a professional photographer. “I enjoy doing that with her. I get to carry the equipment,” he said with a laugh. They call the northern part of Horry County home, and he’s now the physician in Conway Medical Center’s newest office, CMC Primary Care – Little River. “I like the idea of the continuity of managing a lot of different aspects of patient care and the challenges of being the first person to see something and your job is to figure it out. There are a lot of specialists, and they fix it, but we (as primary care providers) find it,” he said.
Dr. Johnson has known since middle school he wanted to go into medicine, even though no one else in the family was in the field. He and his younger brother grew up in a small town just outside of San Francisco with a mother who was a schoolteacher and their father who worked as a computer programmer in a government research lab. While in high school Dr. Johnson took Red Cross first aid and CPR classes, and in college, he worked full time as a medic with an EMS/fire department while going to school full time. He went to medical school on a military scholarship and went into internal medicine/primary care at Walter Reed Army Medical Center.
“I liked the idea of being able to manage a lot of different conditions. Fortunately, being in the military gave me a lot of leeway to do a lot of other things that you wouldn’t typically do in primary care. I was trained in nuclear stress testing and echocardiography, which was unusual for an internal medicine/primary care doctor. I was trained in upper GI endoscopies and colonoscopies. A lot of places where I was stationed, we didn’t have specialists, so it gave me the opportunity to do these procedures when I practiced in the Army.” He spent 12 years serving in the Army all over the United States.
Now that he and his wife have settled in the Myrtle Beach area, they enjoy spending time with their three children and three grandchildren. He looks forward to growing a CMC practice on the northern end of Horry County and serving patients and addressing their healthcare needs.
You can contact CMC Primary Care – Little River at (843) 663-4005.
