2010 Salute to Health Care Honoree: José Dominguez

When Dr. John “Bucky” Buckner III sat down to write a letter recommending Dr. José Dominguez as a Salute to Health Care honoree, he faced a challenge.

“You can go on and on with a guy like him,” says Buckner, who is Dominguez’s friend and medical partner at Ferrell Duncan Clinic. “It was just a matter of when am I going to stop writing?”

Dominguez is a general surgeon specializing in colon and rectal surgery at Ferrell-Duncan Clinic and was the first colorectal specialist in Springfield when he set up his practice 15 years ago.
Dominguez also is a trauma surgeon and sits on the foundations for both CoxHealth and Ferrell-Duncan.

He participates in Cox Medical Explorers, a program for high school students.

 “These are basically the people who are going to be taking care of me in the nursing home,” Dominguez says, with a sense of humor that surfaces often.

Born in Topeka, Kan., Dominguez grew up in Baltimore and moved to Springfield during his junior year of school. He graduated from Kickapoo High School, where he met his wife, Jill.
He attended University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Medicine and completed his residency at Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke’s Medical Center in Chicago before going to the Mayo Clinic for a one-year fellowship.

He set up practice in Springfield at the encouragement of his wife.

“She gave me the choice of coming back to Springfield with her or visiting her and the kids in Springfield,” he says.

Dominguez joined the U.S. Army Reserves and was deployed to Kosovo and Iraq before retiring at the rank of lieutenant colonel.

He received the Combat Medic Badge for providing medical care under fire.

“You see trauma at the level that you just don’t see in the civilian world. It doesn’t make normal trauma seem small, but it puts things in perspective,” Dominguez says.

Dominguez is a commissioned law enforcement officer with the Greene County Sheriff’s Office and an assistant scoutmaster. He also runs marathons to raise money for the Children’s Tumor Foundation, which supports neurofibromatosis research.
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