Dr. Sides and Jack are raising three energetic boys who attend Hot Springs School and are deeply involved in sports and community activities. Whether cheering from the stands, coaching youth basketball, or inviting the kids to join them on long runs, the Sides family is always on the move. When life slows down, you’ ll find them baking together or enjoying a movie night at home.
On weekends and in the summer, the family returns to the ranch— a place of learning, bonding, and rest— where their children are learning the same values that shaped Dr. Sides: hard work, gratitude, and the enduring strength of family.
Dr. Sides continues to bring both skill and compassion to her work, serving her patients, community, and country with unwavering dedication.
Saini Family Haveena, Mona, Jerad, Priya, Rohan
MONA SAINI
From a young age, I knew medicine was my calling— drawn by a deep curiosity about the human body and a heartfelt desire to help others. Growing up, my parents, immigrants from India, sacrificed immensely to provide me with opportunities they never had. Their dedication fueled my own drive to make a difference.
Medical school in urban Detroit was demanding and often overwhelming, but it taught me resilience and the importance of compassionate care in communities facing real challenges. Today, I am grateful to practice critical access medicine in rural Custer, South Dakota, where I serve a population that is genuine and deeply appreciative of the care they receive. This authenticity makes my work profoundly rewarding.
Outside the clinic, I cherish spending time hiking and boating, finding balance and joy in the beautiful Black Hills alongside my husband and three beautiful children.
My journey as a physician and mother continues to be shaped by the values of service, family, and the belief that caring for others is both a privilege and a responsibility.
Brown Family Lisa & David
DR. LISA BROWN
Dr. Lisa Brown is a board-certified family medicine physician based in Custer, South Dakota. With over two decades of experience across primary care clinic, emergency, and hospital settings, and physician leadership, she offers care across the spectrum of human vulnerability, where presence matters as much as precision.
Raised in a household shaped by selfreliance, creativity, and quiet resilience, she came to medicine through a blend of intellectual curiosity and a deep desire to serve. She currently supports Monument Health in both patient care and strategic leadership, while continuing to advocate for innovative, evidence-based approaches to healing. Her journey began in the head— through science, structure, and years of practiced intellect.
Rooted in the rural plains of South Dakota, her healing journey has taken her inward and her heart and body have since become her greatest teachers.
Through personal healing journeys and training in psychedelic-assisted therapies,
Dr. Brown has come to understand that true medicine addresses the whole human being— mind, body, and spirit.
She believes that many forms of suffering stem from disconnection from self, from others, and from the quiet truth that we are already enough; that real healing is not fixing what’ s broken, but reconnecting what was forgotten. She desires to bridge evidencebased medicine with soul-rooted healing and is developing a local path for ketamine-assisted therapy, through which she hopes to help others return to their own inner-knowing that they are enough, untouched by shame or diagnosis.
Outside of medicine, she is a lover of wild spaces, homemade bread, meaningful conversations, and the simple joy of being alive. Her life’ s work is now less about fixing, and more about remembering that healing is not perfection, but a return to wholeness.
Beyond her medical work, she cherishes her two witty, artistic, and beloved stepchildren and her husband David, with whom she has shared 32 years of riding the waves of the human heart— grief, joy, distance, devotion. He is a creative soul, a gifted singer / songwriter, lover of nature and maker with wood. Dr. Brown holds space not only for her patients’ healing, but also for her family’ s, modeling self-love, acceptance, and reverence for all beings as expressions of the universe itself.
LOUISE HALBLEIB, D. O.
I am a military brat turned missionary kid who calls the Midwest home. I rotated in Custer as a Resident and fell in love with the community and the values of its clinic and hospital.
I knew early in my days working with Dr. Falkenburg— this is where I wanted to practice.
Then the medical staff expanded and I joined! My husband and kids are most important in my life. We enjoy camping, hiking, and kayaking. I am
Halbleib Family learning to fish. Custer offers great opportunities for all of these activities! I
Eric, Bernard, Theodore, Louise
enjoy the opportunity to serve the community here. Every day is different! Medicine is a commitment to lifelong learning, and the community has some great teachers. I hope to continue to serve the community by treating children, young people, pregnant patients and breastfeeding moms( a special passion I hold) as well as my favorite:“ years of wisdom patients” as I call them.
I was born in Germany and speak some conversational German. I’ m an identical twin. My sister is a chiropractor in Tennessee. I majored in Spanish in college and enjoy the opportunity to practice my Spanish. I enjoy teaching and have been working as Trauma Director to help teach what I have learned to nurses and anyone who cares to listen. I also enjoy cooking, baking, gardening( vegetables, mainly— my boys are the flower gardeners), and raising chickens.
20 Down Country Roads September / October 2025