Lorna Shanks, MD

Dr. Lorna Shanks is a bilingual physician at Shanks Primary Care, a direct primary care practice in Portland. She trained at the University of Washington before a residency in Vancouver, Washington, focused on pediatric care, labor and delivery, and outpatient procedures.

In medical school she cared for HIV-affected infants and mothers in southern India, and earlier she volunteered in Honduras, helping build water tanks to curb mosquito-borne disease. She spent six years at Kaiser Permanente's Rockwood office in southeast Portland and later worked at Bridgeport Family Medicine in Tigard before founding Shanks Primary Care to offer transparent pricing and personalized attention. Her practice today includes community health, gender-affirming care, and HIV treatment.

A western Colorado native, Dr. Shanks was drawn toward medicine partly by her father, a general surgeon, and the Spanish fluency she built studying abroad in Madrid and Buenos Aires still shapes how she connects with patients.