‘We Fell In Love with this Place’

By Patric Hedlund

Robert Martinez, MD is a bright new face in town. He is the family practice doctor who has been hired to provide and supervise medical services at Clinica Sierra Vista’s Frazier Mountain Community Health Center.

Martinez is a California kid who grew up near San Jose; his wife is from the central valley. Their two children are 5 and 3 years old.

"We found this opportunity here that was up in the mountains. When we were driving the main road through Cuddy Valley, we just fell in love with the small towns, we love that our backyard is the national forest," he said enthusiastically in an interview Friday, Sept. 24. He had more to say.

"The houses here are amazing. We looked in Frazier Park, Pinon Pines, Lake of the Woods and Cuddy Valley. We bought a house in Pine Mountain.

"We definitely wanted to be away from the congestion of the city. Even Sacramento was getting to be too much."

Martinez grew up in south San Jose and Modesto.

"In San Jose I grew up in a low income community, it was multiethnic, but a good, safe community," he recalls. "All of my family knew I was into sciences and they are not too surprised that I ended up becoming a doctor."

He went to the University of California at Davis to study biological science in 1993. While there, he volunteered as a patient advocate at a free clinic in Sacramento that is associated with U.C. Davis, known as Clinica Tepati (pronounced tay-pah-tee; a Nahuatl Aztecan word meaning ‘healing’).

"It is obvious to say that I identified with the patients there. Many were Mexican American. That got me motivated. I got interested in the vacuum of healthcare services to underserved populations. It made me continue into healthcare after I graduated.

"It is obvious to say that I identified with the patients there. Many were Mexican American. That got me motivated. I got interested in the vacuum of healthcare services to underserved populations. It made me continue into healthcare after I graduated.

Martinez received his bachelor’s degree in 1998. He applied to medical schools and decided to attend the University of Cincinnati in Ohio. But first, he laughs, he got married.

"We met at U.C. Davis. She was finishing up her last year of college. We got married two weeks before we drove to Ohio for medical school.

"My wife and I have been married for seven years. She studied art and psychology. She likes to paint the mountains, She does landscape painting. We heard the rumblings about the growing art community here, so that interested us.

"We have two kids, my daughter is five and has been at the Pine Mountain Learning Center less than a month. My son is three."

Martinez has a warm and friendly way of talking, and he appears to have a natural talent for listening carefully. Family practice and pediatrics were his first interests as specialties, although he did have a brief thought about becoming a surgeon, he said.

To help pay for medical school, he took summer employment. He was working with the Stanford human genome project when he published a research paper in Science. He also published a research paper from the Department of Endocrinology at the University of Cincinnati. He has worked in an urgent care facility and an after hours clinic, as well as serving as a physician with a diagnostic and radiology center in Sacramento.

His off-hours interests are his family, mountain biking, weight training, baseball and martial arts. He says they won’t be intimidated by snow: "In Cincinnati we’ve driven through deep snow and ice."

The couple is renovating their new home together, doing most the work themselves. "We put in hardwood floors on the main floor and we’re making the loft into our master bedroom. We have a lot of work to do," he said.

The Lebec clinic’s new doctor is a member of the American Academy of Family Physicians and the California Academy of Family Physicians.

This is part of the October 01, 2010 online edition of The Mountain Enterprise.

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