February 13, 2023 – It's infrequently that a highschool gang brawl leads you to develop into a Harvard-educated doctor. But that's exactly how Alister Martin's life went.
Alister Martin, MD, had originally planned to follow in his stepfather's footsteps and run the pharmacy in Neptune, New Jersey, the township where he grew up, but a struggle modified his prospects.
In hindsight, he must have seen it coming. That night, his best friend was attacked on the party by a gang member from a close-by highschool. Martin was not a gang member, but he jumped into the fray to defend his friend.
“I wanted to save the situation, but that didn't happen,” he says. “There were just too many.”
When his mother rushed to the hospital, he was so bruised and bloody that she didn't recognize him at first. Since he was a baby, she had done her best to maintain him away from the neighborhood, where gang violence was a daily rage. But it hadn't worked.
“My high school had a zero-tolerance policy toward gang violence,” Martin says. “So even though I wasn't in a gang, I got kicked out.”
His mother, who had expelled him from highschool, desired to take him out of town because she feared retaliation from the gang or that Martin might seek revenge on the boy who brutally beat him. So the biology teacher and single mother, who worked multiple jobs to maintain herself afloat, got here up with a plan to take him distant from all temptation.
Martin had loved tennis since middle school, when his eighth-grade math teacher, Billie Weise, also a tennis pro, got him a job sweeping the courts at an upscale local tennis club. He knew nothing about tennis on the time, but later fell in love with the game. To get her son out of town, Martin's mother took out a $30,000 loan and sent him to a tennis training camp in Florida.
After 6 months of coaching, Martin, who earned a GED throughout the camp, received a scholarship to play tennis at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, NJ. However, the transition to school was rough. He was nervous and felt misplaced. “I could have died that first day. It became so obvious how poorly my high school education had prepared me for this.”
But the discomfort he felt was also motivating in a way. Fearing failure, he “locked himself in a room with another student and they studied day and night,” recallsKamal KhanDirector of the Office of Diversity and Academic Success at Rutgers. “I've never experienced anything like this.”
And Martin demonstrated other qualities that will attract others – and that will prove necessary later in his profession as a physician. His ability to point out empathy and relate to students and teachers set him other than his peers, Khan says. “There are a lot of really smart students out there,” he says, “but not many who understand people like Martin does.”
After graduating, he decided to pursue his dream and develop into a physician. He had desired to be a physician since he was ten years old, after his mother was diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer. He remembers overhearing a conversation she was having with a family friend about where he would go if she died.
“That’s when I knew it was serious,” he says.
Doctors saved her life and he’ll always remember that. But it was during his time at Rutgers University that he finally had the boldness to achieve medical school.
Martin attended Harvard Medical School and the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and was chief of drugs at Brigham and Women's Hospital. He also served as a fellow within the Office of the Vice President on the White House and is now an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School.
He feels most comfortable within the emergency room of Massachusetts General Hospital, where he works as Emergency physician. For him, the emergency room is the primary line of defense in terms of meeting the community's health needs. When he was growing up in Neptune, “the emergency room was where the poor went,” he says. His mother worked two jobs, and when she got off work at 8 p.m., there have been no pediatricians available. “When I was sick as a kid, we always went to the emergency room,” he says.
During his time at Harvard he was also graduated from the Kennedy School of Government because he believes that politics plays a giant role in our health care system, especially in how we serve impoverished communities. And since then, he has taken quite a few steps to shut that gap.
Addiction, for instance, became a significant issue for Martin when he met a patient during his first week as an internist. She was a mother of two and had recently undergone surgery for breaking her ankle in a fall on the steps at her child's daycare, he says. She was prescribed oxycodone and nervous she might develop into addicted and needed help. But on the time, there was nothing the emergency room could do.
“I remember the look in their eyes when we had to turn them away,” he says.
Martin has worked to vary practices at his hospital and others across the country in order that they are higher prepared to treat opioid addiction. He is the founding father of GetWaivered, a corporation that trains doctors across the country to make use of evidence-based medicine to treat opioid addiction. In the U.S., doctors need what's called a DEA X waiver to prescribe buprenorphine to opioid-dependent patients. This implies that currently only about 1% of all emergency physicians nationwide have this waiver, and without it, it's unimaginable to assist patients once they need it most.
Shuhan He, MD, a Martin internist at Massachusetts General Hospital who also works on the GetWaivered program, says Martin has a special quality that helps him succeed.
“He is a doer and if he sees a problem, he will try to solve it.”