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Dr. Martin Moix is a Conway native, who, in addition to maintaining a busy practice also finds time to volunteer.

Dr. Martin Moix is a Conway native through and through.

"Yeah, I'm an 'RV Moix,' not a 'carpet Moix,'" he said. "That's how people tell the Moixes apart, by what we do."

After staying in town to attend Hendrix College, Moix didn't know what to do next.

"I had no medical background at all; no one in my family is a doctor," Moix said. "And it was just one of those things. I took the MCAT and got in, and then I decided to go. And going through the process and the system, I kind of got attracted to internal medicine."

But how did he get to his subspecialty, gastroenterology?

"My friends say I was born to be a gastroenterologist, but that may not be complimentary to me," Moix said, with a laugh. "My father-in-law is an internist (in Tulsa) and right before I was going to start medical school, he let me come up and hang around. One of his partners was going to be doing an endoscopy and back in those days it was literally looking through a tube ... and that one particular guy had a polyp, so I got interested in it."

Moix did indeed become interested in polyps, so much so he became "Polyp Man," at least for a day and on the front page of the Log Cabin Democrat, the daily newspaper in Conway.

"Polyp Man is an official, licensed character from the American Cancer Society," Moix explained. "It's a character created by the Cancer Society to raise awareness of colon cancer through the humiliation of doctors and making them into the super villain. It just gets into people's heads that they need to get their colons checked."

Moix dons the suit once a year but, "I'm not the only one who does Polyp Man, though. I'm just the local Polyp Man."

The suit itself is interesting.

"How would I describe it?" Moix mulled. "It's just an amorphous blob, just a big red suit shaped like, sort of like, aaghh … I can't describe it. But it is larger at the bottom and you wear a little red hat with it and these big, dorky glasses."

And with the sarcasm fully engaged, he said, "it's a real joy to wear, especially when it's warm."

But more seriously, "I'd like to do it more often. It's kind of fun and serves a purpose. Colon cancer is the third most common cancer that we deal with. Everyone across the board needs to be checked, especially if they have a family history. If you have (a family history), you need to be checked at 40, but the good news is that you only need one (colonoscopy) every 10 years or so."

Moix made a recent addition to his practice when he hired Mariana Fayman, a physician assistant. And it has had a huge effect on his business.

"Before, on a good day, I would see 15 people in clinic, and do scopes on five people," he said. "Now, we see close to 30 or more people together in a day of clinic and I'm doing more like 10 scopes a day. I probably average 30 to 40 procedures a week these days."

It all comes down to matter of time.

"There's only physically so many people I can see and not lose quality of care," Moix said. "The problem we were getting into was that we weren't able to get people in. Couldn't get them scoped in time and couldn't get them evaluated or anything else and adding the PA was crucial ... Mariana frees me up to see more complex problems. I mean, if you were to come in for a follow-up, you wouldn't need to see me. She could take care of it."

Moix figures other doctors will follow his lead.

"I think more physicians will get to a nurse practitioner or a PA because it allows them increased flexibility in the schedule, and it allows for better use of time," he said. "It just makes sense."

And it all comes down to time, even for GIs, who also have a demanding on-call schedule.

"We have three (GIs) in town and we all take a week [of call] at a time," Moix said. "I'm actually on call right now. There are days when I don't have to go in at all and then there are days like today when I've already had two patients. So it is kind of variable ... but we stay pretty busy."

Despite being busy with his practice and on-call, Moix makes it to the UAMS campus, where he is an assistant professor. "I go down half a day a week and teach scopes," he said.

Moix has also been known to entertain patients at Christmastime with his saxophone, but he wants to do more.

"St. Vincent's has a band that is entirely made up of doctors," Moix said. "I want a band."

ie.
October 2006

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