Beaumont, TX
Changing People’s Lives One at a Time
Dr. Martin’s path to becoming a sought-after OBGYN physician with Texas Center for Health had an unlikely start. She grew up in Omaha, Nebraska, and, as the daughter of a professional horse trader, she thought she would become a veterinarian.
In college, she majored in animal science and taught in that field for several years. Later, she became reinterested in medicine, but it wasn’t to become a vet; instead, she applied to medical school at the University of Illinois College of Medicine, thinking she would become a family practice physician.
“As I got into the OBGYN rotation, the surgery was fascinating,” she said. “We were the first specialists to do laparoscopy and that really interested me.” She graduated from medical school in 1991, then did a residency in OB/GYN medicine at the University of Virginia-affiliated Carilion Center for Women and Children in Roanoke, Virginia. After that, she moved back to the Midwest, working in the Indiana/Chicago area and Oklahoma City, then joined the TCH staff of medical providers in 2020.
“What drew me to Texas Center for Health is that it is always patient-centered. It’s like your best girlfriends come in every day to visit and you get to sit down and talk to them about what’s going on in their lives, so there’s never been an urgency, never any churning out patients like cattle in a chute. They’re reaching out because trust has been gained. Doing gynecology is not like looking into someone’s ear. It’s very intimate, and the things we discuss are very intimate, so it has not surprised me in the least that in times of uncertainty and stress that women have turned to me for things that are totally unrelated. Besides your pastor or minister, your gynecologist and your hairdresser are the people you will confide in.”
She went on to say, “I might never be on billboards and famous for what I do, but you change people’s lives one at a time.”
Dr. Martin’s Catholic faith informs her medical practice. “I follow the teachings, which means I don’t prescribe artificial contraception and I don’t do sterilization.” She said that some people see this as a limitation, “but what it allows me to do is to work up the underlying reasons why women develop gynecological problems and to explain our fertility, which is actually limited to 96 hours in an entire month. If they don’t hear it here, they’re not going to hear it any place else. That knowledge has taken me around the world to talk about these things.” She’s internationally known for her expertise in the Billings Ovulation Method of natural family planning and is a Fellow with the Reproductive Health Research Center of Santiago, Chile.
Outside work, Dr. Martin’s main interests are cutting horses and dogs. Cutting horses are bred to go into a herd of cattle, single out a cow and separate it from the herd so it can be roped and then doctored. She has a two-year-old filly in training, a broodmare due to foal, and a companion pony for the mare. Her home is on 10 acres outside Beaumont, a land she says is an old rice paddy. Dr. Martin has two adult children she’s proud of: a married daughter with a year-old baby, and a son who is active army and currently stationed in Kenya.
She specializes in obstetrics, gynecology, bioidentical hormone supplementation, infertility, recurrent miscarriage, and InterStim therapy for bladder and bowel incontinence for both men and women. She is board-certified in obstetrics and gynecology, and a Fellow of the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists.
