West Orange Physicians Group, Health Central Hospital, Ocoee

OCOEE - Victor Matthews is the first to admit he’s a workaholic. “You know how they say ‘All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy?’ Well, my name should be Jack,” quipped the 43-year-old endocrinologist.

Such dedication to his profession may be an affliction for Matthews, but it is an asset for his patients, many of whom depend on him to manage their diabetes and glandular disorders.

Matthews’ clinic is part of the multi-speciality West Orange Physicians Group, which Health Central Hospital, a subsidiary of Orlando Health, employs to treat inpatients. “There was a huge need” for his speciality, Matthews said. “There are only two of us in a 25-square-mile area,” he said, referring to the endocrinologist with whom he partnered in February, Maribel Montoya, MD.

“I like this hospital,” Matthews said. When he came here in 2005, “I joined several endocrine practices in the Orlando area, but never really fit in.” In 2008, “I finally found the right place for me” at Health Central, he said. “I get to care for my patients, as well as consult on hospitalized patients for their endocrinopathies just at a time when most endocrinologists nationwide are leaving the hospital setting,” he said.

The path Matthews followed to Ocoee is intriguing. When his Japanese-born mother gave birth to him in San Antonio, Texas in 1967, his father could not be there because he was half-a-world-away, serving in the U.S. Air Force as the Vietnam War neared its pinnacle. At age 3, his dad was transferred to Hickam AFB, Hawaii, and Matthews, his mom and his sister lived there for the next 10 years.

The family returned to the mainland and settled near Keesler AFB in Biloxi, Miss. Their mother “pressed her children hard to study and do well in school,” Matthews said. “I performed well academically all the way through college (Millsaps College in Jackson, Miss.). I had the aptitude for medical school, but I did not have the funds,” he said.

So, Matthews found a way to achieve his goal. He joined the Air Force, which agreed to pay for medical school at the University of Mississippi, as well as a second lieutenant’s salary for the next four years. He enlisted in 1989, just a month after his father retired as a technical sergeant and a 30-year military career. The timing was strategic, Matthews said. “He intentionally retired” before Matthews was commissioned “so he wouldn’t have to salute me.”

“After I graduated Ole Miss Medical School in 1993, I was selected to attend a military residency in internal medicine. I chose Keesler AFB.  So, I spent the next three years in the military, but in my hometown as well. It was a great experience. I got to serve my country and I got to be around people with similar backgrounds from all over the country,” he said.

Following a three-year internal medicine residency, Matthews headed to Scott AFB, Ill., just across from St. Louis, Mo., in 1996. He was promoted to the rank of major and appointed chief of the internal medicine clinic. He married and built a house while also overseeing “the clinic’s transition from the previous healthcare system to a commercial healthcare system, TRICARE,” for military personnel. Matthews said he was offered a position to help implement TRICARE “on a larger scale, but I would have had to sacrifice direct patient care. I just could not give up my patients,” he said. “I could not be an administrative doctor. ... I would have lost my reason for getting up in the morning,” he said.

It was while he was in St. Louis that he began to dream about living in Florida one day. “Every day I would drive past a billboard. It had a beach scene and the only word on it was ‘Florida.’ I would be driving in February and dodging the ice falling off the truck in front of me, asking myself, ‘What am I doing here?’ he remembered.

After he was honorably discharged from the Air Force in 2000, he returned to Mississippi, where he “started to take care of general internal medicine patients, and I especially enjoyed caring for patients with multiple medical problems, specifically diabetes,” he said. In 2003, he accepted a fellowship in endocrinology, diabetes and metabolism at his alma mater, Ole Miss. Two years later, he, his wife and baby daughter Kate, moved to Orlando.

Kate is now 7 years old. He and his wife are divorced, but he remains an involved and committed parent. “She says when she grows up she wants to be an ‘insulin doctor,’” he said.

“Things have improved for me. I met and started dating Kelley Sherwood. We’ve been together almost four years,” he said. Sherwood is a registered nurse and a certified diabetes educator and works full-time in Matthews’ clinic. “I could not be happier, personally or professionally ... You can be around someone 24 hours a day and still love them and get along,” he said.

His clinic is growing as word spreads that “people with diabetes get great results. ... It’s a win-win outcome for us and our patients,” he said.

“What inspired me about endocrinology is that it is more than just about numbers. You have to get into people’s heads,” Matthews said. “You have to know what motivates them and you have to sit down and reason with them. It’s psychology and I am drawn to the challenge of those interpersonal skills.”

Matthews is concerned that “what passes for diabetes care today is so 1990s,” he said. But he remains enthusiastic about the future of care for diabetes patients. “There are so many (effective) drugs coming out now,” he said, and it will change the paradigm for how physicians in his subspeciality will approach the disease. It won’t be long, he predicts, before diabetics will be able to take a once-a-day pill that will “lower your sugar, let you eat what you want and lose weight,” he said. “It’s the American pill. They should color it red-white-and-blue,” he said, drawing a comparison to the so-called “purple pill” that revolutionized the treatment of acid reflux disease.

In the meantime, Matthews said he will continue to be a mostly-work, no-play person. “If I’m not seeing outpatients, I’m making rounds at the hospital,” I don’t take time for much else.”

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