WENDELL -- Dr. Willis Martin could have retired comfortable in knowing he had helped hundreds of patients who needed a good dermatologist in and around Nash County.
But a problem ate at him. Many of his older patients and those who used wheelchairs had trouble climbing onto his elevated exam tables, and he would try to accommodate them by crouching on the floor. It was no way to treat patients, or the doctor.
So instead of retiring to tend his huge vegetable patch and 10 beehives in Red Oak, Martin decided to launch a new career in the hope of helping many thousands more people who require a doctor's care.
He set about building a better table - an automated lift table. It couples with a special wheelchair. The sides fold down around the table to, voilà, present the patient for an exam.
"I've always been a tinkerer," Martin said, recalling with fondness his boyhood ingenuity in building a motorized chicken feeder using a washing machine engine and a well pulley.
The exam table, while more sophisticated than a gizmo that feeds chickens, achieves the same results: It makes his work easier while improving the care of those he's entrusted to help.
Despite rejections from the major manufacturers of doctor examination tables, Martin is now producing and selling the Chair-A-Table from his own company's headquarters in Wendell.
Martin said he has made sales to the Veterans Administration, plus doctors' offices in North Carolina and beyond - including the United Kingdom, Australia and Kuwait.
"Every doctor who goes to medical school says they want to help people, not make a lot of money," Martin said. "I said that, but I meant it. I mean it now. That's why I'm working so feverishly on doing this."
Inventive boyhood
Martin, 64, credits his inventive streak to growing up in the 1950s on a farm near Lasker in Northampton County, along the Virginia border. The youngest of four children, Martin learned to be resourceful when money was tight and needs were abundant.
The ethic was to fix what broke, and otherwise jury-rig, improvise and invent. In addition to the corn-spewing chicken feeder, the young Martin built a boat, formulated gunpowder to fuel small rockets (a feat under-appreciated by his high school chemistry teacher) and learned plumbing by skipping school to watch the man who equipped the homestead with an indoor john.
"It was a great place and time for a boy to grow up," Martin said.
After high school, he headed to N.C. State University in 1964, where he studied zoology and poultry science, figuring he'd become a veterinarian - a field his high school counselor told him he'd have a better chance of pursuing than medicine.
Doctor in the Pack
After another counselor suggested he apply to UNC-Chapel Hill's prestigious Morehead Scholars program, Martin declined.
"I said 'No ma'am, I'm going to be a vet, and North Carolina State offers that and that's where I'm going,'" he recalled, injecting his infectious heh-heh giggle. "So I applied to North Carolina State only."
Thus began a lifelong devotion to all things Wolfpack - despite attending medical school at Carolina and professing a passing fondness for the Tar Heels.
To pay his way through undergraduate school, he washed test tubes in the biochemistry lab and, during summer breaks, conducted a census of farm land acreage for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, built houses and manned a service station part time at night.
He graduated in 1969 and went to work as a science teacher in Angier, where he also coached football and raised thousands of chickens.
He enrolled in medical school in 1970, discovering dermatology as his passion, and also enrolled in the Navy under a program that enabled him to fulfill four years of reserve duty while in school. He spent 21/2 years in active duty as a flight surgeon, participating in a December 1976 evacuation of Americans and Britons from Beirut during civil unrest in Lebanon.
When he returned to North Carolina in 1980, he opened an office in Rocky Mount.
There he built a busy solo practice, one of the state's largest, until he sold it in 2005, hoping that a part-time tinkerer could become a full-blown innovator.
Getting the patents
Larry Coats, a patent lawyer at Coats and Bennett in Raleigh and a former fraternity brother of Martin's at NCSU, said he has heard all manner of brainstorms in his career, but when Martin called him seven years ago and told him he had this idea for an examination table, Coats knew to take it seriously.
"He's a very persistent man," Coats said. "He calls me down to his office and says he sees patient after patient come in in wheelchairs and they have problems getting on the examination table. He says he started thinking about it and he didn't have any particular drawing, but he had all this in his mind."
Coats said he was immediately captivated by the idea - lifting patients contributes to health care workers' back injuries, which cost an estimated $7.4 billion in direct and indirect expenses.
But he cautioned Martin about the risks.
"My experience is that the great majority of private inventors at the end of the day are not successful," Coats said. "And this is one of the first things I talked with Dr. Martin about. I said, 'You are a doctor, you don't have any experience in designing medical equipment, and this is a long, hard, expensive road.'"
"And he looks at me - he's a very determined person - and he says, 'Don't hand me that. I know what I'm doing.'"
So Coats enlisted a patent draftsman to help put the vision to paper, and they developed drawings according to Martin's instructions. A prototype was built at a farm equipment manufacturer in Virginia.
From there, they filed and were awarded several U.S. and international patents on the table design. He also got the U.S. Food and Drug Administration certification needed for medical equipment.
How the table works
It's an ingenious idea, if obvious. The examination table serves as a lift, lowering to less than 20 inches off the ground while it folds to look like a chair. One segment drops to make room for the legs, the middle segment stays put and serves as a seat, and the third props up as a back.
Then a specially designed wheelchair backs up and fits around the table. The wheelchair's arms and back come off, and the table segments unfold into a horizontal platform that creates a full examination table, which then lifts to a comfortable height. All the while, the patient has never had to leave the chair.
The exam table can also be used without the wheelchair for all other patients, and as a lift table for people who are overweight; it can handle more than 1,000 pounds.
Dr. Tom Andrus, a Raleigh dermatologist, has had a table in his office for about four years, buying one of the first to come off the production line. A colleague and friend of Martin's - he affectionately calls his buddy a redneck - Andrus said the table has solved a difficult problem for him.
"My patients have aged as I have aged," he said, noting that ordinary examination tables are too high for many older patients to access.
"It was well thought-out," Andrus said.
Martin's startup
Initially, Martin tried to sell the idea to the big examination table manufacturers, but they showed no interest. So in the space of two weeks, tapping friends and colleagues, he lined up $2 million in startup funds to launch his own business, Martin Manufacturing.
"I had a decision to make - did I let this idea go, or did I take it to the next step on my own," he said. "I took a walk in the woods behind my house ... and did a lot of deep thinking. I realized if I continued to practice medicine until I was on my last breath, the last patient I saw would be the last person I ever helped.
"But if I were able to bring this idea to reality, then I would be able to help people not just in Nash and surrounding counties in Eastern North Carolina, but all over North Carolina and all over world, and this device would aid those people to get a better exam, and aid nurses from hurting their backs lifting patients, and aid doctors to do better diagnoses and treatment."
Martin Manufacturing now operates from its production site in Wendell. Although he's not building thousands of the tables, business is growing.
Coats said Martin has dozens of additional ideas to help people who have physical difficulties. He has no doubt those ideas will one day be developed.
"He's a farm boy, so he can do anything with his hands," Coats said. "He's just very creative, and he knows how to make things work. He's an inspiring man."
