The first time I spoke with Justin Moore, MD, I felt like I’d known him for years. His enthusiasm is infectious, and he speaks about being a critical care doctor as persuasively as a preacher on Sunday. He’s much more than an evangelist though – he walks the walk. He recently completed a locum tenens assignment with Interim Physicians, and he regaled me with so many stories we may write a regular series about Dr. Moore even though he made my eyes well up more than once. But that’s life in the ICU.
Dr. Moore’s journey to the ICU is full of twists and turns. For starters, he never aspired to become a doctor. “It wasn’t something I knew anything about,” he says. His high school GPA was 1.98, and that was before he got kicked out – twice. “I had no direction. None,” says Dr. Moore. “I didn’t even graduate from high school. I got a GED.” It’s true, though he grew up in the sunny citrus and olive groves of the San Juoaquin Valley, the future-doctor Moore’s adolescence wasn’t all sunshine. It took a big change and a lot of help from an unlikely spiritual source to point him in a positive direction.
