Adrian Burrowes overcomes Formidable odds to become family physician

Giving Back to One’s Community

"Class, you’ll need a crystal ball for this assignment!” the Brooklyn seventhgrade teacher informed her students. “Please write down where you think you’ll be 20 years from now. I’m going to place your predictions in a time capsule that will be opened in two decades.”

Adrian Burrowes, M.D. ’00, saw himself married, raising two children, and a physician healing the sick. However, his teacher found Burrowes’s medical ambitions a tad over-the-top. She returned his paper with a dismissive note scrawled across the top: “I want you to give me a more realistic assessment!”

“I told my mom,” says Burrowes, now a family practice doctor who was one of nine Miller School students to graduate with honors in his class of 162 physicians. “The first thing next morning, my mom went right to the school.” After Maureen Burrowes read the riot act to her son’s naysayer teacher, she stopped by the principal’s office to deliver a scathing lecture about foisting diminished expectations on inner-city school students.

Adrian Burrowes’s path to becoming a top medical student, then an accomplished young M.D., is a story of resilience, perseverance, and of taking a road less traveled. It’s about defying odds as well as defying death. That’s because during his earliest years,
dream-killing instructors were the least of Burrowes’s worries. The first order of business was to make it out of his rough-and-tumble Crown Heights, Brooklyn, neighborhood without being in a coffin or a squad car.

“We only had 11 guys in my elementary school class. Four are dead, five are incarcerated, and then there’s me and another guy,” Burrowes observes matter-of-factly. During those times, when his day-to-day existence wasn’t presenting life-threatening challenges, health problems stepped in to fill the void.

“I had pretty severe asthma, and I was in and out of the hospital all the time,” recalls Burrowes, who never fell in with Brooklyn’s hooligan element thanks to his mother’s firm hand. “The last time I was admitted, I was actually in a coma from pneumonia.”

Burrowes was treated by a conscientious young internal medicine intern named Lynn Sayres, M.D., who ignited his interest in medicine. “Every time I went to her, I would ask
her to show me something different,” he says. “Dr. Sayres was very engaging and saw that I was developing a love of medicine.”

Not long afterward, Burrowes and his family encountered something that prompted them to leave Brooklyn for good. “We were staying in a building that was basically a crack house,” Burrowes remembers. “We had dealers in the lobby selling drugs.”

One night Burrowes, his mother, and his sister were climbing a dark stairwell in the building when they encountered a young man wearing a trenchcoat who whirled and pointed a shotgun at them. “My mom—I don’t know how she was so calm—she just
started talking to him,” Burrowes says. “It was as if she didn’t see the gun.” Moments after his mother got her family past safely, Burrowes heard a booming shotgun blast emanate from the stairwell, the final sound heard by a teenage shooting victim.

Maureen quickly moved her family to Orlando, where she found work as a dental assistant. After she suffered a stroke while Burrowes was a high school junior, he began working in a supermarket and for a formal wear company that paid him to wear prom tuxedoes to school.

Even though his mother wasn’t 100 percent recovered and money was in short supply, she put the kibosh on Burrowes’s employment when his grades began to suffer.

After high school, Burrowes attended the University of Central Florida, where he and other students founded an American Medical Association chapter. Burrowes became
chapter president and arranged for members to visit various medical schools.

“That’s what got me in the door to go to the University of Miami,” he recalls. “I fell in love with that place immediately! The size of the medical center is absolutely overwhelming, and the surrounding indigent population is significant. That mattered to me, because I was trying to give back.”

While attending the Miller School, Burrowes decided he wanted to pursue family medicine. “And everybody said to him, ‘Adrian, what are you, crazy?’” recalls Robert
Schwartz, M.D., chair of the Department of Family Medicine and Community Health.

“‘Choose a specialty!’ And Adrian said, ‘No, I’m going back to my community.’”

But first Burrowes completed a three-year residency program at Jackson Memorial Hospital. Now in private practice in Casselberry, Florida, Burrowes finds family edicine
enthralling.

“I worked very hard to learn as much as I could about every field of medicine so that I can serve my patients to the best of my ability,” says Burrowes, who got married while he was in Miami.

“It takes someone who’s very dedicated and who believes in lifelong learning to truly be a family practitioner.

“My youngest patient is 3 days old and my oldest is 106,” he continues. “That’s what I always envisioned doing. And I love it.”