Valley doctor has practiced medicine for nearly six decades
Dr. Jorge Treviño helped populate the Rio Grande Valley.
The doctor, who is 86 years old, began practicing medicine in McAllen in 1955. During his time here, he estimates he has delivered about 15,000 babies.
“Somebody else did the job,” Treviño said. “I just delivered them.”
These days, he still sees some of those babies. They’re all grown, and he now treats them as a family doctor. They beg him not to retire, and he tells them he won’t.
Treviño has no plans to stop. As he approaches 90, he has become a bit shorter and much skinnier. And he now works shorter days, but he remains as sharp as ever.
“I love to work. I’m in good health for my age,” he said. “My patients tell me, ‘Don’t retire — we need you here.’”
NO RETIRING
Treviño, a Monterrey native, got his first medical job in Reynosa.
He worked for Pemex, the state-owned oil company in Mexico. He treated workers on the oil fields when they fell ill or suffered accidents. He did that for about 18 months before heading north in search of opportunities to learn.
In the United States, he studied and interned at hospitals in Ohio, Illinois and Texas.
He came to the Valley because it was close to his family and the area had a great need for doctors.
In those days, you could almost count the number of qualified physicians in South Texas on your hands. Treviño found work quickly, and he later opened the McAllen Maternity Clinic with Dr. Rafael Garza.
“It was a small town, McAllen,” he said. “Not too many streets.”
Treviño also saw patients in McAllen’s hospital, which at the time was located on Main Street. He did everything from delivering babies to performing appendectomies. Most doctors at the time were equally as versatile.
Unlike now, there weren’t many specialists in the area. Only the very wealthy had health insurance, and the single piece of technology in the hospital was an X-ray machine. Thus he has seen many changes.
After working with patients at the hospital for years, Treviño worked as the University of Texas-Pan American’s medical director for student health services until about 2003.
These days, he is a general practitioner at McAllen Primary Care, where he sees about 25 to 30 patients each day.
His children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren have stopped asking him when he plans to quit.
“By now, they know I won’t retire until I’m physically or mentally unable,” he said.
FAMILY DOCTOR
Treviño still sees many of the patients he delivered into the world. With more than five decades of experience, he has established a strong level of trust with many families throughout the area.
Take Rosabel Balderas. She’s 90 years old and has known Treviño for 50 years. He treated her, her husband, her father, her mother-in-law and her sisters.
“He’s a family doctor,” Balderas said. “He’s like our brother. He’s not like a doctor when you’re talking with him.”
In the early 1990s, Balderas said, her husband, Antonio Balderas, suffered a heart attack, and doctors told him he had four months to live if he didn’t consent to surgery. He didn’t want to go under the knife. With Treviño’s care, her husband lived 16 more years. He passed away in 2002 at the age of 85.
Balderas said she wouldn’t trust another doctor to treat her.
“I go to see him because he has a lot of experience,” she said. “I’m not going to see the doctor. I’m going to see the man with a lot of experience.”
