Mark Ferdowsian’s hands tell the story of his life.
They’ve swum the scalding waters of a restaurant’s dishwater at age 15, they’ve felt oil splatter against them as a fry cook, they’ve held his newborn children, flipped pages of thick medical textbooks, tended to wounds in an emergency room, and provided medical care to those who desperately need it in the Las Vegas area at one of his five Sunset Clinics.
His hands tell a story that he’s too humble to share — that Ferdowsian, an Iranian immigrant, restaurateur and physician, would go on to open multiple medical clinics that provide preventive care to the Las Vegas Valley’s most needy across the span of nine years.
Ferdowsian’s father emigrated from a small, rural part of Iran to complete his residency in New York as a gastroenterologist in the 1960s before moving his family back to Iran and opening up his own clinic.
“I think I formed my opinion at an early age. I knew I wanted to serve and follow in his footsteps — I would say since I was 10 years old it was a dream, but I wasn’t sure if it ever would come to fruition,” Ferdowsian said.
A year before the Iranian Civil War erupted in 1979, his parents sent their children two at a time to the U.S., the oldest siblings first, followed by the youngest two children, including Ferdowsian. His parents planned to join them after they sold their home and clinic, but the war came fast, the borders closed and because the family belongs to Bahá’í faith, their property was seized.
The family was separated for 10 years.
“I think my father changed the destiny of our entire family,” Ferdowsian said. “We could have been stuck in some small town in Iran without an education. And we instead are now in the United States of America, which is the land of opportunity, I think that has been the driving force is understanding what that principle means and pursuing those opportunities.”
Their children settled in Logan, Utah, but within the first year, the oldest of the three siblings married, leaving Ferdowsian, 15, with a few weeks left on the lease of the apartment they shared and no way to pay rent. He was briefly homeless.
He remembers going business to business submitting job applications until landing a spot as a dishwasher at Golden Corral. He’d work late nights, return back to a family’s garage he was staying in and then attend high school.
Ferdowsian worked his way up to fry cook, then manager, a general manager and to owning his on Golden Corral in California before launching a career in medicine. He married and began his family at 21.
“I’ve applied the same principles to being a doctor, to being a waiter, to being a father — you just have to accept the challenge and give 110 percent,” he said.
Medicine was in his blood. So Ferdowsian attended Western University of Health Sciences, all while raising a family. He did his residency in Detroit and moved to Las Vegas in 2001, where he worked several years as an emergency room doctor before transitioning to running his own clinics.
The clinics are unique because they were one of the first to accept Medicare as insurance and establish a line of preventive care to some of the most vulnerable populations in Las Vegas, he said.
“I was tired of end-stage care where people who had been neglected medically for years would end up half-dead in the emergency department, and I was very interested in prevention and preventive care,” Ferdowsian said. “The big concept of Sunset Clinic was to develop a health care system that will grant access to all the people who ended up in the ER because they didn’t have care.”
He has firsthand experience of the neglect.
Before becoming a doctor, Ferdowsian had a bad emergency-room experience when his daughter was sick. She had a fever and was throwing up, but wasn’t a priority for staff because the family had limited resources. That moment had a lasting impact, said Tuyet Nguyen, who has worked alongside Ferdowsian at Sunset Clinic for about 10 years.
“He promised himself he wouldn’t treat someone that way, and he wanted to show what being a compassionate doctor is about,” Nguyen said. “... The success of the Sunset Clinics is having that heart and compassion. [Ferdowsian's] model behind all of this is doing what’s right.”
The first Sunset Clinic opened in March 2009; four additional clinic have followed. They are a part of the OptumCare Network of Nevada.