A Country Doctor Writes:

Earlier this evening I took my first sauna of the season. The temperature reached 149 degrees Fahrenheit an I don’t wear my glasses under such circumstances. The sauna does have a timer in the control panel and I knew the length of the playlist on my iPhone playing on my Bose on the wooden bench outside the glass doors (better than the built-in speakers). But now and then I wanted to check the remaining time on the control panel, less than six feet away. There’s no way I could do that with my naked eyes. So what I did was create a pinhole effect with my right index finger curled to its maximum almost and then resting against the palm of my hand and my outstretched thumb. That way, I could see perfectly clearly what the temperature was, and how much time was remaining on the timer.

This pinhole effect, as it is called, can overcome nearsightedness and farsightedness, even to fairly extreme degrees, because the small hole only allows the straight light beams to go through, not the ones that come from further away from the center. Early cameras did not have a lens. They just had a pinhole, for example.

I love optics and ophthalmology and briefly considered becoming an eye doctor myself, but I worried that an extremely nearsighted eye doctor might have trouble doing his job, and I was also worried that I might be at risk for retinal detachment because of my nearsightedness so I became a family doctor interested in eye diseases. I’ve written about that a few times before.

Altered Vision

Low Tech Medicine

A Bad Case of Congestion

Not On Call

My WordPress blog, Acountrydoctorwrites.blog, started in 2008. My dashboard here displays what countries each day’s readers are coming from. Lately I see more and more Chinese readers, which is a little surprising given what we think of access to Internet, etc. there.

I’m sharing today’s viewer map, not because it’s a particularly busy day, but because so far today, my Chinese readers are in the majority.

WordPress has a fairly new nice feature. Every day it lists posts that you had published on the same day and month since you started working with them. Today the list included a post from five years ago that I had forgotten about. It is about finding your niche and your style in your practice. I enjoyed rereading it and I’m including it here because I figured if I didn’t remember writing it, most readers don’t remember reading it.

How to be an Expert: Narrow Niche or Novel Juxtaposition

Galileo Maine is going out of business as of January 1 because WellCare Maine is not renewing our contract. This afternoon I signed the offer letter from Northern Light to be their lead physician for their Caribou clinic on Bennett drive and their Fort Fairfield clinic in the old hospital. I’ll be starting part-time with them in December, maybe even sooner.

In the early 2000s at Bucksport Regional Health Center, I did house calls one day a week. I have written about many of them, for example here and here.

Covering for Galileo’s missing Bangor market provider the other day, I took our mobile unit down to that area and found myself driving through Bucksport. On the Mast Hill road I noticed a house I hadn’t thought about for twenty years. It is where Richard Westman lived. He was the visually impaired man who swore he saw little people outside his window and a family member of his guided me to his diagnosis.

Driving past his house brought back so many memories of my years down there and the many patients I saw in their homes. I have written this before, but seeing a patient in their own environment gives you so much more information and so much better chance of building a relationship than seeing them in an office for a few minutes.

Now and for the rest of my days, driving through Westfield, Mars Hill and Monticello, I will pass houses I will no longer visit after Galileo Maine ceases to exist. But those towns and those patient homes are on the road I will inevitably continue to travel to get from my home in Caribou to Bangor, Bar Harbor, Old Orchard Beach, Portland and all points beyond, more often than I now drive down the back roads of Bucksport.