A Country Doctor Writes:

I have had some requests for bulk orders. This is now available for $10/book in increments of 10, standard domestic shipping and tax included. This price is essentially the wholesale price bookstores pay. Ships after payment is received.

10 each of CONDITIONS paperback

$100.00

And stay tuned for the September 7 release of A Country Doctor Writes: PROGRESS NOTES – Starting, Growing and Staying in the Medical Profession.

• For single orders, or fewer than 10, visit your local bookstore or buy from Amazon.

Suddenly it’s perfectly clear: There is endless profit potential for countless corporations in America’s chronic disease epidemic, and it is in their interest that people with chronic disease stay as sick as possible without dying from their disease. Why risk research money on acute disease when there is no continuing revenue stream to look forward to?

— Read on www.kevinmd.com/blog/2020/08/there-is-endless-profit-potential-to-treat-chronic-diseases.html

“In medicine these days, we seem to do more rescuing difficult situations than mastering an art that inspires and rewards us: The very skills that make us good at our jobs can be the ones that make us burn out.

Doctors are so good at solving problems and handling emergencies that we often fall into the trap of doing more and more of that just because we are able to, even though it’s not always the right thing to do – even though it costs us energy and consumes a little bit of life force every time we do it. And it’s not always the case that we are asked to do this. We are pretty good at putting ourselves in such situations because of what we call our work ethic.”

— Read on www.kevinmd.com/blog/2020/08/4-pitfalls-that-run-through-the-minds-and-daily-realities-of-primary-care-doctors.html

Now that we are seeing patients via telemedicine or even getting reimbursed for handling their issues over the phone, our existing healthcare institutions are more and more starting to look like shopping malls.

They were once traffic magnets, so large that they created new developments far away from where people lived or worked and big and complex enough that going there became an all day affair for many people…

— Read on
https://thehealthcareblog.com/blog/2020/08/05/post-covid-healthcare-is-becoming-like-buying-from-amazon-instead-of-going-to-the-mall-or-reading-an-ebook-instead-of-a-paperback/

(A Personal Reflection I put on my LinkedIn profile in 2018, which now seems like a lifetime ago; not a medical topic but a piece about who I am.)

Saturday morning, Memorial Day weekend: I pat the barn animals as I leave our 1790 farmhouse through the attached barn and garage. The air smells salty as I close the garage door and glance at my Swedish vanity place. I climb into my big, white European SUV, built in America, start the V8 engine and let the wipers clear the mist off the windshield. 

National Public Radio doesn’t have a news program on Saturdays, so I decide to play a James Taylor album from 1971. I have it on LP, CD and now also on my iPhone and iPad. The music starts belting out through the Harman-Kardon speakers: “Don’t come to me with your sorrows anymore…”, the first song on “Mud Slide Slim and the Blue Horizon”.

I still remember the first time I heard this album. I was at my girlfriend’s house back in Sweden. It was the spring of the year I later went to the U.S. as an exchange student. Her older brother came storming into the living room and said “You’ve got to hear this album”. I had never heard of James Taylor. I had dropped out of violin lessons a few years earlier and taught myself to play guitar, and I was all into folk music like Peter, Paul and Mary. My renditions of “If I Had a Hammer”, “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” and “Leaving on a Jet Plane” were starting to earn me a place beyond the mere bookworms, but the music I now heard was way beyond anything I had tried to copy before.

My girlfriend listened with approval, if not enthusiasm, but when her brother and I turned the record over again to Side One to start playing it a second time, she left the room and joined her sister. Her brother and I settled back and listened again. I was mesmerized by the melancholy melodies, the almost-bossa-nova strumming rhythm and the conga-like percussion. This music was contemporary America, the country I already knew I was in love with, a country full of individuality and both optimism and soulfulness.

The winding country road I drive to work is empty of traffic. There is a faint morning sunshine filtering through a light haze. The mountains of Mount Desert Island create a jagged blue horizon across the water. As I listen to “You’ve Got a Friend” I reflect on how I don’t feel 47 years older than when I first heard that song and figured out the chords to it. And the next song, “Places in My Past”, sums up a few sentiments from my own life as it has evolved since then.

I think of how strange and yet natural it is that this introverted boy from Sweden ended up living in America. I have lived here much longer than I lived in Sweden. My Swedish passport expired a couple of years ago, and I can go months without uttering, or even thinking, a word in Swedish. 

My home is here in America, in two places, an old white farmhouse in Downeast Maine and a little red cottage in Caribou, not far from the 1870’s colony of New Sweden, within hiking distance of Canada and right next to Amish country in Fort Fairfield. 

I drive past Noel (Paul) Stookey’s house. How odd, my teen musical hero before James Taylor, right on my way to work. I even see him in the hardware or grocery store sometimes. 

On the album’s hypnotic title track, James Taylor sings “Now the reason I’m smiling is over on an island, on a hillside in the woods where I belong”. I am at home on a narrow peninsula and on the edge of the northern woods, both places reminiscent of Sweden but very much American. 

The road winds a bit inland and my thoughts and emotions keep jumping back and forth between me at eighteen and now about to turn Medicare age. I have read that the music you hear between the ages of 17 and 23 stays with you the rest of your life. It has indeed. When I was 23, he released “In the Pocket”, and, if I have to be honest, maybe after “JT” when I was 24, I didn’t feel quite the same tug in my heart every time I listened to one of his new albums, but I always bought them and enjoyed them, because we grew up together and he sang quite eloquently about so much of what I felt. 

As I pull into the staff parking lot, the short last song, “Isn’t it Nice to Be Home Again” is playing. I turn off the engine and leave the music on until it ends. I have driven 30 miles, listened to 13 songs in 37 minutes and in my mind traversed 3,500 miles and 47 very short years.