FARMINGTON – They don’t do it for the money. They don’t do it for the good parking space and they certainly don’t do it for the fame.

So why practice medicine in rural Maine when the financial benefits are far better in bigger city hospitals?

Because it makes for a better community, a healthier one. That, and to really make a difference for their neighbors.

That was the word Friday, when area doctors revealed just what keeps them going at the first ever Physicians in Rural Practice Symposium.

“It’s small enough here for us to make a difference, but big enough where that difference is important,” said Burgess Record, medical director for the Western Maine Center for Heart Health and one of the 100 or so people attending the symposium at Franklin Memorial Hospital.

About 75 percent of the event’s participants were clinicians, said organizer Rev. Scott Planting. The rest were local medical students and academics.

“What makes life in rural Maine interesting?” was one of the many topics addressed by panelists at the symposium. Others included “New directions in rural practice” and “Where are we today in rural practice?”

Panelist Cindy Robertson, the only doctor at the Bingham Area Health Center, said her career in Bingham allows her to do exactly what she wants to be doing. Not only does the practice stimulate her professional life but the community stimulates her personal life.

“I got to raise my children in a village where everyone knows them,” she explained. She also gets to live alongside the banks of the Kennebec River. “And my boss manages the business piece so I can practice medicine.”

Plus she said, it’s a place where she can leave a legacy.

As a child growing up in a life of privilege, she vowed to level the playing field by helping those less fortunate. In rural Maine, she feels she can live out that promise.

Mike Rowland, an emergency room doctor, said he chooses to practice medicine in Farmington because it allows him flexibility. He showed people at the symposium photographs from sailing trips that took him around the Atlantic Ocean. The slides, he said, are an illustration that living in a rural place doesn’t have to be limiting.

Here, he can find a balance, serving people in his community, and doing the things he loves, Rowland said.

Local doctor Cam Bopp also hit on the theme of community. Working in rural Maine allows him to better relate to people around the world, he said, more so than working in a city would.

He spoke about a visit to Botswana where he worked in the ER there. “It’s our engagement in our own communities that let’s us go out and be beacons to the rest of the world.”

And he added, working here gives him a chance to be around the decent people Bopp wants to surround himself with.

The conference, Planting said, was so successful that planning for next year should be a cinch. It was a fitting tribute to Dr. Paul Brinkman, a Farmington doctor who died several years ago and for whom the symposium’s keynote lecture was named.

Brinkman, he said, epitomized the values spoken about at the event, both when it comes to practicing medicine and being an active member of a community.

The event was revitalizing, said Robertson, and was a good way to bring together doctors who are often isolated from others in their field. Now, she has new energy and new ideas to take back to rural Bingham.

That’s exactly the response Planting hoped the symposium would have, saying if doctors are happy and find their work in their practice and their communities satisfying, then they’ll stay.

sdepoy@sunjournal.com

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