The rarest doctors treat patients, not disease

The Boston Herald

Beverly Beckham

What you want when you or someone you love is sick is a caring human being on the other end of a telephone line. You don't want voice-mail. ("Press your party's extension, now.") You don't want to be put on hold. You don't want to be told that the doctor returns all phone calls after 5:00 p.m. and doesn't have an opening until March 13. You want someone to listen to you, to advise you, to treat you as if you matter.

Doctors like this are hard to find. My mother was critically ill for 18 years and for 17 of them we dealt with a long succession of physicians who saw head injury and aphasia and bed sores and atrophy and rheumatoid arthritis, but never saw my mother. She was her medical chart, a list of chronic problems, and nothing more. I used to think sometimes that I should carry a dossier to hand to the host of people who examined her and talked to her and walked away not having ever seen her. This is who she was before she got sick, I wanted to say. She was a daughter, wife, mother, worker, friend, singer of silly songs, lover of old movies, life of a party. This is what she still is inside. She's not much different from you and or from me.

But only one doctor ever recognized this and saw past her medical problems clear to her soul. "She has a great sense of humor," Deborah O'Keefe, an internist at Carney Hospital, said the first time she met my mother. In 17 years, no other physician had even noticed. But Deborah treats people, not patients. She recognizes individuals, not just their diseases.

Dr. Nelson Batchelder, a general practitioner in Canton for more than 35 years, is the same kind of caring, accessible doctor. You call his office and his wife, Lois, answers the phone. You ask for an appointment and you get one, immediately if it's an emergency, within a few days if it isn't. When you say you'd like to speak to the doctor, he comes to the phone, and if he can't he calls back between patients. If you have a 9:30 appointment, he sees you before 9:35.

He always explains, in simple words, no matter if you're nine or 90, exactly what he's doing, why's he's performing certain procedures, and what results he's found. He's aware of people's personal histories as well as their medical problems and because he cares for entire families he treats them as extensions of his own.

My friend Caryn praised Batch long before I started going to him. "He's wonderful," she said. "There's no one like him." He's been her doctor since she was a child. He delivered two of her children, the first while on crutches. "I was eight months pregnant when he broke his leg. I didn't want to switch doctors and he didn't make me." He's been her husbands' doctor and her children's' doctor and her parents and brother and sisters' doctor.

I don't remember when or how he became my doctor. It seems as if he has always been. I remember calling him one Easter, years ago when my son was about nine and had hives in his mouth and ears and all over his body. Batch wasn't my son's doctor, but I called him anyway. His answering service had to page him and I imagined I'd torn him away from the family meal and I thought he might be cold and abrupt and deservedly annoyed that I had interrupted him.

But he wasn't. He asked what the problem was, listened while I told him, gave some instructions, said to call back later if I didn't see any improvement. "I'm sorry to have bothered you," I apologized. He said it really was no bother at all and that he was glad he could help.

He's helped so many times. When Caryn was diagnosed with breast cancer and given a host of options, she went to Batch for advice. When my father was diagnosed with prostate cancer, I called Batch to find out what he would do if he were my father. Whatever the medical problem, it's always been, "Call Batch."

In a world of swirling change, he has been a constant. But not for much longer.

Batch is retiring Dec. 31 not because he's sick or too old to practice. He's retiring because there's no longer room in the system for a small-town, caring doctor whose office is part of his house. To continue his practice, he'd have to get computers and someone to run them and someone to fill out the host of medical forms now required by everyone and he'd have to start asking his patients, the way so many doctors do these days before even asking a name, "Do you have medical insurance?"

He's never done this. He's never turned anyone's bill over to a collection agency. And he never will.

"Your trust, friendship, and loyalty have made my practice a most rewarding experience," he wrote to more than 1,000 of his patients.

It's been his trust and friendship and loyalty that have made the years with Dr. Batchelder rewarding for us.