PUTNEY — “It's time to move on to something else.”
That's what Walter Slowinski, M.D., said of his Oct. 22 departure from the Putney Medical Office, where he has been practicing for the last 12 years.
Slowinski said his decision has nothing to do with finances and everything to do with wanting to focus on his lifelong passion for making clay pots, developing a web presence to market them, finding galleries to carry his ceramics, and “moving [his] work out into the world.”
Things have changed for doctors like him, Slowinski admits, in that the “bureaucratic and legal systems don't deal with respect” for the people -neither patients nor the doctors who just want to help them feel better.
Slowinski explains family doctors are on the relatively low paying end of the medical spectrum. This is partly based on a Medicare formula designed many years ago, where the risk score is used to adjust payments. The result is fees for services are lower than procedure-oriented fees.
“Graduates are less excited about going into medicine [because of the enormous debt load]. It's not as satisfying,” he said, particularly for primary care providers like himself.
He adds that few doctors graduating - some with student loan debts as much as $100,000 after medical school - want to work for a small, private practice where income is not guaranteed, and benefits packages do not cover as much.
As a result, Slowinski says that the primary care medical programs are not being filled.
“Doctors want to work where they have a predictable paycheck to pay off their enormous debts, and have a good benefit package.” Large medical organizations can provide this, where a private practice cannot.
But once a position is found, paying off the loan becomes paramount, often overshadowing patient care in the form of patient load and specialization.
According to malpractice insurance dictates, having an obstetrician deliver a baby, or an orthopedist put on a cast, has less risk attached to it than if a primary care doctor performed those services, as they did historically. As a result, specialization ends up driving up the cost of health care through the mechanism of malpractice fears.
An Oct. 5 article from the Reuters news service notes that the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) estimates that 63,000 more primary care doctors would be needed in 2015 than would be available.
Also, as an estimated one-third of today's doctors retire, 32 million people are expected to need health care under the new federal health care law, according to a recent report by Modern HealthCare.com.
According to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, nurses currently perform many primary care functions such as counseling for diabetes and care for patients dying of cancer, as well as delivering babies.
The AAMC suggests nurses are an untapped resource and can fill the expected physician shortage with more training, helping to cut costs, and is advocating legislation to fund training programs supporting that direction.
Slowinski, however, notes that Vermont's health care programs are ahead of the rest of the nation. He has had conversations with Rep. Mike Mrowicki, D-Putney, regarding health care reform, and says that he is “willing and available to tell people” of his experience as a PCP.
“Nobody values us but our patients” he said, quoting a friend. “But they love us and they let us know.”
“People are able to get care much [more easily] here,” he added, citing the Catamount and Dr. Dynasaur programs for families and children, as well as VHAP for those who are not insured in Vermont.
The clinic in Putney also provides free clinic Thursdays where “we help people find the health resources they need, and fill out paperwork” more than they actually treat patients. “It's a different doctor each time,” Slowinski said, “so there's no continuity of care.” The treatment comes with getting the patient connected with the appropriate provider for their needs.
Slowinski said he will miss the practice and his patients, and that the door isn't completely shut to getting involved again in some way in the future, but for now, he wants to concentrate on his art, and the rural lifestyle he lives just outside Brattleboro.
Doctor's art
Slowinski's home sits in “the perfect spot” for orchards where he raises apples and peaches, and has a large kitchen garden each year. He has successfully had peaches three years in a row, “which is unusual to anyone who grows them,” he said, because of spring freezes like the one that killed many fruit bearing trees this last spring.
“We were watching the temperature gauge,” he said. “If it had gone below 28 degrees, we would have gone out and sprayed the buds, but it stayed steady.” A difference of one degree at that point, will determine life or death of the bud that yields the peach.
Slowinski's connection with the outdoors is at the heart of his love of farming, and his lifelong desire to produce ceramics. His family farmed growing up, first in Connecticut, and then in Minnesota where they moved when he was 10 years old. “My father always had a garden,” he said. “I learned from him.”
His grandmother raised and preserved fruits and vegetables as well, as did grandparents going back generations. “I guess that's where it came from,” he smiled, as he stood among his apple and peach trees.
Slowinski said he gets about 7 to 8 bushels of apples each year now, and while he stores some in a high tech root cellar he dreamed up with the help of Gary MacArthur of Solar PV Assessments in Marlboro, he said he bought a cider press, pointing to the shed just off the house, and now makes cider as well as hard cider.
“Hard cider was the Vermont state drink,” he grinned. It also happens to be rising in popularity along with local breweries, wineries and distilleries in Vermont. “We don't sell it though,” he assured. “We drink it ourselves.”
Slowinski showed the way down past his house to a huge, hand built, wood-fired kiln based on the noborigama climbing kilns of Japan where he fires his ceramics. He pointed out the firebox and vents, and a peep hole in the back where he can check his cone [“I fire at cone 11.”] temperature. Dozens of bricks slide in and out to regulate air flow and adjust temperature throughout the firing process.
Using stoneware clay, the wood firing melts the clay so it fuses, thus he does not have to glaze it, pointing out the delicate patterns and colors left by wood and ash on the finished pot held in his hand.
The wood he uses to fire the kiln comes from a Putney company that makes stakes for the highway at $5 a bundle. “I can fire my kiln for about $20 worth of wood,” he said. It is important to him to weigh costs and energy usage.
Just as the shed housing his kiln sits beside the house but amidst maples that have all ready lived several hundred years, Slowinski's desire to live sustainably and bridge the natural world with his art form in process and form means paying attention to details such as this.
An old barn sits near the original site of his home [“…that we had moved away from the road”], and the quiet walk past an old stonewall and maple trees over colorful fallen leaves covering the old driveway, is broken only by the sound of chipmunks and squirrels and argumentative jays among the limbs and branches overhead, and soft swish of our feet.
One side of the original barn is dedicated Slowinski's art. As we entered the first room, he bent to a pile of gnarled and twisted branches and limbs that took up most of what resembled an old stall.
“Apple and wild high bush blueberry are the best,” he said, holding up piece after piece of bent and unique branches of wood.
“I'm always on the lookout for them,” he said, “whether I'm out hiking or canoeing. If I see something that looks right, I'll stop and bring it home.”
He held up a twisted, corkscrew branch. “A wild rose grew up the trunk. It took years to make this,” he said.
Slowinski is concentrating on making teapots now. “I drink a lot of tea,” he said, “but I also like to make something that people are going to use, that has function, that is beautiful.”
He said the idea for using wood for the handles didn't come all at once, but kind of arrived after a few years of making teapots and looking at books and seeing someone else using something organic instead of clay for a handle on a pot.
“Then I started to really get into finding the right piece of wood that had the shape to fit for a handle,” he smiled.
He said he can make three pots a day now, “but maybe up to six [once retired]. I don't know yet. I want to be making pots every day.”
When he went to college at Oberlin, he belonged to an unofficial student co-op where he learned to throw pots.
“I've done it ever since,” he said, which amounts to almost 40 years. “I want to do it full time now.”
Slowinski also plays the clarinet and saxophone with the Jazzberry Jam band professionally, he said. For as long as he has worked in Putney, he has ridden his bicycle the six miles to and from Brattleboro, bringing a new definition to “park and ride.”
“I drive to just north of town on Route 5, park and ride [instead of riding all the way from his house]. I was getting home too exhausted to do anything.”
He explained his involvement in the arts and medicine concurrently as sides of the same coin.
“I have to be quiet, and either listen [medicine and music] or see [art] and let a sense of what fits rise.”
Slowinski said he is outdoors all the time hiking, fishing or canoeing, and while there, he is always observing what is.
“Like the Japanese would look at a landscape and appreciate it for what it is without wanting to change it,” he said. He loves to see how rocks have been shaped by wind, water and things growing on them like lichens and trees, seeing the natural geology of his surroundings.
“My pottery tells me what it needs,” he said. “Initially, I might not like it [when it comes out of the kiln] but it grows on me as I observe its texture or colors [from the wood firing process] and I realize it's supposed to be like that. I want people who enjoy that sort of thing to have my art,” he said.
Slowinski's market will reach beyond local, regional and national boundaries he believes, “which is why I want to establish a web presence [for global access] and to find national galleries who will show my work.”
Walter Slowinski, M.D., is clearly ready to move into being Walter Slowinski, artist, musician and potter, and everything is in place to do so. “My last day [at the Putney Health Clinic] is Oct. 22.” He has taken care that his patients are all aware of his departure and that a replacement has been found, so no one will miss out on health care that he has provided until now.
“It's been really great working in Putney. The staff and patients have been wonderful. But the time has come to make the break. I'm grateful to have this opportunity,” he smiled, his face alight with the anticipation of being able to focus on his art full time.