Thomas Bolte, who today is still boyish at 45 and still working out of the small one-room office where he first examined Moore, is a doctor obsessed with mysteries. He calls himself an unusual symptoms investigator, his term for a doctor who picks up where other doctors fail.Like the cranky character played by actor Hugh Laurie on the Fox TV series House, Bolte is a master of the differential diagnosis—identifying patients’ ailments based on a careful analysis of their symptoms.
Call him Dr. House if you want, but this is not the House you know. You see, before he fixed people, he fixed houses. The houses belonged to his mother, an Irish-American woman named Rosemarie Martin, who bought a handful of dilapidated houses by the seashore in Long Island, hoping to rent them. When the boy was only 11, his family lost five of its dearest loved ones in the span of 16 months. A beloved cousin, three grandparents, and lastly, the boy’s father—all dead from various illnesses. Bolte’s father, felled by a melanoma, had been a dapper Long Island attorney, and when his widow ran out of cash, banks foreclosed on the family’s two homes. Rosemarie, who until then had played the part of the doting housewife, whisked her son and daughter away to live in the slums of Staten Island with her father, her children’s only remaining grandparent. There was talk of sending the kids to foster homes, but Rosemarie vowed to keep the family together, to get a job, make money, and move back to the Island. She sought financial security in real estate.
The pattern went like this: Rosemarie and her son fixed up the houses, the tenants trashed them, and they fixed them again. From a parade of handymen the boy learned to plumb pipes, wire switches, hang drywall, lay brick, and do simple carpentry. He learned that no two tradesmen built a house exactly the same way. They all had their little tricks, their favorite tools, favorite circuits, favorite brands of building materials, and unorthodox pet theories. When something in a house didn’t work, you fixed it by running down all the possible options where the system could possibly break down. You found the leak and patched it; you uncovered the rotten joist and sistered it back together.
Studying medicine in Puerto Rico and moonlighting at a San Juan hospital, his hands coaxed newborns into the world, 60 or more before he ever graduated from medical school.
During his residency at New York Downtown Hospital, he was chosen to be administrative chief resident of his class—a high honor—in his last year.
After Downtown, Bolte worked as many as six medical jobs at a time. Doctors, he thought, were no different than builders, and you should try to learn from as many as possible. Inspired by his parents’ fascination with nutrition and alternative medicine, he apprenticed himself to Robert Atkins, the famous diet doctor, and Leo Galland, another author of best-selling books who blended alternative with conventional therapies.
The first time Rosemarie saw her son in a white coat, a stethoscope draped around his neck, she wept. Somehow, all the time he was in medical school, she had not connected the dots, had not imagined that this kid in gypsum-spattered jeans spackling drywall was going to be a doctor.
The mother did not know, and the boy did not tell her, that at night in his bed he bargained with God. He had attended five funerals in little more than a year, and they had terrified him. Over the graves of his loved ones he learned the words of the Lord’s Prayer for the first time. At night, he prayed: Please, God, don’t let my mom die. Please don’t take her from me.
more often Bolte is guided by intuition. He tries to bond with the patient as quickly as possible, hoping to forge an alliance in which the patient feels comfortable confiding even the most intimate details.
Bolte longed to open a practice that was relatively free from the influence of insurance and pharmaceutical companies. Today he literally runs his own office. No secretaries. No partners. No insurance forms. (Many patients submit his invoice to their insurance companies for reimbursement.) If you call the number listed on his Web site, it rings his cell phone. “Doctor’s office,” he says. “What’s the problem you’re having?” Then, if you agree to his terms—no insurance, $125 for a 25-minute urgent care visit, $290 for a major 60-minute consult, he’ll enter your appointment into his Palm Treo. When you arrive at the office a few blocks south of Bloomingdale’s, he answers the door himself, unless he’s with a patient. It’s like this all day, all week. When it comes time to pay, he runs your debit or credit card through the machine under his desk, prints out an invoice, and asks, “Want me to staple that?”
Another time, a woman presented with headaches, fatigue, hives, rash, and countless chemical sensitivities. After a lifetime of fine health, she broke out with the most annoying physical symptoms from using soaps, shampoos, and cleansers.
After a blood workup revealed the presence of hexane, a petroleum derivative known to cause nerve damage, Bolte asked her about her living conditions. What, he asked, makes your home different from other people’s? She boasted that she had a fine new home. After living in a one-bedroom apartment for years, she bought and renovated the apartment next door after the birth of her first child. Now she had a roomy three-bedroom apartment, the kind of place New Yorkers would kill for.
What happened to the extra kitchen? Bolte asked her.
Now it’s my master bedroom, she replied.ou have a gas stove, right? Where did the old stove in the old kitchen sit, exactly? Can you tell me? Do you remember?
The patient’s eyes widened. My bed is right up against the spot, she said.
A few days later, at Bolte’s insistence, the woman had the gas company inspect her apartment. They located and corrected a leak in the woman’s bedroom, not far from her headboard. The patient bought and installed a small sauna unit, which she used to sweat out the toxin. Her symptoms resolved in six months.
Theres a good reason why Doctors sometime miss what is right in front of them.In mainstream medicine there’s an expression:”when u hear hooves,don’t initially look for zebras.”and as a result Zebras are missed all the time…….
God bless
cheers!!!!!!
