Trailside Health - Family Doctors for You

Doctors and health care are scary. They cost too much. We can feel lost and afraid.

Would you like to be heard? Have your questions answered?

How nice to not feel rushed in the room!

Friendly, accessible, caring and highly skilled - and affordable. What more can we do?

You have here a complete doctor's office and community health center right in Shelburne Falls. We offer consults, exams, counseling, emergency care, complementary and preventive wellness, and surgery for all ages.

For over twenty-five years our democratic cooperative, Caring in Community, has tested older theories for social change in real life and practice, and this works great for everyone who still wants to feel treated as a real person in body and soul.

Remember how life used to be. It was simpler, yes, and it was harder in some ways too yet people also depended on each other more and worked together. In these times of broken dreams and crazy life we still want to stand up, slow down, and seek traditional wisdoms to better embrace life's constant change together.

We welcome everyone of all ages including infants and children. Our true medical home sets aside the rules where we can guided by neighborly compassion and love in order to help you. Our success comes from open minds giving synchronicity and the unexpected a chance to change our lives as far as Lorenz's "butterfly effect" may take us..

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Dr Topolski is a social reformer* and trained scientist, teacher and professor of general practice who has taught in every medical school in our state, published some thirty papers, edited books and been invited to speak on over one hundred occasions on health and illness, ethics, history, philosophy, complexity and reform.

So for some peace, a bit more tolerance, and a dear dollop of hope:

• Scott Nearing - a true radical, for worse and better

• Dorothy Day - the best thing i learned at Brandeis was not at Brandeis U.

• Orphan Wisdom - for the skills of deep living rooted in knowing history, being claimed by ancestry, and working for a time we won’t see.?

• Call to action - Quakers as an institution with the flaws that brings

• PeaceAbbey - local action right here

• Old is New Again - Mind, body, spirit approach to whole health

• Tuba Man - what is too small to matter?

• Fairness - straight dope on news today

• "Nearing felt that the radical's place is as the external critic, the outsider:"

  "[Now and in the future} it will be the business of the radical, as it is now, not to take an appointment as justice of the Supreme Court, not to perform any particular function as a part of the established order, but to stand apart and speak his mind about the established order. ... A radical who wishes to continue being a radical cannot do so if he is an essential part of the existing order, for then he owes a certain fealty to his position. I have seen Socialists elected to office; they become, not critical functionaries, but administrators, and one cannot be both at the same time...

  I am a pacifist in that I believe that no man has a right to do violence to any other man."

  and Martin Luther King Was a Radical, Not a Saint:

  “For years I labored with the idea of reforming the existing institutions of society, a little change here, a little change there. Now I feel quite differently. I think you’ve got to have a reconstruction of the entire society, a revolution of values.”

  .............

  * reforms in homeless care in Boston, medical education in Baltimore, inequity and abuse in Pittsburgh, health care access in Franklin County, health care quality at the VA Leeds, cross-coverage & record access at the Franklin Medical Center, and some twenty years of work to improve the corporate monopoly behavior of the Baystate Health System which has sucked resources out of our local community and endangered some along with the good care that they can give.