Trailside Health - Family Doctors for You

Do doctors scare us? (yes)

Would you like to be heard? To answer all your questions?

How nice to not feel rushed by your physician!

Friendly, personal, caring and highly skilled - what should your doctor be?

Dr Topolski is a social reformer* and trained scientist who has taught in every medical school in our state, published over twenty papers, and been invited to speak over three dozen times about health care ethics, philosophy, complexity and reform.

We here are a complete doctor's office and community health center in Shelburne Falls. We offer consults, treat emergencies, give preventive care and perform surgery for all ages.

For nearly twenty years our democratic cooperative Caring in Community has tested older theories for social change in the crucible of real life and practice, and it works for those who still want the old yankee west county way.

We welcome everyone into a true medical home built on neighborly compassion and love. And we succeed when open minds allow synchronicity and the unexpected to change lives as far as Lorenz's "butterfly effect" may take us.

Not everyone remembers how life used to be. It was simpler, yes, and harder in some ways but people worked together. In these times of broken dreams and crazy life we want to stand up, slow down, and encourage traditional wisdoms to carefully embrace life's constant change together.

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

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

• 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

• Fairness - straight dope on news today

• Tuba Man - what is too small to matter?

"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.”

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* 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 over ten years of work to improve the corporate monopoly behavior of the Baystate Health System which abuses employees and endangers some patients with less staffing and lower quality care.