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Mountain Man

At his community clinic deep in the Cascades, Dr. Michael Wollner brings the healing touch to a rural population in need

By Danielle Harlan (Bay Area ’03) and Ting Yu (N.Y.C. ’03)

On a typical afternoon at the Mountain Valleys Health Center in Fall River Mills, Calif., a man holding a coffee can walked into the packed emergency room and announced that he had brought in the rattlesnake that bit him. Then he cracked the lid. “You’ve never seen people run so quick in their lives,” says Michael Wollner (Houston ’91), medical director of the nonprofit community health center nestled deep in the Cascade Mountains, 300 miles north of San Francisco. “But it did keep things lively.”

Since 2004, Wollner has been a family practice physician at MVHC, a network of six clinics serving five rural communities in the area. Fall River Mills, where Wollner lives, has a population of 600. “It’s very much like Appalachia,” he says. “We’re way off the grid. It’s a rural population that’s been here for many generations. A lot of people hunt and fish, they work seasonal jobs, and they don’t access health care or education very frequently.”

Along with snakebite patients, who routinely bring the perpetrators into the hospital so that doctors can determine which antivenom is needed, Wollner sees more common chronic diseases like diabetes and heart problems. Still, the acute ailments can be eye-opening. “We’ll have people come in who have had things festering for months,” he says. “In a more urban place, you’d go to the mall and someone would tell you to get that looked at, but here they just don’t think to come in.”

When they do, it can be quite an affair. “There’s a family that comes rolling into town in their pickup truck, and they make one appointment and 12 of them get seen.”

The access issue is one that Wollner has been battling since he came to MVHC four years ago. “What’s great about teaching is that you’ve got your kids every day,” he says. “In health care, you see patients about once every three months for 15 minutes. So, how do you teach adults to live with chronic ailments and take care of themselves? That’s the challenge.”

One way is to make sure patients are taking their medications. Not long after he arrived, Wollner realized that the vast majority of his patients could not afford their prescriptions. For the few who could, there wasn’t a pharmacy for 90 miles. As medical director, Wollner helped enroll patients in low-income prescription programs that provide free and subsidized medications; he also worked with pharmaceutical companies and the state and federal governments to have prescriptions delivered directly to the clinic, where patients could pick them up without driving for hours on snowy roads.

As for Wollner’s road to practicing medicine in this tiny town, he says, “I’ve always wanted to travel and be a part of new places.” After teaching stints in Houston and Hawaii, Wollner graduated from Baylor Medical School and pursued a family practice residency—a decision influenced by his corps experience. “Most people choose to specialize, but going into med school, I knew I wanted to be in primary care—even though it’s a struggle and not as well compensated,” he says “I knew that what I loved about teaching was getting to know my students. And what I love about medicine is getting to know my patients.”

Often the care he provides extends beyond the clinic. Wollner recounts the story of one family with a 6-year-old son who had severe speech impairment and mild Down’s syndrome. Living in a remote logging town, the parents didn’t know of any public schools nearby. Wollner and his wife, Jenny, a special education teacher, helped enroll the child in kindergarten in a neighboring town and secured transportation to and from the school. The boy is now learning to speak.

Now expecting their first child, the couple plans to move back to Houston to be closer to family. Wollner wants to get a master’s in public health and is searching for a position at another community-based clinic, albeit a bit less out of the way.

But for Wollner, nothing will replace the small-town charm. “I’ll miss the land out here, and I’ll miss the people,” he says. “A lot of my patients are close friends. You know everyone in the grocery store. I’ve stitched that guy up or set that guy’s fracture. I’ve been with families as they mourn an elder and with them as they welcome a baby. I’ve been allowed to participate in those times, and it’s been very personally rewarding to have people let you be a part of their lives.”