Doctors of Distinction

A visit to a hospital in the greater Bangor area will likely bring you into contact with doctors from all over the globe as well as other parts of the United States. Maine has a lot to offer medical professionals in terms of environment and quality of life, and recent years have seen an influx of expertise that has in turn improved the quality of life for the rest of us. Medical conditions that once required out-of-state travel are now routinely treated locally, with excellent results.

Best Doctors Inc. is a worldwide database service founded in 1989 by two Harvard Medical School physicians with the vision of making the best medical expertise available around the world. The specialists on this list are nominated through continuous peer-to-peer surveys, in which physicians name other physicians they believe to be most qualified in their fields. Some 1.5 million confidential evaluations are conducted each year. Only about 5% of all doctors in any country make the list.

The polling process utilizes telephone interviews and proprietary polling and balloting software. Anonymity of the participants is protected throughout the entire process. To ensure impartial and reliable results, doctors cannot pay to be included in the database, and Best Doctors does not pay them to participate in the survey.

The 48 doctors on this list were named by their peers as the best in their respective fields. We selected four of them to profile in this issue. The good news for patients throughout eastern Maine is that their competence seems to be contagious.

Elizabeth Weiss, MD
Internal Medicine

By Joy Hollowell

Compassion, competence, and community—those three words are the motto of St. Joseph Healthcare and what ultimately drew Dr. Elizabeth Weiss to practice medicine at the Bangor facility. “You can’t be an excellent physician without those elements,” she says.

Weiss works at St. Joseph’s internal medicine building, just up the street from the hospital. She describes herself as an adult pediatrician. “We are primary care physicians for adult health. We manage chronic illness and are the point of first contact for most health problems that people have.”

When it comes to her patients, Weiss admits she’s terrible with names. And considering she’s been practicing medicine for nearly 30 years, it’s understandable. “But usually I remember their story,” she says. “I remember lots of stories.”

Weiss’s own life story is full of faraway lands and close encounters with the people who live there. She graduated from Harvard University and went on to earn her PhD from Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine in Cleveland, Ohio.

After a residency at Beth Israel Hospital in Boston, Weiss could have practiced medicine wherever she wanted. She chose Bethel, Alaska, a tiny town about 400 miles west of Anchorage. She went there “partly for the adventure, and partly for the sense of purpose.”

The hospital Weiss worked in covered patients in a geographical area the size of Oregon, but with few roads leading to those communities. “We traveled mostly by plane, by boat, and by snowmobile to get to the clinics that we served.”

Weiss and her husband, who was also practicing internal medicine, enjoyed their time in the last frontier. But after four years, both longed to be closer to their families. They packed up their two small children and moved across the country to Caribou. “We wanted to stay in a rural area,” she explains.

There, the husband and wife physicians decided to split a practice. “Caribou is a wonderful place to live,” Weiss says. “A great community with great people. And we had a dog sled team that we brought from Alaska, so it was a great place to run the dogs.”

In 2001, Weiss and her husband traveled to rural Africa to work at a teaching hospital for three months. “We spent a month in Sudan, one in southern Sudan, and then worked in a town in Tanzania called Moshi at the base of Mount Kilimanjaro,” she says.

Weiss arrived at St. Joseph in 2004. “I love what I do,” she says. “It’s an incredible privilege to be allowed into people’s lives.” She says she is still fascinated by the field of medicine and manages to learn something new every day. “I enjoy coming to work. Everybody has something to teach me.”

The passion that Weiss and her husband share for medicine turned out to be contagious. Both of their children are now in college, studying to be doctors. 

C. Eric Hartz, MD
Oncology and Hematology

By Jodi Hersey and Henry Garfield

Dr. Eric Hartz wears two hats, either one of which would fit comfortably by itself on the head of most full-time doctors. Hartz is a medical oncologist at Eastern Maine Medical Center’s CancerCare of Maine. He also works as EMMC’s chief medical information officer, where he is responsible for the hospital’s electronic record system.

“In 1995, EMMC started an oncology pilot [program] developing a regional electronic medical record connecting clinics in Blue Hill and Bangor,” he says. “After successfully demonstrating this, I slowly became involved as the lead physician at EMMC for computerization.”

The job was voluntary at first, but now takes up much of his workweek. He sees patients on Mondays and Fridays and spends the rest of the week on information services. “My training has been through reading, meetings, on-the-job learning, and the help of our wonderful staff,” he says. “The two jobs do overlap, as I must use what we implement. I am now developing the oncology electronics record system.”

A native of Montreal, Hartz moved to the United States at the age of three and spent his childhood in Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, and West Virginia. He earned his undergraduate degree at the University of Illinois, and then went on to the University of Illinois Medical School and Ohio State University, where he specialized in internal medicine and oncology.

He came to Maine to practice oncology in 1983. “I was very impressed with the practice of medicine in this rural setting,” he says. “It’s a great place to work and raise a family.”

Hartz’s favorite part of his job is the close relationship he has been able to build with his cancer patients. “I’m so amazed by my patients and the courage they have,” he says. “Being a part of their lives and going through their illness with them is very special. It is also a mixed blessing.”

It was that one-on-one relationship that inspired Hartz to study oncology in the first place. “The teachers and instructors I had, the relationships oncologists have with their patients, plus the evolving medicine, were the reasons I wanted to work in this field,” he says.

As the self-described “quarterback of the treatment team,” Hartz helps patients decide on the best course of treatment. Among the newer techniques for fighting cancer are “target” therapies, which, unlike chemotherapy, attack cancer cells exclusively. These therapies typically have fewer side effects. “We have better tools to treat cancer almost like a chronic disease like diabetes,” he says. “So people with cancer are living much longer than they used to.”

An avid runner, Hartz says that some of his best ideas come to him while running. “Running not only keeps me fit, but allows me private time to think,” he says. Hartz recently completed the MDI half-marathon for the fifth time and runs the CCOM Race for Hope every year. “Sometimes I have the great opportunity to run with some of my patients who have been through unbelievably hard times. We cross the finish line together.”

His other job has its rewards as well. He’s won industry awards for his work in information services, and been invited to speak all over the country, as well as in London to members of the British Parliament. At the new CancerCare facility in Brewer, which he’ll move into in December, he’ll be in charge of developing an electronic national comprehensive cancer care network, which will enable doctors nationwide to access evidence-based pathways for treatment.

“I’ll be as busy as ever,” he says. “But I might take a break to go running at lunch, instead of at five in the morning.”

Susan O’Connor, MD
Surgery

By Henry Garfield

Dr. Susan O’Connor originally wanted to be a novelist. “I wanted to write the defining novel of our generation,” she says. “But it turns out I don’t write very well.”

Literature’s loss is medicine’s gain. A specialist in breast cancer surgery, O’Connor came to Bangor in 1994 as the Queen City’s first female surgeon. There’s nowhere else she’d rather be.

“I plan to stay here until I retire,” she says. “I can’t see myself leaving.”

Her office at Eastern Maine Medical Center boasts a stunning view of the Penobscot River. Originally from Burlington, Vermont, O’Connor graduated from the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and did her surgical residency at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in New Hampshire. She knew she wanted to live and work in northern New England.

“My partners at that point were both avid fishermen, and they were looking for a female surgeon,” she says. “The recruiting letter was all about fishing, the restocking of the Penobscot with salmon, and so on. I called the office manager and said I didn’t fish, and was that a problem? She said, ‘That’s great—there’ll be someone here to work during fishing season.’ I’ve been here ever since.”

Though she still does general surgery, breast cancer cases now make up 80% of her workload. “The worst part of the job is telling someone the worst news of their life,” she says. “But the best part is being able to do something about it. The vast majority of patients survive breast cancer. There are procedures now that weren’t even thought of when I was training. It’s all a push toward trying to be less and less invasive, which is true, I think, with surgery in general.”

Just as breast cancer treatment has evolved, so too have the numbers and roles of female surgeons in the area. “It’s not unusual to come in to a night on the ER and have the general surgeon, the trauma surgeon, the orthopedic surgeon, and the neurosurgeon on call all be women,” she says.

O’Connor got turned on to medicine while an undergraduate at Colgate University studying English history. An article in Scientific American about the physiology of the brain spurred her to change her major to neuroscience. All went well until her senior year. “I developed a horrendous allergy to my lab rats,” she recalls. “I couldn’t even finish my senior project. Fortunately, I had more than enough credits to graduate.”

Two years of research at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital at Harvard Medical School “working with cells, because they don’t have hair” followed, then med school at Pittsburgh, where O’Connor fell in love with surgery and realized that’s what she wanted to do with her career.

She’s now the director of EMMC’s Breast and Osteoporosis Center, and has served as president of Northeast Surgery and the chief of surgical services at St. Joseph Hospital. She and her husband live in Glenburn and have two young daughters.

“We’re very proud of the level of care this community provides,” she says. “The hospitals are very good, and, on the whole, are staffed with people who have trained at good institutions and have chosen to come here. The atmosphere is very collegial, and a lot more sophisticated than many people give it credit for. Our results are as good as anything out there.”

James Fine, MD
Psychiatry

By Molly F. McGill

Dr. James Fine sees himself more as a healer than a psychiatrist. “To be able to participate in a process of actually healing people or keeping them from getting sicker, it’s a very special thing,” he says in his native New York cadence.

In 1996, Fine came to Maine through a job at the Augusta Mental Health Institute. He brought with him extensive experience in psychiatry as the director of several top-rated programs in New York and Boston. His schooling included the Universidad de Monterrey in Mexico and the New Jersey School of Medicine and Dentistry, plus a residency at St. Vincent’s Hospital Manhattan. His prior positions dealt with the treatment of addictions, which he calls “normal behaviors gone wild,” with a focus on drug and alcohol addictions.

Fine enjoys the challenge of trying to find out why patients get to the point of sickness they do, and he finds reward in helping them to recover. He’s been part of many successes in which people whom others had perceived as chronically ill or incurable are now able to maintain normal lives. “I enjoy people and I love my work,” he says. “I like trying to participate in the healing process. It’s an honor to be a part of that.”

Although he no longer works in drug and alcohol addiction therapies, he brings those skills to the Augusta area, where he is now the medical director of a handful of community-based organizations focusing on general psychiatry.

“When I’m with a patient, I try to have all of my skills, background, intuition, and everything else, at their disposal,” he says. “You want somebody who has a special attachment to try to keep you healthy, for whom it is a personal and spiritual value, somebody who is dedicating themselves to that moment in your life. That’s what I try to do with my patients.”

He handles approximately 30 to 60 cases per week. Days are filled with seeing patients who are part of a support program, spending time with them, assessing their needs, and prescribing the correct psychiatric medications when needed.

“Some of the people I see would be prisoners of their illness if somebody wasn’t doing for them what I am doing,” he says. “These [psychiatric diseases] are terrible burdens to people. Making sure that people have the best functional care is very important.”