Pies & Ticks: At the recent Boothbay Harbor Rotary Club Auction on Saturday, Aug. 3, the Boothbay Region Health Center raised $1,000 by selling homemade pies and providing products & education to prevent tick-borne diseases.

$20,000 Matching Grant Met: The Health Center, which is open seven days a week and is located in the Boothbay Harbor Meadow Mall, is also pleased to announce that we met our $20,000 matching grant on July 31, 2019.

Here's what happened: In early June, an anonymous donor from Boothbay offered to match donations received through July 31 up to a total of $20,000. Sure enough, Health Center patients and supporters donated the first $10,000.

The final $10,000 was a gift from the Schacknow Family Foundation, Inc. to support the Health Center's Tick-Borne Disease Prevention & Treatment program. In providing the gift to the Health Center, Paul and Sharma Schacknow said, “We're excited about the quality of preventative and primary general medical care being provided by this local community organization. In addition, over the past year the Health Center has become a de facto regional center for their expert knowledge on preventing, diagnosing, and treating Lyme and other tick-borne diseases. People from outside the Boothbay peninsula travel to the Health Center to see its practitioners who are highly experienced in treating these serious diseases. Our donation to the Health Center will provide financial resources to allow them to expand on the scope of their efforts to both educate the public about and to treat these tick-borne illnesses.” Dr. Paul Schacknow and his wife, Sharma, summer residents on Southport, have been active in supporting charitable health-related projects in the Boothbay Harbor area, including the Boothbay Region Ambulance Service, the provision of AEDs (Automated External Defibrillators) to locations all over our peninsula, and for their support of the Boothbay Region Community Resource Council's (BRCRC's) Opioid Outreach program.

New $50,000 Matching Grant: On July 30, a new donor from Southport upped the ante, offering an additional challenge grant of $50,000 to match individual, business, and Family Foundation donations. Their motivation is to focus on the need to ensure high quality, local health care coverage for local people who can't afford it. We encourage those who haven't donated yet in 2019 to do so, in order to help us reach the full $100,000 potential of this grant.

Now in its second year of operation, the Boothbay Region Health Center is filling a vital need of providing affordable, accessible, preventive and primary care to residents, workers, and visitors in the Boothbay region. The Health Center is open seven days/week. Its two MDs, three Family Nurse Practitioners, and three Health Coordinators practice family medicine, treating patients of all ages. In addition to primary and preventive health care, the Center also specializes in women's health, family planning, geriatrics, pain management, substance mis-use treatment, including group and individual therapy, mental health services, a senior wellness/exercise program, and diagnosis and treatment of tick-borne diseases. In addition to serving the Boothbay Region, the Health Center is now attracting patients from all of Mid-Coast Maine and beyond.

New Programs Planned for 2019/2020: Recent in-depth research has shown that nutrition, exercise, and sleep are causative factors in the prevention and mitigation of most chronic health conditions. Therefore, the Health Center's next major initiative, which will require additional funding, will provide peer support, nutrition, exercise, sleep & lifestyle programs tailored to prevent and/or mitigate chronic inflammation, diabetes, heart disease, hypertension, dementia and Alzheimer's, and treat chronic tick-borne diseases. The Health Center hopes to partner with other local non-profits, nutrition & cooking programs, exercise providers, and holistic practitioners to help people prevent these diseases, as well as to cure them, using integrated, evidence-based programs. Peer support and patient education will be incorporated into these programs. The Empowered Patients group--which meets monthly at the Boothbay Harbor Community Center under the mentorship of Dr. Steve Cook, has been (and will continue to be) instrumental in researching and identifying the programs that patients are interested in launching locally.