To the editor:

I am sick at heart to read of what appears to me to be Mid Coast Hospital’s latest attempt to take over Parkview Hospital.

This feels much like what happened to the Bath Memorial Hospital earlier. I lived just blocks from the Bath hospital, the one taken over in the name of “efficiency,” and always appreciated the quality of care given in Bath and did not feel so intimidated by a very large hospital complex. There is much more to patient care than so-called efficiency, which may not in the long run turn out to be so efficient for the patient.

Parkview has a unique outpatient LifeStyle Choices program, perhaps the only one of its type in the country, which is far less expensive than the inpatient ones run elsewhere.

Parkview is committed to wellness and has a highly trained, highly qualified director of Wellness, Sheryl McWilliams. She and the Parkview doctors (which include Dr. Howe and Mary Penner, as well as a master vegan chef) are dedicated to helping people make changes to improve their health that reverses diabetes, coronary heart disease and other problems most people consider chronic.

This program has been highly successful and Parkview has the data to back this up. I do, too, having participated in the program several years ago.

I believe in the old adage about teaching a person to fish rather that giving him a fish, or medications that “mask” the problem but do not get to the root of it.

In what other hospital in the Mid-coast do people learn the real, scientific truth about vegan cooking and how to prepare vegan meals through and off-shoot called Simple Abundance and incorporated spiritual and natural aspects of healing?

I have found my practitioners at Parkview to be warm, caring human beings with time for their patients. It isn’t a “medical business.” It is a “healing business,” which in Parkview’s case is actually art. I hope it is not a dying art.

I, for one, do not want to lose this unique and valuable asset to our community.

Janet Clement
Richmond