Dr Tom’s on a mission
Part doctor, part gypsy, our new columnist wants to keep Kiwis healthy. Adam Dudding reports
The other day, Dr Tom Mulholland was giving a talk to some men employed by a concrete pipe company.
‘‘Guys,’’ he said, ‘‘you’ve got to look after your pipes!’’
He showed them pictures of blocked arteries, and explained how they needed to watch their blood pressure, get the blood tests that give an early warning of looming diabetes, and seek treatment if they suffer from depression.
If just 10 of those pipe guys followed one of these bits of advice, says Mulholland, ‘‘I’ll have had way more effect than just sitting there waiting for them to come to me.’’
Mulholland is part gypsy, part doctor, part motivational speaker, part public health activist.
As a part-time emergency department doctor at Auckland City Hospital, he waits for the sick people to come to him, but most of the time he’s nabbing the not-yet sick off the street.
He calls himself, and his website ‘‘Dr Tom on a Mission’’. He drives about in an old Chevrolet V8 ambulance that features a grinning cartoon of himself on the back, and he sets up health-check stations outside supermarkets or The Warehouse or in a Masterton hotel full of local farmers
Mulholland is 54. He was born in Lower Hutt, son of a ship’s engineer and a nurse, and at five wanted to be a brain surgeon. Instead he did a forestry degree, but when he tired of pines he went back to uni, graduating from Otago medical school at 29.
He never quite became a surgeon, instead working as a doctor and raising a family in Taranaki. Then round 2000 his marriage fell apart.
‘‘I got depressed, and this was before John Kirwan. I was suicidal. I was doctor for the Taranaki rugby team. I was on the district health board, chairman of the school board of trustees, but my whole life changed overnight.’’
‘‘I was put on pills, but I thought there’s got to be more to it than this. I thought if I’m this miserable there must be other people in the world who are miserable, so I developed some tools and techniques to help change your mindset.
‘‘The business plan was write a book, get some corporate clients, do some stand up comedy. So I went from being clinically depressed and suicidal to doing comedy at the Classic in about eight weeks.’’
The book, Healthy Living, sold well, and other books followed. He didn’t do the stand-up for long, but it helped hone his corporatespeaking skills.
He now lives on a houseboat in Auckland’s Westhaven Marina, works a few days a month in the emergency department, and for the past two years he’s been getting around the country in his ambulance, funded by contracts with organisations such as the government’s ‘‘Healthy Families’’ initiative or the Mental Health Foundation’s ‘‘Farmstrong’’ scheme, offering basic medical checks for free and dispensing advice.
These disparate jobs all point in the same direction: prevention not cure, wellness not sickness. He’s parking his cartoon-bedaubed, self-aggrandising Chevy V8 ambulance at the top of the cliff.
‘‘People say it must be awesome working in an emergency department and saving people’s lives, but the reality is we might extend your life by four minutes, or four hours, or four days or, if you’re lucky, four years. But usually most of the damage has been done, with things like high blood pressure.
In Henderson, west Auckland, the Chevy is already parked in front of Pak’nSave. Mulholland’s ambulance manager (and fiancee) Meleane Bourke has set up a rudimentary clinic in the supermarket’s foyer.
It’s exactly like a GP’s surgery, except there’s no reception, or crying babies, or bored people reading magazines, and there’s a guy lugging in long trains of supermarket trollies every few minutes, and the clinic consists of trestle tables, a few chairs and a row of small but high-tech diagnostic machines.
All right, it’s really nothing like a GP’s surgery. And that’s how Mulholland wants it. He’s hoping to grab the ordinary folk who don’t get around to seeing their GP, or can’t afford it, or only go when they’re properly sick. He wants to talk to them while they’re still well.
There are curious looks from shoppers entering and leaving Pak’nSave and no shortage of takers for a free checkup. Tania Vano blows into the lung tester and submits to a diabetes-test finger-prick. An elderly but fitlooking woman with a Dutch accent chats as her blood pressure is taken. It seems a little high so Mulholland takes it again.
She’s not been to the GP for a couple of years, but feels pretty fit. Mulholland suggests two years is probably a bit too long between visits, and that it would be good to get the blood pressure under control.
The Healthy Families scheme is focussing on 10 high-need areas, including poorer districts within Auckland, but also the Far North, East Cape, Rotorua and Invercargill, so he gets around. He’s taken his ambulance to d’Urville Island in the Marlborough Sounds. He’s off to the Chathams soon.
‘‘There are times when it’s tough, when it’s snowing or raining or you’re in traffic or the ambulance’s starter motor goes. But it’s like any roadtrip – you wake up the next day and drive to a new place.’’
He’s seeing the country, and some of what’s wrong with the country.
‘‘There’s a divide. Look at the life expectancy of Remuera versus, say, the East Coast. It’s like two different countries. That’s why we’re going there.’’
If he can keep tapping the right funding, he’d like to do this for another five years, and then he’s got a new plan. By then he’ll be nearly 60, and he’d like to get on a boat and keep doing the same thing, only this time around the Pacific.