BRATTLEBORO — Another new primary care doctor is joining the Brattleboro Memorial Hospital medical staff.
Lauren McClure, MD, a board-certified family practitioner, is in the process of opening her brand new office. Dr. McClure will be seeing patients as of early January at space owned by John Daly, MD. His offices are on 191 Clark Ave. (across Canal Street from the hospital). In the meantime, she has set up a phone line which will have a voicemail for people to leave a message to arrange appointments. That number is 802-257-9922.
Dr. McClure moved to Brattleboro recently from Augusta, Maine, where she was a family physician at a rural health center. She received her doctor of medicine degree at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. Following completion of her post-graduate training at the Maine-Dartmouth Family Medicine Residency, she joined a health center in rural Maine as a board-certified family physician.
The new BMH doctor went into the field of medicine somewhat circuitously, having earned her degree in the arts at Alfred University, after which she took a bicycle tour of Europe where she ended up staying and herding goats and making cheese.
Dr. McClure subsequently came back to the States and held a couple of interesting jobs, not the least of which was working at a meditation center farther north in Vermont where she found she had an interest in how Buddhist meditation helped her 'be' in the present, and this is where she says she noticed her developing interest in the field of medicine.
Then, a number of years out of college, she decided to move to Boston to try to sort out her career path and, having dreamed of becoming a doctor at various times in her life, was delighted to learn from a career counselor that medicine was, indeed, a good path for her to follow. She worked as a management information analyst at a computer company which helped pay for her night-time pre-med courses at Harvard.
During those years in Cambridge and in pre-med studies, Lauren also received EMT training and certification at Northeastern University, and took hospice volunteer training after which she served as a hospice volunteer at the Palliative Care Center of Deaconess Hospital in Boston.
Dr. McClure has a couple of particular clinical interests besides rural health, one of which is a love of the science of nutrition and healthy lifestyles. This includes the role that diet can play in avoiding metabolic diseases such as diabetes and obesity.
She recently returned from a week-long conference which dealt with something called Functional Medicine, which a fellow physician had introduced her to. This science-based approach to health care is personalized medicine that deals with primary prevention and underlying causes and may be helpful for complex degenerative chronic diseases. It focuses on body processes, such as inflammation, rather than isolating organ systems.