Carrie Levine stands in the sun between her home and clinic in Newcastle. Levine has worked in women’s health care in Maine for more than two decades and now operates a small, local practice where she says she feels lucky to get to know her patients and community. (Molly Rains photo)
Newcastle nurse practitioner, midwife, and author Carrie Levine has always seen connections in unexpected places.
When she first stepped into the labor and delivery room early in her training, for example, Levine said that the scene reminded her of something familiar.
“I had never really heard of midwifery before, but I had done a lot of outdoor education,” she said. “When I went into the labor room, I just thought, I know how to do this. This is just women doing physically hard things – I’ve been doing that for a long time.”
For more than 20 years since then, Levine has been using her eye for connections to help the women who seek her assistance in understanding and healing their bodies. At her Newcastle clinic, Levine treats women and girls from across the Midcoast and further afield with holistic functional medicine.
“I’ve just always wanted to work with women,” Levine said in a sunny corner of her home on the afternoon of Tuesday, April 9.
However, she said, as a young adult, she wasn’t sure what form that work would take. That changed during Levine’s time at the University of Maine at Orono, where she worked as a peer counselor at the college’s women’s clinic and volunteered at a feminist health clinic in Bangor.
“I loved the relationships … and being part of the community in a way that, hopefully, was helpful,” Levine said.
Levine transferred a few times during her undergraduate studies, moving first to the University of New Mexico and ultimately to Syracuse University, where she graduated with a degree in public relations and women’s studies.
Levine then trained to become a nurse practitioner at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, before enrolling in a midwifery program through the Frontier School of Midwifery and Family Nursing, now called Frontier Nursing University, based in Kentucky.
After her schooling, Levine was ready to return to Maine. She took a job at LincolnHealth’s Miles Campus in Damariscotta as a midwife and remained in that role for more than seven years. Her husband, Bryan Manahan, took a job in the English department at Lincoln Academy around the same time and is now the head of the department.
In her first year at Miles, Levine said, she delivered 17 babies. At a busier hospital, a midwife might deliver 17 babies in a week’s time or less.
However, things soon picked up, and both Levine and the hospital’s other midwife were kept busy.
It was during this era that Levine had her own two children, Isabelle and Aidan Manahan; many of the babies Levine delivered around this time would later become her own children’s friends.
Levine stopped delivering babies in 2006, when she moved from Miles to the Women to Women clinic in Yarmouth, where she was introduced to functional medicine.
Functional medicine, Levine explained, is a holistic approach to health that emphasizes the interconnectedness of the body’s many complex physiological systems.
“That model gave me language for everything I had understood about health and didn’t have words for,” Levine said. “It really speaks to the interconnectedness of health issues.”
At Women to Women, Levine met women who had traveled from all over the world to get answers for their health concerns. The experience was eye-opening, she said.
“There’s just so much need. Women want to understand their bodies, women want practitioners to take time with them, women want to be listened to, and women want to participate in the decision-making about their care,” Levine said.
After eight years at Women to Women, painfully aware of the extensive need for women’s health care and growing weary of her 50-minute commute to Yarmouth, Levine was seized by the desire to share what she had learned from years of working with women.
Levine started her own clinic, Whole Woman Health in Newcastle, in 2014. Some patients followed her from Yarmouth, while others found her later; while it took a while to get the clinic fully off the ground, Levine said, she is now so busy that she is “teetering on the edge of manageability,” booking appointments five months in advance.
Levine loves to work with patients of all ages and passionately believes that a more personalized, holistic approach to health would help reduce the incidence of many chronic diseases.
Hoping to further share her knowledge and aware that the cost of coming into a clinic may prevent some women from seeking care, Levine authored a book: “Whole Woman Health: A guide to creating wellness for any age and stage” in 2023.
Levine said she hoped the book would help women benefit from functional medicine and find a path forward grounded in a holistic understanding of health and wellness.
Caring for women’s health in particular is rewarding, she said, because it is less often discussed. Generally, Levine said she believes there is a lack of education, communication, and shared decision-making in mainstream women’s health care.
“It’s amazing how many women come into the clinic and say, ‘nobody is talking about this,’” she said.
In her own life, Levine said, she tries to practice what she preaches.
And, just as she appreciates the opportunity to practice medicine in a rural community where connections are lasting and multifaceted, Levine said that she had enjoyed living and raising her family in the area because of how it resembles a “close-knit nest.”
“I don’t know that I really ever experienced community until moving here,” she said.
The full extent of that community became even clearer, Levine said, in the wake of her daughter Isabelle’s death in a car crash in 2018.
“The community that erupted around Isabelle’s passing – in some ways, I don’t even know that we knew how much community we had,” Levine said.
Lately, Levine continues to build community in and around her practice, building one-on-one relationships with women and girls and sharing her gift for finding connections and unearthing missing links.
“It’s really about meeting the woman where she is and helping her take care of herself in the way that she wants to,” she said.
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