
Dr. Allan “Chip” Teel stands in the hallway of Hodgdon Green in Damariscotta on April 29. Teel is the founder of the ElderCare Network in Lincoln County, an affordable, long-term assisted living facility network. He has also worked as a primary care physician in Damariscotta for 30 years. (Johnathan Riley photo)
Dr. Allan “Chip” Teel, of Nobleboro, has been enriching the lives of people of all ages for a long time.
Whether that’s been as the founder of the ElderCare Network in Lincoln County, a world figure in elder care, or a primary care physician in Damariscotta for almost 30 years, Teel’s guiding philosophy centers on listening.
“I think it’s important to listen and to meet the patient where they’re at,” he said. “Medicine is a really, really hard job, but it’s also the most rewarding job you could possibly imagine, and you’re really honored to have people share their good times and bad times with you – especially their bad times. You’re privy to all of the stuff that they’re struggling with, and I think you’ve got to be enormously respectful of how hard that is for those individuals to share that.”
Teel, the eldest of six siblings, grew up in Reading, Mass.
“I … had one of those idyllic childhoods of the ‘50s and ‘60s where you could ride your bike everywhere, and there were lots of kids in the neighborhood,” he said. “You could play baseball in the backyard or throw the football around and every household had 3,4,5,6,7 kids, and you just traveled around after school. You showed up for dinner time, but until then, you were pretty much just going around and hanging out with your friends.”
When Teel was in the eighth grade, his family moved to Epping, N.H. and he attended the internationally prestigious Phillips Exeter Academy, which he said was a “profoundly transformative” educational experience, especially in contrast to his Catholic school education thus far.
“(Phillips Exeter Academy) was just extraordinary, really challenging, and you’re a sponge, you suck it all in, it was transformative for a young brain,” he said. “I jokingly like to say that I went from eighth grade where I was memorizing catechism questions to a roommate who could diagram the big bang theory on the blackboard, and I had to come to terms with the difference between the world created in seven days and the big bang theory.”
The academy’s experiential learning focus and use of primary sources in the classroom were foundational for Teel and an approach he’d later use in his own classrooms.
Between his amassed Advanced Placement courses, a program of college-level courses and corresponding exams offered to high school students by the College Board, and loading up his course schedule, Teel graduated early from Dartmouth with a K-12 teaching certificate and a Bachelor of Art in history.
Part of his teacher training took place in Compton, Calif., where he taught sixth grade for a semester.
While the learning experience was valuable, Teel said the student teaching opportunity put him in the mentorship of Dr. Wilburn Durousseau, an African-American OB-GYN and Dartmouth College graduate who was overseeing the public service teaching program Teel was participating in.
Teel said Durousseau “apparently saw something” in Teel he couldn’t quite see himself, and after school, the doctor took Teel to the hospital with him to show Teel the world of medicine.
“(He) taught me to deliver babies, work in the office. He introduced me as a Dartmouth medical student and let me assist with him at surgeries and things like that,” he said. “So I got a bird’s-eye view of what medicine was all about without having any right or knowledge to be there at all, so I’ve often credited Dr. Durousseau with my medical career, because that was a game changer for me.”
At the time, Teel thought the experience was “a lark,” but the exposure to medicine planted a seed that wouldn’t blossom until Teel was in his early 30s.
After graduating from Dartmouth, Teel and his two younger brothers bought a property in Rangeley – much to the surprise of the eldest.
“(My brothers) said that they had just signed all of our names to buying a piece of land in Rangeley,” he said, laughing. “We were the proud owners of a back-to-the-land homestead that we were going to figure out how to work on, so I went from my Ivy League education and Exeter education having no clue how to swing a hammer to being a homesteader in a town of 800 people, where you have to be pretty self sufficient to do all the things that need to be done.”
Teel and his brothers learned how to take care of the land while also working to make ends meet. Teel took a job bartending and waiting tables at the local ski resort, Saddleback Ski Area and Bike Park, where he was also the high school tutor for the resort’s ski racing team.
“From 8-11 a.m., I would run school in the bar for the people who were in the ski racing program,” he said. “And then after they went out to ski for the rest of the day, I turned the (closed) sign around, and I’d run the bar, you know, for the rest of the day.”
Teel’s time in Rangeley taught him a lot about personal responsibility and self-efficacy and showed him the importance of competence in a variety of fields. He became a proficient plumber, carpenter, and could navigate electrical wiring.
“When the pipes froze in the middle of the night, there wasn’t anyone you could call,” he said. “So you learn to be very self-sufficient, very accountable, and do what it takes to keep your household going.”
During his time in Rangeley, Teel met “a very attractive woman” named Carol from Boston, Mass., around 1974. The two married in 1978.
In addition to his growing skill set, Teel took jobs in the area as a teacher in Stonington and, after a year, took a longer teaching position in a two-room schoolhouse serving the towns of Magalloway and Wilson’s Mills where he taught fourth through eighth grade.
Teel believed in experiential learning and would often bring the students on field trips to Boston, Mass., or Washington, D.C. to let them learn firsthand what the world was like outside of their mill town on the Maine-New Hampshire border.
“I could fit my entire class, you know, in really tightly, in my little Ford Maverick and we could go on field trips, and we did,” he said. “I was very close to these kids and their parents … I got a chance to kind of show (the kids) a little bit about the world.”
After teaching at the school for a few years, Teel said he felt the need to build toward something career-wise and gave his notice at the school. He then became involved in the immediate community in Rangeley as a Little League baseball coach, worked with the youth center that was just beginning in the area, and helped build the first batch of condos began at Saddleback.
“I knew just enough to be dangerous,” he said. “I was one of the few people who were able to build throughout the Rangeley winters.”
Teel ended up directing the team in charge of putting up framing for the condos, which he said remain to this day at the resort.
While Teel busied himself with construction and community involvement, he was still keeping an eye on the horizon and an ear to the heart about what he wanted to do next, and he kept coming back to his time in Compton, Calif. with Durousseau.
“I was looking for the next big thing,” he said. “I couldn’t get out of my head that experience that I’d had in California with that OB-GYN, and at that point, I had to make a decision as to what to do.”
At 30 years old, Teel and his family, Carol and their 1-year-old son Jonathan, moved to Dover, N.H., where Teel attended the University of New Hampshire to complete his pre-med schooling. The requirements, which typically take two to four years to complete, Teel finished in one year.
Teel then attended medical school at the University of Vermont in Burlington, Vt., where the family welcomed a second child, Ben.
Going into medical school, Teel carried with him the idea that he wanted to be a general practitioner and a family doctor. His clinical rotations, during which students get hands-on experience in a variety of medical fields, reaffirmed that belief.
“All I did in med school and these rotations was find out that I really liked doing all of it,” he said. “I liked the surgery and the orthopedic stuff, and I liked the primary care. I liked the relationship with patients, and as an older student, who had had, at that point, a fairly diverse experience for a recent grad. You know, I’d seen real people in all sorts of walks of life, from Rangeley to teaching to whatever, I had a decided advantage as an older student over all of the other folks who were just kind of thrown into that, not knowing really where they were headed.”
Teel said he knew he wanted to become a doctor in a small town because it would give him the opportunity to work in many capacities within the medical system, so he did his medical residency in Lancaster, Penn., where doctors got to do a little bit of everything.
“I absolutely had a vision I wanted to be competent to handle most anything,” he said. “So I wanted to push myself to get the most intense and most comprehensive residency training that I could get to be able to be good at what I was going to do.”
Pushing his way through his medical education didn’t come without exhaustion. Teel said his playtime with his sons during their early years was often him passed out on the floor of the living room of the family’s home.
“My family time was to come home and fall asleep on the living room floor, on the rug, and let the kids crawl all over me,” he said. “I was the mountain, and I was a play thing to give Carol a little bit of a break while they were climbing all over me.”
At the completion of medical school and his residency, Teel and the family moved to Damariscotta, which happened to have exactly the small-town hospital he was looking to be involved in and work for.
Teel began working at MaineHealth Lincoln Hospital’s Miles Campus, then Miles Memorial Hospital, in Damariscotta in 1988 as a family doctor.
“I really did get a chance to use all of the skills that I had been trained in,” he said. “So it was a very good fit with what I was hoping to find.”
In 1996, Teel founded the ElderCare Network in Lincoln County, which created an affordable assisted living model that focused on wellness, family, and community-style living. Today, there are five homes, called “the Greens,” in Damariscotta, Edgecomb, Jefferson, Round Pond, and Waldoboro.
“I think it was in my DNA, also, I was pretty close with my grandparents as a kid,” he said. “So I’ve been interested, both personally and professionally, in older individuals for a long time.”
In 2003, Teel, Dr. Minda Gold, and Dr. Denise Soucy opened their own practice, Full Circle Family Medicine, on Chapman Street in Damariscotta. When Teel took a position with Eastern Maine Medical Center as its director of innovation in 2016, the practice closed. Gold went on to open Full Circle Direct Primary Care in 2017 in the Chapman Street location, where it still is located today.
Teel was approached for the position with Eastern Maine Medical Center after he gave a lecture at the Bangor hospital about his work within elder care.
“I was doing a lot of geriatric work at that point, and a lot of at-home video monitoring of people to try to keep people out of nursing homes and assisted living homes and be able to stay in their own homes,” he said. “I had been working on this for a decade at that point, and doing some writing and some lecturing about how it was going to be critical that we do something different with long-term care in this country.”
Teel published a book in 2010, “Alone and Invisible,” about utilizing technology and volunteerism to aid in solving the long-term, affordable elder care and emphasizing the importance of elders in American culture.
After a year with Eastern Maine Medical Center and finding it wasn’t quite the fit he wanted, Teel returned to his medical practice as a primary care physician in Damariscotta on the ground floor of Hodgdon Green in Damariscotta.
Teel’s latest project within medicine is combating Alzheimer’s disease, a progressive brain disorder that gradually impairs memory, reasoning, and behavior, with a holistic lifestyle approach that emphasizes good sleep, exercise, and a healthy diet.
“So it is based on the hypothesis that Alzheimer’s disease is a multifactorial condition that has many, many contributing factors, and the more you can address the contributing factors, the better chance you have of reversing Alzheimer’s disease,” he said.
Teel said he has no intention of slowing down and plans to continue practicing medicine as long as he’s able. When he was doing his schooling, he was struck by how many doctors were retiring early because of exhaustion from the highly regulated and administrative field.
While Teel has found that to be true in his experience, he said he thinks the field needs doctors with experience.
“I love medicine, I want to be able to continue to do it as long as I am able to do it as long as I’m physically and mentally able to do it … in my opinion, medicine is so vast that it takes 20 or 30 years to become valuable,” he said. “If you’re paying attention, you’re always getting a little bit better.”
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