Bolte’s colleague, Robert Scully, a board-certified internist and medical director of two MediCenter Clinics in Long Island, New York, has followed the younger doctor’s work for the past 15 years. Bolte sometimes consults him for advice. Scully says that there’s a very good reason why doctors sometimes miss what is right in front of them. “In mainstream medicine there’s an expression: ‘When you hear hooves, don’t initially look for zebras.’ And as a result, zebras are missed all the time. Tom’s a zebra hunter.”
Back in 1999, Ethel Moore took a liking to this man who gave her so much of his time and asked a seemingly endless stream of questions. I just know you’re going to find out what’s wrong with me, she told him. I just know it.
Something about the tone of her voice was familiar. If you listened between the words, you could detect a more urgent plea that Bolte knew too well: Please, doctor, help me get well. Please don’t let me die.
Call him Dr. House if you want, but this is not the House you know. You see, before he fixed people, he fixed houses. The houses belonged to his mother, an Irish-American woman named Rosemarie Martin, who bought a handful of dilapidated houses by the seashore in Long Island, hoping to rent them. When the boy was only 11, his family lost five of its dearest loved ones in the span of 16 months. A beloved cousin, three grandparents, and lastly, the boy’s father—all dead from various illnesses. Bolte’s father, felled by a melanoma, had been a dapper Long Island attorney, and when his widow ran out of cash, banks foreclosed on the family’s two homes. Rosemarie, who until then had played the part of the doting housewife, whisked her son and daughter away to live in the slums of Staten Island with her father, her children’s only remaining grandparent. There was talk of sending the kids to foster homes, but Rosemarie vowed to keep the family together, to get a job, make money, and move back to the Island. She sought financial security in real estate.
The pattern went like this: Rosemarie and her son fixed up the houses, the tenants trashed them, and they fixed them again. From a parade of handymen the boy learned to plumb pipes, wire switches, hang drywall, lay brick, and do simple carpentry. He learned that no two tradesmen built a house exactly the same way. They all had their little tricks, their favorite tools, favorite circuits, favorite brands of building materials, and unorthodox pet theories. When something in a house didn’t work, you fixed it by running down all the possible options where the system could possibly break down. You found the leak and patched it; you uncovered the rotten joist and sistered it back together.
Years later, his hands would take him to the hearts of machines: jalopies, used computers, musical instruments, sound equipment. When he was still in his early twenties, studying medicine in Puerto Rico and moonlighting at a San Juan hospital, his hands coaxed newborns into the world, 60 or more before he ever graduated from medical school.
During his residency at New York Downtown Hospital, he was chosen to be administrative chief resident of his class—a high honor—in his last year. “He was extremely bright,” recalls Satish Dhalla, director of general internal medicine at Downtown Hospital and a professor at New York University School of Medicine renowned for his seminars preparing residents to ace their medical board exams. Concurs Bruce Logan, chief of medicine during Bolte’s tenure, “Tom was an extremely reliable, hardworking guy who really cared about the patients. Just a really good guy.”
After Downtown, Bolte worked as many as six medical jobs at a time. Doctors, he thought, were no different than builders, and you should try to learn from as many as possible. Inspired by his parents’ fascination with nutrition and alternative medicine, he apprenticed himself to Robert Atkins, the famous diet doctor, and Leo Galland, another author of best-selling books who blended alternative with conventional therapies. Bolte didn’t think much of Atkins’s famous diet at first, but eventually came to think it worked well for patients with type 2 diabetes. Clearly, he realized, med school had taught him a lot about drugs, but his training had been markedly deficient in the areas of diet, nutrition, and exercise. “There’s not one drug that has been proven to ‘extend’ life,” he’s fond of saying. “The only things that do that are fruits and vegetables.”
The first time Rosemarie saw her son in a white coat, a stethoscope draped around his neck, she wept. Somehow, all the time he was in medical school, she had not connected the dots, had not imagined that this kid in gypsum-spattered jeans spackling drywall was going to be a doctor.
