ATHENS — Edwin Dunton, who lives in Massachusettes, had been visiting a log cabin his wife’s mother owned on Dore Hill Road on weekends for years when, about four years ago, he saw that the owner of the Athens Corner Store, Steve Jewell, was not doing well.
Dunton noticed Jewell’s speech had dramatically diminished. Jewell, who has multiple sclerosis, had had a setback, a flare-up.
Dunton, a chiropractor, offered to help.
“It started by accident,” Dunton said. “I had said to Steve years ago, ‘Did you ever go to a chiropractor?'”
Jewell told Dunton he had gone to a chiropractor and it helped him a lot, but it was too far away.
Dunton had “a funky portable table at the cabin” and told Jewell he would get it and adjust Jewell right there in a back room at the store. He started taking care of Jewell with twice-weekly visits to the store. Jewell said he has not had a flare-up since starting his sessions with Dunton.
With the success with Jewell, word began to spread, first to an employee at the store who’d had hip surgery and later to customers and friends.
One by one area people began showing up at the cabin to visit the “Doc on Dore Hill.”
“I was adjusting people in the kitchen, and Jodi was doing massage in the loft,” Dunton said.
“Next thing I know we had people in our kitchen, in our bedroom,” Jodi-Ann said. “We were laughing because now we were spending our weekends working and working during the week in Mass.”
The “accidental success” of their combined chiropractor and massage efforts in town has prompted Dunton, 71, and his wife, Jodi-Ann, 52, to move to Athens full-time from their home in Somerset, Massachusetts, something they said will happen by summer. By the time Dunton had started treating area residents, he and Jodi-Ann had built their own cabin on her mother’s property, one that has room for the practice.
Residents say they’re happy to have the service in rural Somerset County, which was ranked last out of Maine’s 16 counties in 2015 on the state’s health index for health and health care. One of the factors in the rankings is the availability of health care for residents, many of whom are poor and live far from doctors and other practitioners.
Since opening four years ago, Dunton and Jodi-Ann’s Love in Touch Massage has seen about 160 patients. The proximity to area communities and the low session rates keep their patients and clients coming back, those patients say.
Mark Franzose of Cornville lived in constant pain and was on prescription drugs for years after an automobile accident in his 20s and had his lower back surgically fused together.
Franzose, 56, went back to work in construction, but in 1990, with the pain now traveling up his back, he had his neck fused and his right shoulder reconstructed.
“For the last 10 years of it, I was on narcotics,” Franzose said. “All that does is mask your problem and gives you the opportunity to think you feel better than you do, which makes you think that you need more of them than you do. I was to the point where I couldn’t dress myself. I couldn’t put my socks on. I couldn’t lift my arms up over my head.”
Then he heard of Dunton and everything changed.
Dunton started treating Franzose about three years ago, and for the last two-plus years, Franzose said he has been narcotic free. Franzose comes once a week for an adjustment by Dunton and Jodi-Ann, a licensed massage therapist.
He can now dress himself and get around more easily.
“I am never pain-free, but I am 80 percent better than I was when I first came to see him,” he said. “I’m not nearly in the pain that I was and am able to do little projects. I exist without being miserable. It’s good medicine and it don’t come out of the bottle.”
Dunton grew up in Hampden before his family moved to Massachusetts. He began practicing chiropractic in 1970 after studying at Lowell Technological Institute, now a part of the University of Massachusetts system, and later completed a four-year program at Palmer College of Chiropractic in Iowa.
Chiropractic medicine is based on the fact that the central nervous system — the brain and the spinal chord and the nerves that come off of them — control and coordinate everything else in the human body, Dunton said. If the nervous system is interfered with, the body reacts, sometimes with pain, sometimes with disorders of the nerves, muscles and organs.
“The vertebra can move out of place and put pressure, or a better word is, impinge, on a nerve and cause that nerve to malfunction,” he said.
Chiropractic treatment can ease symptoms of neck, shoulder and back pain, as well as asthma, earaches and chronic cough.
Jodi-Ann, a 20-year licensed massage therapist, uses Reiki, a hands on, non-invasive process of energy balancing and relaxing thought to release the negative effects of illness. Reiki is a Japanese technique for stress reduction and relaxation that also promotes healing.
“It’s a great way to work with anybody who has had emotional or physical trauma, such as child abuse, sexual abuse, anything like that,” Jodi-Ann said. “It’s a great way to introduce being in a relaxing state, trying to understand that they don’t always have to be clenching, which causes spasm and pain.”
Katie Anton of Cornville brings all three of her children to Dunton, even 4-year-old Natalie, who had a cough and runny nose for eight weeks. Her doctor wanted to put her on an antibiotic, so she went to Dunton and it cleared up.
“My oldest daughter Emma has not had an ear infection since she has started getting chiropractic care,” Anton said.
Dunton became the “Doc on Dore Hill” pretty much by accident.
Reiki treatments counteract the toxic effects of chemotherapy for cancer patient Julie Jewell, 60, Steve Jewell’s wife. Jodi-Ann said that by working her muscles and getting her to relax, she can release the toxins from the chemical treatment.
“I was frightened to come the first time,” said Julie Jewell. “I was not sure about coming to a chiropractor. It’s been four years for me.”
Franzose told her to go see Dunton.
“I was much better after the first visit,” she said. “I see him once every couple of weeks and I see Jodi-Ann once a week. It just kind of balances me.”
Jewell said she has had breast cancer and radical surgery, chemotherapy, radiation and now lung cancer.
“The massage therapy through all this I think has just helped me with everything in general as far as relaxing, and I did not have neuropathy in my hands and feet,” she said of diagnosed weakness, numbness, and pain from nerve damage. “To this day, I have no neuropathy and I’m guessing that’s why — massage and Reiki.”
The Duntons will continue to operate out of the log cabin they built years ago at the end of a long wooded driveway that opens out to a wide view to the east from the top of Dore Hill. They later added three rooms that comprise their offices.
“This is home,” Jodi-Ann said. “This has always been home.”
Doug Harlow — 612-2367
Twitter:@Doug_Harlow
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