Dr. Botta decided to become a physician as a teenager, after a doctor treated him badly. He went to high school, college, and medical school with a single goal: to treat people well.
He trained in the Bronx and came to northeast Connecticut looking for a place to raise a family. He found Putnam, and stayed. After four years in a traditional practice that asked him to see twenty-six patients a day, he founded this one — because the patients he cares most about, older adults with multiple chronic conditions, are exactly the patients a six-minute visit fails.
He practices what he calls the biopsychosocial model: medical history alongside the financial, social, and practical circumstances that decide whether a treatment plan survives contact with real life. Whether a patient can afford both their medications and their groceries is a clinical question, and he asks it.
“The first three minutes of a conversation are the most important minutes for a physician not to speak. Things surface twenty-five minutes into a visit that a ten-minute appointment would never reach.”
His subspecialty within all of this is polypharmacy — reviewing a patient’s full medication list and safely reducing it. A patient on twenty medications with fifteen diagnoses is not a hard case for him. It’s the case he trained for.
When he’s not caring for patients, Dr. Botta plays ice hockey year round, every Sunday morning. He runs, and has completed two half marathons with Dr. Candow. He’s a self-described city boy — born in Brooklyn, raised outside Queens, trained in the Bronx — who fell for northeast Connecticut and never left.
He keeps saltwater fish tanks in the office, including a small one his father gave him when he made the honor roll at sixteen. He’s had it forty years. His dog Luna comes to work most days.
