Exclusive | I’m a doctor in rural Georgia — the illnesses, injuries and infections city folk couldn’t imagine

When Dr. Jim Hotz attended medical school at The Ohio State University, an infectious disease specialist showed his class a slide of the bacteria that cause tuberculosis.

“And he said, ‘You’ll probably not see another case of tuberculosis in your career,’ ” Hotz, 75, recalled to The Post.

“I come down to Georgia, and it was everywhere,” he said. “Last year alone, we treated 21 people with tuberculosis.”

Hotz founded Albany Area Primary Health Care while serving southwest Georgia for 47 years. His work is highlighted in Oscar winner Ben Proudfoot’s short documentary “Doc Albany,” which premiered Sunday at the Tribeca Film Festival.

“Dr. Hotz has spent his whole career making sure people in rural communities get the care they need,” “Doc Albany” executive producer Teresa Barreira said. “He knows how to work the system and fight for his patients.”

Hotz is no stranger to the limelight. He inspired the 1991 Michael J. Fox movie “Doc Hollywood,” about a crackerjack young doctor who ends up in a small Southern town despite his big-city dreams.

Hotz initially thought he would work in Athens, home to the University of Georgia, but instead found himself in rural Leesburg, Georgia.

He was accompanied by his brother-in-law, who had been his med school roommate. The pair figured they could do anything for a few years before moving on to something bigger.

“What we didn’t understand was the incredible challenge of going to a community that [hadn’t had] doctors in 30, 40 years,” Hotz said. “So in a whole county, we were the only doctors.”

The first woman who came to see him had Stage 4 cervical cancer — “bleeding as big as your fist.”

“When you don’t have a health provider there, you run into some pretty advanced diseases,” he said.

Besides diseases, he’s also treated farm injuries, poisoning from pesticides sprayed in pecan orchards and snake bites.

“Had a couple of guys that were out hunting hogs. There are wild hogs. They use dogs to hunt them. They run after them,” Hotz remembered.

“And these guys were running barefoot through a swamp,” he continued. “One guy said, ‘I think I got stung by a bee.’ And I said, ‘That’s interesting. The bee must have had fangs because it looks more like you got bitten by a water moccasin.’”

In one unusual case, Hotz treated a farm laborer who developed cryptococcal meningitis, a serious fungal infection, from exposure to pigeon droppings while working in a hay loft.

“So there’s kind of those quirky things you get a lot of exposure to,” he said. “I can’t tell you the number of people we’ve taken care of who fell out of deer stands.”

Hunters tend to fall asleep on these elevated platforms while waiting for deer to come within range, Hotz said.

But the most common problems he fields are high blood pressure, diabetes and obesity.

When he started, 3% of his patients were diabetic and 10% were obese.

“Now we’re sitting at 70% obese,” Hotz said. “We manage 8,010 diabetics, 14,000 people with obesity, 16,000 people with hypertension.”

His medical group also treats nearly 1,400 HIV patients. He saw his first AIDS patient in 1983, when there was no local infrastructure to address the disease, so he developed a groundbreaking regional rural HIV program.

Technology has since significantly transformed the healthcare landscape.

For example, Publicis Sapient developed a digital system for placing healthcare professionals in underserved areas. The tool is featured in “Doc Albany.”

“If we can help more people like Dr. Hotz do their work, we can start closing the gaps in healthcare access across the country,” said Barreira, Publicis Sapient’s chief marketing and communications officer.

Limited resources have contributed to the recent spread of tuberculosis, a disease that can be traced back to ancient Egypt.

Researchers blame the COVID-19 pandemic for delaying diagnoses and antibiotic treatments, as well as increases in post-pandemic travel and migration from areas with high TB prevalence.

Over 10,300 cases of the contagious bacterial lung infection were reported in the US last year, up from about 9,600 in 2023. Kansas saw the biggest jump because of an outbreak in the Kansas City area.

In NYC, 839 TB cases were logged, a rise from 684 in 2023.

“What we came to realize is that, if it hits New York City, there ain’t any reason it can’t hit south Georgia,” Hotz said.