“Risk Taking: Necessary For Maximum Medical Practice Business Profitability, Growth, And Business Success”

"If you value reaching your greatest potential
as a physician, this is how all physicians
should approach their risk-tolerance level
while using their medical skills and
knowledge for maximum advantage."

Risk-taking is a measure of our adaptability and creativity. It has everything to do with creating a highly profitable medical practice success. It has everything to do with your private practice management and survival.

You consciously or unconsciously confront risks daily. You either adapt your thinking to modifying those risks when you recognize them, or you adjust to the risk and modify your behavior to live with them. You drove your car to your medical office today--was that a risk? Actually, it's a higher risk than medical practice will ever be to your survival financially or personally.

Naturally, we first think about avoiding risks of any nature, an instinctual process that provides you with an immediate sense of security. The problem is that many risks to our lives and personal self are not recognized or predictable. To protect ourselves we commonly engage our minds in patterns of looking for potential risks that we otherwise wouldn’t have noticed.

We pay attention to possible, probable, or actual risks because we intend to do something about them… usually. Ignoring them only postpones the inevitable consequences of living with the probabilities of misfortune following you around like a shadow. Add that to your list of stresses if you have masochistic tendencies.

With these ideas in mind, we are down to dealing with the risk factors and their benefits or destructive potential within your medical practice and career. Whether intentional or not, we eventually make the necessary changes to avoid risk factors we perceive as dangerous and only evaluate those that have a significant potential of resulting in a benefit.

The options available for accomplishing this are selected by emotion and rationalized by reason. Any choice we make among those risk options either impedes or enhances the objective we have in mind so there’s a lot of mental analysis involved.

The choices we make measures our degree of success and failure in everything from marriage to career status... even how much beer you can drink and still remain upright.
 

What are some of your risk-facing options?

• Recognize risks, but ignore them—the “what-the-hell” attitude
   
• Select some risks and do something about the ones you care about making
  adjustments for
   
• Spend your life in isolation to try to avoid any risks at all--masochistic
   
• Believe your religious faith protects you always, so no need for worry
   
• Assume your life is predestined, so risks are of no consequence...
  your fate is already decided no matter what
   
• Pretend the risks you notice won’t ever affect you... such as
  gambling, riding motorcycles, or belief of fighter pilots.
   
• Rely on statistics that tell you that there is only one chance
  in 10,000 or a million of a certain risk happening to you
   
• Face your risks and fears head-on every day... resting on hope
  and your self-confidence in your personal capabilities for
  overcoming them, whatever they are
  
• Risks force our mind to consider the advantages and disadvantages of proceeding on a course beyond the obvious chance of injury, damage or loss--or WINNING.

There’s another risk dimension of opportunity, believe it or not, that lies beyond what we usually determine to be our personal risk limitations.

The limits that we presently feel comfortable with (our comfort zone) may even contain more risk potential than in the environment outside our comfort zone. It’s just that we often don’t recognize it. The fear of what could happen, holds us hostage. If you’re crippled by the fear of an increased “assumed risk” being present outside your comfort zone, get a grip!

The fact that we most often think additional risks as being more of a threat than we are already
facing without stepping out of our comfort zone, in no way guarantees for us that there’s a
significant greater risk outside the box we are in. Is it better to stay as we are, or take a chance on improving our situation in spite of a potential risk taking venture into the unknown?

Risks are cognitive warnings that something bad might happen if you push your actions beyond a certain point, because you have had no experience with that circumstance to show you it’s safe
to proceed.

Your fundamental freedom for maximizing your professional potential and creativeness is possible only when you’re confident you can handle the risks you undertake. It’s been shown that the mind functions at a much higher level of creativeness and productive thought patterns outside your comfort zone. It's a supernatural mental occurrence that is automatically matched with your
degree of confidence. All entrepreneurs experience that effect often.
 

How does one measure the severity of risk factors?

Risks don’t predict the outcome of any risk-taking choice. It’s left to us to move ahead with caution.

The greatest mistake we make is to consider risks primarily as threats rather than opportunities. So, here we are with our knickers in a twist trying to fight off the emotional right brain and soothe the logical left brain at the same time.

Fear is the dominant measurement device we use to judge the consequence of risks. The greater the fear of what we “think” will be the result of taking a risk, the greater we perceive the risk to be. Fear causes us to be imprisoned by the foolishness of “pretend” or “guessing.”

Our move into a situation where we have never been, creates fear to a variable degree. The amount depends on your belief in what you are capable of accomplishing… a matter of your self-esteem.

Fear of the unknown makes a risk feel like a threat. We have that fairy-dust belief based on what we have seen and heard about those who have ended up on the short end of the stick by taking risks. We dwell on the fate of risk losers rather than the risk winners. This is exquisitely demonstrated by individuals who believe that stock market investing will result in loss of all your money every time. Why is that?

Why don’t we accept what happens to risk-winners who have overcome the fears and their perceived threats successfully. The fear of failure, fear of disgrace, fear of disappointing family expectations, fear of your own capabilities, and fear of loss of everything you have created for yourself, prevents us from upgrading our professional careers and lifestyle? We normally refer to such “over-comers” as entrepreneurs.

Discipline is a profound measuring device for judging risk. The greater a person’s discipline has become over their lives, the less the risk potential appears to be… and actually is.

Discipline over one’s own life includes such things as setting goals and achieving them, never being satisfied with their level of accomplishment, using time productively, making plans that are followed to the end, and ultimately, maintaining the perception of failure as just another stepping stone towards success.

Failure has been attributed to being the best teacher that one can have--converts a negative to a positive result.

Discipline had to be present for anyone to have graduated from medical school, but you know that. You have it but may not know how to use it to the best advantage. You may be very disciplined at controlling your productive use of your time, but may not realize you have not done so well with establishing medical practice goals beyond medical school and reaching them.

Ask yourself right now, “Am I disappointed with my medical practice management or professional career today? Have I reached my highest level of skills and medical knowledge that I previously anticipated at this point in my career? Am I sure that I’ve reached my maximum potential in my medical professional career?

Am I convinced that I have the discipline and control to accept certain calculated risks in order to reach the place in my career where I originally expected to be?” How do you know that you are able to do much better than you have, unless you take the next step into the unknown?

Don’t tell me you can’t discipline yourself to do all these things, because I know you have the desire and capability to do so. The difficulty is, “You don’t know what you don’t know.”

If you don’t allow your mind to help you (while outside your mental comfort zone), you lose. Just try to imagine how much useful information and knowledge your mind has suppressed, yet still retains, that you could really use now. It's all in the memory banks waiting on your move, not down the garbage chute.

Accountability is not only a virtue, but also a means of measuring risk potential. Taking responsibility for everything that happens to you in your life is key to your ultimate potential in your professional career. The greater your accountability, the less severe the risk potential becomes.

Your level or degree of accountability is inversely proportional to your level of risk acceptance.

Accountability provides you with the ability to think more decisively, make more reasonable and acceptable decisions, and create the most advantageous outcomes from any risk taken. These qualities are best exemplified by war heroes who instantly are able to put aside all risks by understanding their own accountability to others. I discovered that fact in combat in Vietnam while flying on over 90 helicopter medevac missions in hot zones as a flight surgeon.

Physicians and other professional medical care providers are accountable to their patients, to their peers, and to their families, among others. Because of the impact of your accountability for your medical practice performance, most doctors are quite willing to push their limits of skills and medical knowledge (step out of their box) to be of more value to their patients and
medical profession.

Overcoming the risks we’re talking about here, leads to extraordinary accomplishments that become result multipliers. You might end up rich even when you didn’t plan to.

When you’re accountable, risk taking surpasses conventional wisdom. You see and understand risk factors more clearly. It enables you to more easily reduce the risks involved. You are less likely to end up out on the end of a limb. This brings up the next topic of adjusting to risk taking… a fresh eyes view of your thoughts concerning risks.
 

How to change your thinking about medical practice risk factors...

Every physician professional becomes involved in reducing risks to themselves and their patients. Here, I want to focus on the business risks that medical doctors face today in this world of economic crisis, while the members of congress hide in the pucker-brush.

What I’m most concerned with are the causative factors leading medical doctors to avoid the practice business and medical practice marketing aspects of their practices. I’m convinced that a large portion of the causes can be attributed to the way physicians think about risk.

An example of medical doctors who are able to feel comfortable enough to practice medicine, while claiming objective amnesia regarding the risks, reveals the power of mental repression. Quite likely, physician's medical practice management is a primary victim of both lowest risk and highest risk taking over time.

Isn’t it remarkable that every OB-Gyn doctor hasn’t quit medical practice as a result of an
incredibly high risk of medical malpractice, especially with obstetrics? Some say… let the midwives (CNM) take the risk instead. The remarkable rare occurrence of malpractice cases filed against all midwives who are directly involved with the same trauma factors as medical doctors’ face, rarely are sued for the same childbirth damages to babies or mothers as physicians encounter. Go figure.

A medical doctor’s pugnacious attitude towards their risks of possibly losing everything, is commendable… but foolish, when you consider their alternatives. In my case, it was necessary for me to be neck-wrestled to the ground by my wife before I was able to understand the stress I had put myself under all those years… what an idiot I was!

Yet OB medical doctors plod along continuing to pay the outrageous malpractice premiums,
worrying about when (not if) the next patient will sue them, and knowing that one bad medical judgment, or treatment, or surgical procedure can terminate their practice and career with the loss of everything. Often, it also includes loss of their family as well, which most never hear about.

It seems amazing to me that our politicians and many physicians today become blatantly more concerned about abortions restrictions and laws, than they do about the far more damage that results from medical malpractice verdicts, the constant threats that all OB physicians face daily over bad injuries to newborn babies during delivery that are blamed on the physicians and that have never been proven medically, scientifically, or statistically.

Forceps injuries to babies, prolonged labor injuries, beyond term pregnancy deliveries, cerebral palsy of newborns, brain damage suspected injuries, are a few of the egregious claims that punish thousands of OB physicians, their careers, their families, their competency, and their reputations that are published to all state medical boards in the nation, without any detailed proof medically, scientifically, or statistically that they did anything at all to cause the damages to babies.

Those assumptions, guesses, and interpretations, by the legal system and medical malpractice plaintiff attorneys that are influencing the juries to place all the blame of the physicians anyway without actual scientific or medical proof is an outrage beyond belief in a sane world. Perhaps it's another covert means of financially supporting the weak side of the legal profession as well as the poverty of citizens in our society that has never been put in front of the US Supreme Court yet.

How is it possible to rationalize that kind of risk taking?

Let me list a few possible reasons...

The amount of risk involved in each of these situations is a matter of individual perception that
has no basis in fact, statistics, or overall outcomes for any physician in any specialty. Fear freezes us in place with few exceptions.

It seems that physicians who are earning a large income from their practices pay much less
attention to risk factors than those who are barely making it financially. Money eliminates risk?

Sure, rich doctors have a far larger financial cushion which allows them to have less concern about
risk taking. During my years in private practice 1973 to 1994, I knew an invasive cardiologist making over $600,000 a year, and a gastroenterologist earning about the same amount. Risks to them were considered essentially insignificant compared to obstetrics physicians. And they paid far less for their medical malpractice coverage.

Wouldn’t that circumstance cause less affluent doctors to step out of their comfort zone at least long enough to disregard risks that they previously believed to be too drastic? Apparently not.
 

In this section of discussion about taking risks in medical practice, it seems that a few key lessons stand out...

• 1. Objective amnesia is a necessary mental process to develop to reduce your perceived risks.

• 2. Becoming a wealthy physician appears to reduce risks.

• 3. Certain personal beliefs about risk-taking are capable of helping or hindering you’re professional status to a great degree. Arrogance can be a tactic for reducing practice risks. It reminds me of the description of a bully---"He's so tough he can hardly walk."
  

Although this tongue-in-cheek summary of lessons are to some degree a bit believable, while they, at the same time, point out that each of us responds to risks in different ways. It takes a go-round with your “inner self” to learn to deal with risks. How you deal with risks continues to change throughout your professional life, depending on the triggers that rifle you off into a different
phase of belief.

Hard facts to remember...

Fact #1:  You get nowhere without taking risks.

Fact #2: Taking calculated risks keeps us in the recoverable zone.

Fact #3: Ways to reduce risk and create improvement are not
counterproductive.

Fact #4: Fear creates more failures in medical practice than all
other factors combined.

Fact #5: Every doctor has the in-born capacity to find their full
potential by learning to adapt to practicing in an
environment where change is constantly occurring and
risk-taking is prevalent.
 

What happens when you combine risk taking with medical practice
business profitability?

The answer is…nothing! At least not until you’re completely convinced that you need to do what it takes to make it all happen. Even then, nothing happens to your medical practice business until you take action and implement what needs to be done. No one can do it for you.

Obviously, you will have to trample rough-shod over your fearful uncertainty, deprive yourself of the panty-waist comfort of inertia, buggy-whip your intentions, and recycle your mental mindset.

The thermal noise you hear is nothing more than excitement stirred up by your sustained focus on
the outrageous idea that you are capable of making major improvements in your medical practice
and income.

You must understand that there’s a right way and a wrong way to protect your medical practice management and medical practice business. Unfortunately, most doctors don’t really know how to manage their own medical practice business with maximum efficiency and profitability that most successful ordinary businesses already know about.

Medical doctors aren’t taught what they need to know about medical practice business principles and medical practice marketing strategies. The results of that fact are relevant to the following issue. Reports have been made public that indicate most private medical doctors leave at least a million dollars on the table during their private medical practice years without recognizing it.

Maybe those wealthy physicians didn't have a formal business education either, but discovered how to retain what you left on the table.

Structuring your medical practice business success to provide you with financial independence over the long haul is a worthy goal. The effort requires both persistent efforts and the medical practice business management knowledge and knowledgement about management to make it happen.
 

Some food for thought about matching risk to gain... 

• 1. How could any doctor in private medical practice expect to maximize
  his or her business profitability without having foundational
  business knowledge?

• 2. How can any doctor in medical practice set aside the time to learn
  business principles without compromising their medical practice
  income significantly?

• 3. When the need arrives for doctors to save their practice from
  financial failure, they are already too financially strapped to pay
  an expert to help them. Do it yourself?

• 4. If you are not a risk-taker, how would you ever expect to reach
  your maximal professional capabilities without taking risks?
  
• 5. How much time, effort, and money are you willing to spend on
  educating yourself in business principles, tactics, and strategies?
  Would you be open to purchasing a "business and marketing" set
  of about 30 books that will enable you to do most of it yourself
  at your own time and leisure?
  

Want that list that's only available in one place? The book that I
recently upgraded and published the second edition of in July 2021
---"The Wounded Physician Project"---

Comments...

Our 174 Accredited Medical schools in the USA, over the last century, have never had any intention
of providing even basic business education of business and marketing to medical students. It is clear to those of us who have the knowledge and expertise of business and marketing that such action taken by the AAMC (Association of American Medical Colleges) has been and continues to be an intentional effort by this professional organization to prevent all medical students in all medical schools from being able to ever reach their maximum potential in their medical practice careers.

Additionally, AAMC, which is responsible for medical school curriculum management across our nation, is purposely handicapping all private practice physicians for the full duration of their medical practice careers by never providing a curriculum for learning business and marketing. In essence, literally all physicians lack the ability to manage, grow, and maintain a highly profitable medical practice business because of the lack of an academic business education.

About three of them recently came up with the idea that it might be an advantage to themselves if they offered a formal business education to their medical students. Most likely they are predicting that it would be used as a magnet for recruiting more Americans to apply to their medical schools.

What I discovered about 10 years ago--MBA business education is too general in nature to help medical doctors in private medical practice--and they haven't realized that yet.

Sending their medical students across campus to the business school for an MBA education will not result in what physicians need for private medical practice. My research showed that students will need a specialized curriculum applicable to medical practice for maximum value to physicians.

Another just as important part of medical education, that all medical schools totally ignore, and college pre-med advisors are ignorant of, is the need for two requirements...

1. First, medical school education departments, once they recognize that a business education of medical students while in medical school is valuable, need to communicate with all premed colleges and universities with premed programs. Premeds while in college must have at least an introduction to some kind of business education courses that prepares them for medical school admission and business education in medical school.
   
   The reason this is important is because the nature of a first year medical school student
   faced with...
   
   **a business education in addition to their tough medical
   education
   
   **having no idea what a business education is all about, what
   it's for, and what benefits it has for a practicing physician
   
   **won't accept a separate education they know nothing about
   
   **the extra cost might make it not affordable
   
   
   When the premed student reaches medical school they will be
   prepared and knowledgeable about how a business education
   will benefit them. Premed college advisors need to understand
   that medical schools require a basic business education for
   medical school admission.
   
   
   2. Second, Medical schools must establish a curriculum compatible
   with private medical practice business requirements. Whether it
   is a curriculum with the business school or one provided by the
   medical school itself. The materials can be all digitally available
   and/or live lectures (import business and marketing experts to do)
   concerning the critically important issues.
   

College premed students continue to suffer from the lack of any stimulus to take business courses during college. What you have left in medical practice is learning by trial and error.

This incredible defect in the education of medical doctors is a setup for medical practice financial failure in every sense of the word. That is exactly why so many private medical practices are now failing and forcing doctors to seek other careers and business opportunities.

Those doctors comfortably snuggled under the wing of an HMO or hospital employment should be worried as well. Total control over how you practice medicine and the constant possibility of being terminated if you resist the hierarchy is even more brutal. I’ve experienced both.

The one undeniable and most critical benefit offered by a formal business education is that a doctor is able to work less and earn more than they ever could otherwise.

Knowing what I now know about risk-taking, business success, and the potential for profitable careers, I am convinced that any physician or other professional healthcare provider that is failing financially in their professional medical practice situation would be far better off to read, implement, and become addicted to this website as a reasonable means of getting back on the profit train.

 
Some other distinguishing advantages of using private medical practice business knowledge and management to propel your medical practice business machine are...

• Practice burn-out is almost a non-issue.
  
• Doctor frustration is reduced by 10 fold.

• Doctors can earn enough to afford to improve their skills and
  knowledge at any time they choose.

• Financial freedom is no longer a pipe-dream if the right tools
  are taught, learned and used.
  
• Doctors are able to alter their medical practices to meet
  economic or personal choices with very little loss of income.
  
• Practice management requires considerably less time and effort.
  
• Employees are more loyal and remain longer in the job when
  practice is run by effective business procedures.
  
• Practice income can be moved up and down by increasing or
  decreasing the marketing efforts.
  

If you scrutinize these carefully, you will understand that every one of these advantages are never available to those in employed positions or in private medical practices without incorporating formal business knowledge into their core framework.

“If a businessman invested one hour every day doing
nothing but thinking, brainstorming, creating new
and better ways to be of greater and more valued
service to his customers, money problems
would melt away.”
        ---Earl Nightingale

----Professional Probe----

"Extreme frustration with medical practice absolutely
prevents any chance for a sympathetic 'Hug'."

******************************

I keep this media clip about education that I found in my Allegheny College Brochure as a reference to bring me back to reality...

"At the heart of our educational mission lies an ethos of access, and unflagging commitment to ensure that promising young scholars from all walks of life and backgrounds can grow and aspire to new heights because of the Allegheny experience. Every Allegheny graduate has benefited from the generosity and financial support of alumni who came before them. In order to continue to give the most promising students the opportunity to attend Allegheny, we must increase resources for scholarships."

Is there a better way to ask for donations \without traumatizing the "ask"?

Articles © 2013-2022/CGG INVESTMENTS LLC. All rights reserved. #32, 3-21-22