"The cause of intense stress is more often the result
of a calamity in their medical practice business rather
than a Clovid Variant PANDEMIC infection."
No matter what the cause of that terrible unrelenting feeling, your medical practice business suffers its own business pain. The faster you can shed the rotten feeling the better the compliance of your patients, office staff, and those around you that day or week will be. I’ve had my share of that feeling in my medical practicing years and have seen how destructive it can be for you to manage your medical practice business appropriately under such circumstances.
You can’t hide the “rotten feeling” from anyone, even though you believe you can. Your body language, speech tone, and face expose it all. So if you can’t hide it and still want to continue your normal medical practice management duties for the day(s), you need to have your own means of
eliminating it fast.
Other than an illness that you can treat medically, there are many other more serious causes of a rotten feeling that are more damaging to your mental health, reputation, and interaction with those around you.
When one day I received a legal notice that a patient had filed a malpractice suit against me, it took me all of the first day thinking about what I did that would have made that medical patient so hateful towards me. Then the questions we all ask ourselves. Was it because of what I advised them, did in their medical treatment, didn't cure their illness, or never mentioned the complications that might happen in those circumstances?
The second day after that notice I had problems with depression about it all and that lasted over a week while I continued practicing. I truly was blaming myself for the problem, whatever it was that I did. Trying to work harder, involve myself with jobs and tasks, did not help. I couldn’t hide from my guilt about it or from the bad thoughts that automatically popped up in my brain intermittently. My self-induced criticism of myself for being such a bad doctor was emotionally intolerable.
It so happened that this lady was my patient and I had done a tubal reanastomosis on her following a prior tubal ligation elsewhere. That was two years ago. She had not became pregnant in the two years and brought the suit against me for that reason. I specialized in infertility surgery and had done many reanastamosis procedures under the operating microscope, mainly because no other physicians in the area would do them (insurance didn’t pay for these at that time). The highlight of my practice over the years was doing infertility surgery because I loved doing it and was good at it.
The success is always measured by pregnancy occurring. There are no guarantees of pregnancy after the procedure. Most of the time pregnancy doesn’t occur after such a repair, so it gives patients a chance to hope where there was essentially none, otherwise.
Within a month after the malpractice notice, my attorney told me that the case has been dismissed… she was pregnant in the uterus, not the tube, which was another miracle on top of that.
Most of you have had some catastrophe in your practice comparable to this one and suffered similarly from it.
One reliable way to resolve that “rotten feeling”...
The solution revolves around the idea of what John C. Maxwell, New York Times best-selling author, speaker, leadership expert, wrote in “How Successful People Think.” It’s called “deep thinking.” To most professionals, the idea of taking time out to do some expansive and deeper thinking about issues they face is unacceptable or not worth their time, because it's a fabricated myth.
For physicians who later discovered they had picked the wrong specialty it certainly would have been important at the time. Even the choice about where to start medical practice demands a lot more thought than most give it.
We are never taught how to involve ourselves in deeper thinking. Yet in our lives, the number of mistakes we’ve made, wrong decisions we’ve made, and problems we’ve solved using the wrong strategies serve to remind us how important deep thinking is to our profession, success, and lives. Everyone should read his books.
Mr. Maxwell’s book tells you how to think deeply, because most of us have no idea how to do it and remain uninformed about its value.
John C. Maxwell’s advice on thinking in depth...
1. Deep thinking is not automatic; you have to work at it because it requires
a change in your thinking.
2. Expose yourself to good input by reading, tapes, spending time with
those that are good logical thinkers and successful.
3. Don’t use emotions except to feed the process and create
mental momentum.
4. Shaping your thoughts requires using humor, humility, excitement,
creativity, fulfillment, honesty, passion, change.
5. The spot to think deeply, anywhere you can concentrate on thinking.
Most productive thinking comes within a team.
6. Thoughts need to be a habit and discipline... thinking often.
7. Cultivate the big-picture thinking… learn from every experience.
8. Thinking evolves sequentially from visualization, to ideas, to focused
thinking, to goals, to creativity, to realistic thinking, to strategic thinking,
to possibility thinking, to reflective thinking, to questioning popular
thinking, to questioning all your own thinking, to practice unselfish
thinking, to bottom line thinking.
9. Profit measures how well you are thinking in your medical
practice business business planning and management.
“Where success is concerned, people are
not measured in inches, or pounds,
or college degrees, or family background;
they are measured by the size of their thinking.”
---David Schwartz
How all this fits into medical practice business planning...
1. Regarding healthcare decisions...
We learn from human behavior studies and experiments on brain function that nearly all decisions we make are made on an emotional basis and later rationalized using the other side of the brain, that thinks in practical terms.
The habit of emotional decision making, makes for increasing our stress because the results are so frequently far off the mark of what we should have done. Surgeons rarely enter the operating room without thinking about the process of the surgery they are about to do. Pro and con factors pass through their minds, sometimes subconsciously, and remain in conscious range during the surgery.
Is this person too old to tolerate this surgery, or too unhealthy to survive post op? Even the physician who referred the patient to the surgeon has to think about that. Confound that with the thought that the patient’s desire and request is to have the procedure done regardless of the potential danger to themselves.
In private medical practice business physicians have a responsibility to advise the patient honestly. That responsibility extends to your medical practice business management as well as to family matters. If there is no thorough investigation into all the ramifications of any decision, whether business ones or not, is the only way to truly modify the eventual results of a decision and to avoid the bad decisions we make.
2. Regarding picking a specialty and location of your practice...
The 14% of physicians in our nation that move to a different location each year revealed by the AMA survey results seems to indicate that 14% have made a decision without fully evaluating the consequences of the original decision, no deep thinking or due diligence. That was an older survey and probably the percentage is much higher now--2022.
Then what about the other percent of physicians who lucked-out in their guessing about picking the right specialty for themselves, or place to start their private medical practice--should they be added to the total?
Physicians who choose the wrong specialty to pursue often stick with it rather than change to another and continue to remain unhappy, unfulfilled, and miserable. How many times have you made a decision and regretted it later? The reason commonly is because a person failed to uncover consequences of the decision and alterations that may have to be made later if this-or-that situation comes along. By knowing what talents and skills you have, gives you a far better background for choosing your medical specialty, than going on your desires and emotional choices.
Obviously, the extent of our investigation will not uncover all of the undesirable consequences of a decision we make, but you can eliminate many of the worst consequences by considering every aspect, good and bad, of the decision about to be made.
Successful people make a habit of considering everything they can think of—by deep thinking. If you set up your medical practice business in the poor area of the city or out in the country-side in a small town, you can’t expect to earn a lot of income or have the benefits of locating in nice areas of the city, unless you have a “business system” setup that works under those circumstances.
Suppose that little farming town had a large meat packing or fruit boxing plants just outside the town that drew hundreds of workers from 50 miles around?
3. Regarding joining partnerships or groups of physicians...
If you decide to join another doctor or group practice sometime, wouldn’t you visit the doctors at least in person? Most split-ups of partnerships and groups occur because the doctor didn’t investigate it enough. I once contacted a doctor in AZ about an association with him. On the phone everything sounded fantastic and was right for me to pursue.
4. Regarding other physicians in your area...
A physician friend of mine practicing in that area told me just the opposite story about the problems with the doctor that I had spoken with about an association in practice with him. The hospital administrator confirmed those problems as well.
Doctors become suddenly disabled, die in accidents or from cancer, are restricted in-hospital privileges, become incompetent to practice, go through a divorce, have a million dollar settlement of a malpractice case, lose their medical license, involved in a crime, etc.
I’ve seen it all during my years. Lots of these terrible situations and their catastrophic results can be identified early on and save you major grief later.
You might want to go around to all the physicians locally and have a friendly conversation with them, maybe on the premise of referring patients to them. Ask them questions about their careers and what has happened to them unexpectedly in the past.
My interview with a hospital CEO about practicing in his area taught me another lesson about private medical practice that I had never thought about. I asked him why they had so many physician turnovers in their small town and why were they so often.
He explained that most of the physicians that started medical practice in his area were either foreign doctors from other countries or physicians that had had medical board problems, legal issues, or family problems. The last medical doctor that left quickly, and that I would be replacing if I decided to stay there and practice, had problems with patients.
He was from Iran and had brought his "culture tradition" with him. His male dominant attitude, intimidation of female patients, and disrespect for normal American female aggressiveness resulted in a perpetual loss of his medical practice patients once the "word" had spread in the town about his treatment of female patients. Husbands started to threaten him as well.
That put the possibility of practicing there off my list.
Bottom Line Comments...
There is so much more to developing deep thinking than I can tell you here. You can use the information in books written on the topic and alert your children to the process, encourage them in doing it, even do a few projects of deep thinking with them to let them have an experience with it.
I hate to admit it, but I would have made a number of different decisions about medicine in my life if I had known these things and used deeper thinking, had I read John Marshall's book 50
years sooner.
----Professional Probe----
"Deep thinking can be a
hair-raising experience"
"Many times it takes more time, energy, and work to avoid a task than to perform the task.
By rejecting any effort to thoroughly understand and uncover the majority of the consequences associated with our decision-making through deep thinking, we commit ourselves to management of the future results of those decisions, regardless of the severity of repercussions.
It is so much easier for anyone to avoid the consequences of our decisions if we have considered all possible outcomes beforehand. I believe that none of us really take this issue seriously enough in our medical careers. It may be that that action is one of the reasons great numbers of physicians are not successful in their medical practices and careers."
Medical schools do not make any significant effort to inform students or to help out with those decisions, in my experience. Just one two-hour lecture by a speaker with extensive knowledge about medical practice management or marketing problems and solutions, given during the third year of the medical school curriculum, would make a world of difference to the about 20,000 medical students graduating every year in our nation.
Articles © 2013-2022/CGG INVESTMENTS LLC. All rights reserved. #70, 3-16-22
