physician wellness

A few weeks ago, we faced a full-on fly invasion in our house.
At first, we blamed the warming temperatures. But this wasn’t just a seasonal nuisance—something else was wrong. I tried my usual fly-swatting tricks: the electric racket, sticky traps, sprays…even Zevo. Eventually, I set aside my squeamishness and got a fly swatter. Still, nothing made a dent.
Weeks later, we found the real source: a trash bin in our backyard had become a breeding ground—crawling with larvae.
No wonder nothing worked. We were swatting individual flies while thousands more were hatching daily.
So, what does this have to do with quitting healthcare?
Everything.

Today, I’m closing our series, Things I Wish I Knew Before Quitting Medicine, with a topic close to my heart: standards and self-worth.
I’d like to start with a quote that changed my life years ago. Don Miguel Ruiz wrote:
“Nobody treats you worse than you treat yourself. If they did, you would have left immediately.”

In this post, I continue my series on “Things I Wish I Knew Before Quitting Medicine.” Today’s topic may resonate far beyond the world of healthcare: values and integrity.
This is no longer just a conversation about physician burnout—it’s about the spiritual crisis unfolding in our workplaces, and in our world.

Stress is the new smoking. That’s my biggest takeaway from the Harvard Mind-Body Health course. Stress overload raises the risk for nearly every chronic illness imaginable.

Today, I share the first video in the series “What I Wish I Knew Before Quitting Medicine.” In this video, I tell the story of the first time I experienced the tug of cognitive dissonance—and how I chose to ignore it. I’ll use this story to highlight the three most important mistakes I made, mistakes that could have changed the course of my journey if I had addressed them earlier.