Dear Patient,
I would like to apologise for whatever reason you might feel let down by the health care system right now. You wait for weeks for a GP appointment with your long term condition. Once you lose patience you come to spend hours in the Emergency Department waiting rooms to get a diagnosis. But when your tests for acute life-threatening conditions come back normal, we will send you back to your GP with the same problem.
Our journeys as doctors are often different but know that most of us took up our calling to serve your overall holistic well-being, only the current system pressures continue to fail us both.
Like for many, my story started with a childhood hero, who inspired me to serve your needs. In my case, it was my father.
When I was younger I was running behind his footsteps & watched his every move. Although he trained as a surgeon, he also trained as a classic doctor who always considers the overall well-being of the patient before & after surgery. His holistic ways inspired me at an early age to become a doctor.
Getting through the sciences in high school in preparation for my medical degree, then doing my foundation training and finally getting accepted to general surgical training seemed like everything I ever wanted at the time. While I enjoyed the challenges I faced in & outside of the operating theatre, I started to feel a hollowness that was impossible to ignore.
Years of quick ward rounds, endless rotations between hospitals, infinite paperwork, exams, audits and research projects left
very little time to spend with my patients. I had to realise that the doctor-patient interaction & the holistic approach to patient care is no longer how we practice medicine. This realisation deeply concerned me.
After long nights of reflection, I made the painful decision to quit surgical training without a plan, but with the knowledge that there must be a better way to treat patients & I could not stop searching until I found it.
I went on to do Emergency Medicine & I qualified as a Board Certified Lifestyle Doc. Yep, even in the fast paced emergency setting if we know how, we can take lifestyle & nutrition history & advise around it when appropriate like so many of us do now. Not only that we can, but we must, or we fail to diagnose and treat correctly. Now every day I pick up on missed opportunities where patients can get life changing advice to turn their lifestyle around during teachable moments to prevent the next heart attack etc.
Seeing patients get better and off their meds renewed my passion for medicine & fuels me to do what I can to change the way we all practice. We can & we must reduce pressures with the 3rd arm of conventional medicine the non-pharmaceutical & non-surgical advice to help eliminate the root cause of chronic illness, halting the pandemic of NCDs fuelling the system failure.
So I hope, soon we can offer you the time & care you deserve!