In today’s bulletin, we look at a neurosurgeon’s technique for achieving healing, weight loss, and mental clarity. Read on to learn the details of his timeless approach, which he is backing up with his life!
“It ain’t brain surgery.”
Jim Gaffigan, a stupendous comedian, has a funny line about brain surgeons. He speculates how hard it must be for them to never be able to turn to their coworkers, shrug, and say, “Oh well, it’s not like it’s brain surgery.”
We all know brain surgery is special and complex and that only a certain type of person can make the steps to be able to operate on someone’s brain. Neurosurgery training programs are extremely competitive, as far as admissions are concerned. Your credentials need to be exemplary. Once you do get admitted, the training is rigorous. Neurosurgeons not only operate on the brain but are also trained to operate on nerves in areas other than the brain, like the spine, for example.
I want to tell you the story of a young neurosurgeon who trained at MIT and had a revelation that was so strong that it caused him to recently walk away from his practice altogether. He isn’t even 40 years old, but in a recent viral video he discusses why he couldn’t continue with the practice that he had worked so much of his life to be able to do.
He says he remembers well being told by an older physician instructor in medical school that the job of a doctor is to alleviate suffering. He held onto that as he set up his life to perform back surgeries on people of all ages suffering from various painful conditions of the spine.
As he began his private practice, he noticed it was not uncommon for his surgeries to only have a temporary result with his patients. His patients would get some relief but symptoms would return after 4, 5, or 6 months. This doctor was excellent. His training was impeccable. His technique was brilliant. He expected that a skillful surgery should have a lasting benefit. He was growing frustrated. He and one of his assistants started to get the feeling that they were not really getting at the root cause. They felt like contractors replacing the water damage in a house without repairing the leaky roof.
Then there was something else. He also started noticing that some of his patients with bad ruptured discs on MRI would get better by the time he could get them to the operating room, especially if there was a 3 or 4-week delay, for whatever reason.
Curiosity
He was curious, so he started asking questions. He asked all his patients questions about many aspects of their lives: diet, lifestyle habits, health of relationships, thought patterns, and more. He started to see a pattern. There was a certain subgroup with a healthy lifestyle that would heal and improve NO MATTER WHAT COURSE THEY TOOK. There was another group that would have a poor outcome NO MATTER WHAT APPROACH THEY USED.
He learned the people who do well are the ones who:
- manage to get good sleep
- don’t smoke
- have good relationships: people they love and people who love them
- eat well- plenty of plant-based, whole foods
- know how to sweat and do it regularly through exercise or sauna
- have a good stress management approach including a mindfulness practice
- have exposure to nature
He started counseling his patients on these topics, and as more people improved by taking his advice, he realized he was becoming a misfit in his profession. He realized the system was not incentivized correctly, at least in his case. More people with beneficial long-term outcomes was not incentivized, surgery was. It would be bad for business if there were fewer neurosurgery patients in the operating room. Full stop. From his perspective, he could see that to get the best outcomes, he would have to go entirely against the way the system was set up, and it was impossible.
He felt himself at an impasse. He didn’t believe in what he was doing any longer. He tried to continue the career that took him 9 years to master but he struggled to do so. He gained 40 pounds. He knew it would kill him. After a heart-to-heart with his partner, he decided to walk away from his career.
He’s not yet a year into his decision and the change it has brought, and he’s not sure what he will do; but, he does report that he is the happiest he’s been in his entire life. He walks a lot with his dog and even has started vlogging about their hikes. Amen to that!
The moral of the story is that no system is spared from the tendency to become a hungry beast needing to feed itself, diminishing resources from its original mission. It’s a difficult situation when true and lasting healing gets rejected because it can’t provide income for the system. The medical system becomes increasingly ill the more it loses track of its core values. That goes for all of us!
As this brilliant young man shows in his testimonial, whenever we are part of a system that appears broken, standing up for ourselves and our values is the path to happiness. And this is the approach I want to amplify for you today. Kudos to him. I hope he will find a way to stay in medicine as part of the effort to create a new system.
He deserves much credit for reminding us to have the courage to trust ourselves. We are the source of so much brilliance! We ourselves have all the answers to our most pressing questions! Realizing that is excellent medicine. Our core mission is to tap into our own source of wisdom more and more with each passing year and lesson.
