Category Archives: medicine

November 18:  Relentless Curiosity Makes Me Better

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NaBloPoMo 2019

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

Tonight, in the month of gratitude, I feel deeply thankful for Coach Christine.  I might have been a curious person all along, but it was not until I got a life coach that I learned the vast and profound value of curiosity in every realm.  As I wrote earlier this month, standing always in curiosity liberates my mind.  It relieves me of unnecessary urgency for an answer.  I can exercise professional creativity in forming better and better questions, and the answers (often multiple, intertwined, and intriguing) emerge more easily and artfully than if I chase them demandingly.

The business of medicine is to solve problems, to heal, to cure.  So we assume that the faster we get to answers, the better.  And they had better be the right ones, because lives are at stake here!  It’s always interesting to me when patients talk about my work as ‘saving lives.’  I can’t remember a time when I could actually make that claim, at least at all directly.  But to my colleagues—emergency medicine and critical care docs, trauma surgeons, suicide hotline counselors—thank you, you really do save lives every day!

I love primary care because I usually have the luxury of ‘(living) the question.’  When patients present with new problems, as soon as I know they are stable, I get really excited.  I’m liberated to get deeply curious, ask as many questions as they will tolerate, paint the big picture together.  I follow the standard physiologic and diagnostic process initially, which often yields a straight forward answer and plan of care.  But life and work would be pretty boring if that were always the case.  When the usual suspects are all acquitted and the mystery persists, that’s when things get fascinating.  This is when I really get to know a person.  When I ask truly open, honest questions—the questions I don’t know the answers to and that are not meant to lead anywhere—I never know where the conversation will go.  And I always learn something new and relevant, something that helps me connect.  This is the information that makes a person memorable, because it is truly unique to them.

One of my favorite moments in a patient encounter is when I have to pause a few seconds to form a really good question.  What do I really want to know, what am I after, what will really break open this conversation?  It happens regularly, and wow, what a rush.  OH, I just never know what I will learn!  You’d think people would get impatient and grumpy with such prolonged, sometimes meandering interrogation.  But I find that they often lean in, look me in the eye.  They get on the train with me and look as eagerly as I around the next bend.  What will we find?  Let’s explore together!

Relentless Curiosity.  It’s the funnest part of my work.  I love it.  And as we all know, loving our work makes us better.

November 17:  Elasticity Makes Me Better

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NaBloPoMo 2019

What was school like for you growing up?  Were you bored?  Confused?  Frustrated?  I had a pretty easy time, but many of my classmates did not, even the ‘smart’ ones.

In high school I was on the speech team.  One of my events was persuasive speaking.  I chose one year to advocate for teachers to broaden their teaching styles to match a wider variety of learning styles.  I used the Gregorc Mindstyle Delineator as an example of how styles can vary (mine is Abstract Random, go figure).  It was an interesting thesis and I sincerely believed what I wrote and presented in those 8 minutes each weekend.

Thirty years later, I wonder how much I walk this talk of meeting people where they need me.  Simply asking the question, raising my awareness, makes me better.

Parenting.  It doesn’t matter how many parenting books you read or how well you think your parents raised you.  General principles apply, of course.  But every kid is unique, and we parents do better when we realize that the methods we use for anything on kid #1 won’t necessarily work with kid #2, #3, an onward.  Flexibility is key to a happy and functional household, for getting out the door every morning without yelling.

Marriage:  According to the Dr. John Gottman, about two-thirds of marital problems are perpetual, meaning they will never actually resolve.  So how do couples stay together successfully?  Among other things, they learn to accept one another and work around the hard stuff.  At least partially, we have to soften our rigidities, learn to bend and sway, embrace the supple, intimate dance of commitment.

Teaching:  Not all students learn best by watching.  Not all learn best by doing.  Or by hearing, mimicking, or competing.  Luckily, medical education gives trainees multiple platforms on which to acquire the necessary knowledge and skills to care for patients.  For all its flaws, our profession actually does well here.  I’m happy that I realized this in my own experience.  When I precept students in clinic, they shadow, scribe, see patients alone or lead a joint encounter, so they can experience the work from different perspectives.  I think this mutual versatility and adaptability makes us all better.

Patient Care:  Over the years I have accumulated myriad articles and books to share with patients.  But not everybody’s a reader like me.  Not everybody wants to meditate or journal.  Some people do better with a personal trainer, others in spin class.  It’s my job to assess how each patient is most likely to succeed in health habit optimization, and present the most appropriate resources for consideration.  Primary care definitely does not work with a one size fits all approach.  So now I include audiobooks, podcasts, phone apps, and YouTube videos in my repertoire of medical information sharing.  I am blunt when it’s needed, and also gentle and diplomatic.  I can speak from the head and the heart, often both at the same time.

Speaking Engagements:  Here is where my elasticity has grown the most in recent years.  For the first decade of my career, I still used the expository presentation style I learned in high school.  Thankfully in 2014, I watched Nancy Duarte’s TED talk on transformative oral presentations, and then read her book, Resonate, in 2015.  Make the audience the hero, she says.  Tell a story, contrast what is with what could be, paint the vision of the blissful future clearly.  Engage people’s emotions and aspirations.

This is not easily done with Power Point decks full of words.  But words are my medium!  I had to add color, diagrams, cartoons, photographs.  I started making my presentations more interactive, between myself and the audience, and between audience members themselves.  Now I have people stand up and move their bodies.  I may bring raisins to my next talk and do a mindful eating exercise.  I need to learn how to embed music and videos into my slides.

What is the objective in all of these relationships?  It’s connection.  How do we best connect?  We reach out.  We extend ourselves to others—make ourselves relaxed, flexible, spring-like.  That is how we gather people closer.  It’s not formless or weak.  A strong elastic maintains its integrity even under high tension.  But it must be stretched often, or it becomes stiff, brittle, and ultimately ineffectual.

 

November 10:  Experimental Questions Make Me Better

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NaBloPoMo 2019

What’s the most interesting question your doctor asks?  What effect does it have on you?

I get to ask some really fun and interesting questions of my patients.  They often come about spontaneously, then I realize how helpful they are, and I integrate them into my routine interview.

It was almost ten years ago now that I was seeing a pleasant young woman for the third time.  She had recurrent, nonspecific physical symptoms, and felt down.  She was having a really hard time at work, and it was having a significant impact on her overall health and well-being.  Around the same time I saw another patient, a young man.  He felt well overall, but was also not happy in his job.  I remember casting around in my mind, looking for a quick and easy way to quantify the negative effect of these patients’ negative work experiences on their health.  I can’t remember which visit sparked the 0-10 stress and meaning scale questions, but it was one of them, and then I repeated the questions on the other soon after.  These were my first two, unsuspecting, experimental question subjects.  On a scale of 0 to 10, how high do you rate the overall stress of your work?  That was easy, but I also had to figure out whether there was some benefit that was worth the cost of the stress.  So: On the same scale, how high do you rate the overall meaning of your work to you?  The bottom line is that we can tolerate very high levels of stress if the work is meaningful—for sustainable work, the meaning-to-stress ratio needs to be 1 or greater, and overall meaning is best at 7 or higher.  That year I realized I could create deeper, more helpful, more insight-revealing questions in my patient encounters.

My own work meaning rating rose by at least a couple integers almost immediately.

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Since then I have consistently asked about body signs of stress, resilience practices, the proportions of threat vs. challenge stress at work or home.  Since I last wrote about these questions in 2016, I have continued the experiments.

By 2016 I was also using the elite athlete analogy with my patients, asking every year about habits in the 5 reciprocal domains of health (after talking about stress and meaning at work): Sleep, Exercise, Nutrition, Stress Management, and Relationships.  But after asking the same questions for a couple years in a row, both my patients and I get a little bored.  So in 2017 I went a little deeper in the relationships category.  After confirming marital status, ages and health of children, I started asking, “Tell me about your emotional support network,” because the more I am reminded of the critical importance of emotional support in our health, the less it makes sense to not ask about it directly.

With each additional set of questions, I learn more about my patients. I learn how people understand the questions—sometimes it’s totally different from my own understanding, and the conversation about the meaning and objective of my asking gives me wonderful insights into people.  Patients are remarkably open and honest in their answers, which always reminds me of the honor and privilege of my role as physician.  The answers to these questions are what allow me to imagine my patients in their natural habitats, engaging with their work and the people in their lives.  The answers provide context and texture to the other patterns we uncover in health habits, and we often come together to a better understanding of both the origins and consequences thereof.  I can’t speak for my patients, but I always come away feeling just a little more connected.  I get goosebumps just thinking about it.

This year I’m excited to introduce 4 new questions.  It started out as three.  The third one wasn’t landing quite right initially.  I wasn’t asking what I meant, and I couldn’t quite articulate what I was after.  So I experimented with the wording until I got to the current state:

  1. In the coming year, what do you see as the biggest threat to your health?
  2. What is the biggest asset?
  3. Having answered these, how does this affect your decision making going forward? …And other iterations I can’t remember anymore
  4. One year from now, when we meet again, what do you want to look back and see/say about your health, relationships, and whatever else is important to you?
  5. (then the corollary question that occurred organically once and I then incorporated–) In order to make this vision a reality, what support do you already have or need to recruit?

I have asked these questions since July.  I always think to myself how I would answer for my patients, based on what I know about their circumstances, habits, and biometrics.  About two thirds of the time, our answers are the same.  Patients seem to receive them well, too.  One asked me to email them to him, so now I offer to email them to everybody.

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You might imagine that I think these questions make me a better physician.  That may or may not be true.  All of these questions make me better—a better, more self-aware person—because I also ask them of myself.  What is my meaning:stress ratio today?  This week?  This year?  I assess the threat/challenge ratio of my own life stressors, especially the acute ones.  I have had the same body signs of stress for many years, but in 2019 I may have developed a couple new ones, darn.  What’s the biggest threat to my health?  My hedonist impulses, no question.  The biggest asset?  My Counsel—those best friends and confidants.  What is my vision for my health a year from now?  I only answered that for myself a week ago (and I’ll keep it to myself, thank you).  And what support do I have/need?  I’m still working on that one!  That I don’t already know the answer to this one surprises me—I assumed I knew, but when I sat down to think about it formally, I realize that this may be the missing piece that holds me back from achieving some of my personal health goals.  HUH, how fascinating!  Did I not just write about how I question some of my patients’ ‘Lone Ranger’ method of self-care?  Well hello kettle, I’m pot!

Now, off to ponder some more, yay!