So I co-hosted a little event on the topic of wholistic medicine yesterday. A few said that it was a rich and necessary environment for them. That is wonderful, AND, it wasn’t that for me. I am always grappling with how to express myself and even figuring out what my own opinions are. Why am I in the medical field? I would like to help people heal. But I am also a musician and a meditator. I want to deeply listen to people. I overwhelm myself thinking about becoming an expert in integrative health ON TOP OF traditional medical care where I generally feel inadequate. It’s this expectation I have for myself to go above and beyond when I’m actually not quite meeting the standard. I could do better.

But I also have this attitude that my self-care takes over my life. I indulge in having the weekend slow time. I am not able to exercise or write as much as I would like. I am still in residency. I have neglected a few obligations recently, and that very well may bite me in the ass.

I want to be childish. It’s my inner artist that is calling out. I do not want to be this stuffy expert. I don’t want to control it all. I may be a family medicine doctor, but I don’t have the answers on how to fix the system. I don’t get it all. I am interested in facilitating. I am interested in community building. I am interested in deep listening and empowering.

I have this vision for my clinic, but I am not able to really describe it yet. I tried telling a friend about it yesterday, and it just seemed to fall so flat. Let me try again. I want to open a clinic in this city. I would like to rent a space that I have access to on a part time basis for very limited cost. I would like to have a piano there. I would like to initially set up one off consultations. The rates I imagined the other day were $170 for a 1-hour appointment, and $100 for a 30 min follow up. Then I thought about the cost of living in the city, and boosted it to 230 and 150. The previous rates were town rates. They are respectable, but also accessible for the people who value what I do.

What do I do? So this is the part that has been hard to define. I know it looks different than my current role at residency clinic. I am currently delivering medical care as part of a very large system. A big part of my current role is connecting patients with the other parts of the system that can help them. In my future role, I won’t be able to easily refer people for colonoscopies and mammograms and behavioral health consults and social workers, and so on. I’m not planning to perform spirometry or manage very much medical complexity. That is not my strength, and it is not my interest. I am interested in a “lifestyle approach” to health care. I want to simply create space to help people with their health behaviors by listening deeply. I want to have a core set of practices that I promote, but also have flexibility to customize and personalize the treatment for each patient/client/person. I want people to bring me information and ideas that I haven’t heard about it. I want to look it up and explore it together. I want to share my honest opinion. I want to listen to people talk about their mental health. I want to support them in coming off of their medications. I want them to choose another provider if I am not what they are looking for.

I want to be heart-centered. I want to love my patients and all people. I want to deepen my spiritual practice. I believe creating my own space will facilitate doing that.

So when I open up, I might schedule 1 person. It will be slow and deliberate. I might see up to 4 people on a busier day if there is demand. I guess seeing 8 people seems like an upper limit, and I wouldn’t choose that for myself. I want to respect that the kind of presence I want to offer works best when I am seeing 1-4 people a day. 1 sounds puny. But I am doing work in other areas. I am reading. I am writing. I am involved in the community. I am playing music and going to zine fest. I am getting myself outdoors and I am cooking. I am taking good care of myself.

And I am creating an experiment to deliver “good health” care. I am interested in using the word radical to describe what I do. Radical means “getting at the root of things.” That is my focus. And my personal view is not so biomedically focused. I want to simply be authentic. I’ll just have to tell my patients when they need to go see a “medicalogist” for concerns beyond my expertise (interest).