This is an introduction to DocRocks, a new blog with a goal to provide opinions, hacks, and answer to your questions. Everything you need to enhance your Doctor Awesomeness. If you find this interesting, click here to subscribe to future posts.
Does this sound familiar?
You just became a doctor and the future looks bright.
You are excited to save lives and leave a positive mark on the world, guided by your own principles and ideas on how things should work.
Everyone talks about the downsides of being a doctor but it doesn’t bother you too much. You clearly know what you want and that is helping patients and providing exceptional care.
Two years later, it all starts to fade…
Despite the wish to make great clinical judgments and show compassion for your patients your hands are tied. After feeding the electronic beast and doing all manner of administrative things, you get less than 5 minutes to actually speak with patients.
In those five minutes, patients are confused, afraid, and oftentimes angry. They are frustrated with the broken system and you are the front line representative of it.
You take blame and responsibility and someone else takes your money.
Every time when you want to reverse your wheel and come one step closer to your dream, you get the same answer, “It’s Impossible,” over and over again.
But still, you don’t stop believing. The other side of “impossible” still fuels your motivation.
You never wanted to become a falsely glorified “prescriptioner,” you have slightly different picture of yourself for the future.
Deep inside, you know it’s possible and only one question remains.
How?
The Other Side of Impossible
This blog is about “How”.
In the last 7 years, we met doctors who hacked the system. Some found the ways to go above and beyond for their patients. Others made perfect micro-environments, where almost everything worked as intended.
And guess what?
It works for everyone.
When I look at my patient experience with those special kinds of doctors, “AMAZING” is the only word that fits. It made me share positive vibes about them, refer them to other patients, and in the end, it inspired me to start this blog.
Several doctors enter medicine because it is worthwhile and noble. However, only the rare ones have found effective ways to transform good intentions into good practices.
These ways aren’t taught in medical school and aren’t part of some big governmental initiative. They are the result of courage and a lot of trying. Best of all; from today until the end of time, we are going to cover them here.
DocRocks is blog about opinions, tactics, and answer to questions; everything that can give you immediate value. Things you can read or watch and use to improve your doctor awesomeness.
You will find no armchair analysis here; just hard earned lessons from our own experiences, mixed with practical advice from awesome doctors.
Starting With Doctor – Patient Communication
Over the next few posts, we are going to cover doctor-patient communication.
This is a field where doctors rarely look for improvement. Most doctors rely on abstract advice like “be emphatic,” “smile at patients,” or “watch out for yourself.”
Instead of abstract advice, we will show you the exact moves step by step, to make your patients healthier and your private life happier.
For example, we will feature posts about:
- How to make yourself available to patients without ruining your personal life.
- Why my doctor didn’t want to schedule a physical exam because he cared about me.
- How to track patients’ outcomes without long and fancy questionnaires.
These posts will be packed with explanations and real life examples. “Small skills” that make big differences.
Pairing courage and medical knowledge with these skills made the special kinds of doctors I wrote about above. It helped them become the doctors they wanted to be, and I hope it can help you too.
Are You With Us?
Hopefully, you will join us on the road to build an awesome DocRocks community.
We will release a new post every 10 days, starting with those outlined above. To get each post emailed to you as soon as it’s published, sign up for our blog’s mailing list.
See you next week! Have something you want to learn more about? Let me know in the comments below or hit me up on Twitter.
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Submitted by Selver Maric. Father of twins, a healthcare entrepreneur and writer, he speaks internationally about the doctor-patient revolution. After 7 years of fighting against illness, searching for solutions, and interacting with doctors – his passion to improve relationships between doctor and patient is the strongest driving force in his life.
This is a brilliant and essential essay. Thank you
Thank you again for your support. I hope you’ll like my ideas and tactics for better care.
Great read! Thank you Selver!
Can’t wait to see what’s coming up!
My sincere hope, however, is that you will focus mostly (entirely?) on those awesome docs and the “exact moves step by step” (sharing their specific, practical examples of how they’ve changed practice, and less on the “positive vibes” you and I may feel as patients while being around such docs).
As you know, your blog is up against a wall of entrenched medical practice (needing, as Dr. Victor Montori himself calls it, a patient revolution to address). But to make the needle move, this has to enlist gradual buy-in from those who are sick and tired of yet another piece of “abstract advice” from anybody who is not working in the trenches, too – indeed, the true target readership is probably the least likely to pay any attention to doctor awesomeness.
Best of luck to you….
C.
Thank you very much for your words of wisdom. I will focus mostly on the “exact moves” and we will publish “unorthodox opinion” posts from time to time. I hope there are people who will find it useful and interesting.