A pitfall of patient-centered communication

I’ve come back from physician visits without a clear idea of what my physician thinks. I think I’ve found a problem, and I believe it’s communication. 

The push to be patient-centered and take all patient preferences in to account has morphed in to a wishy-washy communication style which boils down to the clinician saying “Well, whatever works for you. What do you want to do?” This, in turn leads to conversations at home with spouses and friends of “I don’t know, I wanted my doctor’s professional opinion and they told me I could do what I want. They gave me options but not direction”

Fundamental Finances

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Stacks on stacks! You make money, now what will your money make?

In this post I interview Dr. Zachary Stroud, MD, MBA to get some great insights into how to make our money work for us. Zach is extremely passionate about finances/economics and equally passionate on how to make it simple and understandable. (*economics is basically just people interacting, and as a Psychiatrist, he knows people). He also operates TheInvestmentMD.com with tons of free information, no conflict of interest selling/soliciting, just pure helpful honest content. The guy really brings value to the financial conversation. Let’s Begin…

(Me:) Zach, tell me a bit about why you like economics so much?

(Zach): I would say that I prefer finance to economics. I enjoy understanding money and how the benefits of my hard work in medicine can be utilized to my advantage through investing. Economics is interesting because people as a group can behave just as irrationally as an individual. This can create distortions in prices in the investment world. It requires a certain bit of self-reflection when you invest because you have to know where your biases and weaknesses are. I highly recommend Daniel Kahneman’s book, Thinking Fast and Slow, which talks about some of these biases.

Warren Buffett has stated in the past that you don’t need to be all that smart in terms of investing, you just need to be able to remain calm and keep emotions from ruining investment decisions. As an investor and as a psychiatrist, I wholeheartedly agree with this idea.

Let’s discuss the 3 major concepts we should think about (can be conceptual or pragmatic) when dealing with our investments:

Interview with Travel Physical Therapist: Kristen Schwenk PT, DPT

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Interview Post! I recently ran in to Kristen Schwenk PT, DPT in Philadelphia and we got to talking about PT (naturally).  Kristen was the person who got me into PT and literally introduced the field to me.  For reference, I was in San Diego, we met up on the advise from a mutual friend, and I first heard the words “physical therapist.” I was in my late 20’s at the time and had never even heard of PT. She described her job with such passion and enthusiasm… well, flash forward about 6 years and here we are. 

Besides being a totally cool person, Kristen is a Travel Physical Therapist and had some really nice insights into the setting, some tips/advise, some perspective and really what it’s all about.  So let’s see what she has to say:

Give me some background: What made you want to go to PT school?