1.2 - Ideals

What drives your life? What is the goal of your everyday actions? What motivates you? These questions can all be answered to some extent by ideals. In this episode, we discuss why a deep understanding of our ideals is necessary to avoid burnout and maintain love for the noble profession of medicine.

14 minutes • Published Nov 04, 2024 • Download • Transcript

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[Intro music]

Hi and welcome to the Hippocratic Society Podcast. This podcast is a project of the Hippocratic Society. In the podcast, we aim to reflect on deeper questions in medicine, all with the aim of rediscovering the ideals that brought us to medicine in the first place in order to better serve our patients and colleagues.

Thank you for joining us and we look forward to engaging with you through this podcast.

Hi and welcome to the Hippocratic Society Podcast where we aim to help physicians and trainees thrive by giving them the tools to pursue and practice good medicine. My name is Michael and I'm joined by Dr.

John Rhee.

Today we would like to talk about bringing your ideals to medicine.

This episode follows our interview with Dr. Farr Curlin about the issues in the medical field today and how we can renew our love of this noble profession.

As part of the Part two series, this episode will build on the ideas of the interview episode, but will be shorter with a focus on how to practically live out those ideas in our daily life, work and relationships.

Let's jump right in.

Sounds great, Michael. I'm excited to be here and talk about this important idea of how to live out these ideals in our daily practice.

Great.

So why don't we just start right at the beginning?

What we mean by ideals, specifically in medicine? What are we talking about by living out our ideals?

Yeah, I think the important reason why we're talking about this today is the larger idea in which we are reflecting on what is it that brought us to medicine in the first place and the idea that this is sometimes hard to keep in focus while we are going through all the logistics of our day practicing as well.

Trainees in medicine or sval attendings.

I thought we could start off by just imagining a scenario to help us reflect on perhaps those virtues or ideals that are most important to us.

So imagine you're on your deathbed and perhaps using your imagination, look around and see who is there with you.

Who would you want to be there with you?

And continuing with this image,

those people are deciding what to put on your gravestone. Three words to describe you and three words that really embody who you were.

What would those three words be and what would you perhaps want those three words to be and want them to say?

These are the ideals and relationships that are most important in your life and these are the ideals that we want to talk about today and how to live those out in a way in which we could bring them to the forefront of our daily lived experience as well as we go through our daily life wow.

Thank you, John.

That was slightly uncomfortable, but certainly powerful.

And it gives a sense of clarity in seeing the character traits that I.

Would want to define my life, especially.

With the idea that these have helped me to get closer to those that I love.

But besides being an exercise in setting goals for our own self improvement, what are we supposed to take away from this and these ideals that we identified?

Sure, yeah. Michael. So research from various studies, including the Pew Research Center, shows that when people are asked about what are the most important things in their lives,

oftentimes they mention families,

relationships, friends,

as the most important part of our life. These bonds, these relationships, shape our goals, aspirations, motivations, and ideals.

And so ideals are what we value in others as well as what we value in ourselves. And they primarily lead us to grow in relationships with others and facilitate those connections.

So an ideal is the best version of a thing. When we speak of striving for ideals in our own personal life,

we are thinking of living our best life, doing the best things in the best ways, for the best reasons, with the best people.

The Harvard Study of Adult Development, which was a longitudinal study over 80 years, showed that physical health actually depends largely on the quality of our relationships and how happy we are in those relationships.

And so that too reflects this idea that this love and our bonds with others are what drive us to do good. And these relationships allow us to strive for ideals and to be our best selves for others.

We'll talk about what this looks like practically in a few minutes.

Wow. Fascinating stuff. Especially the deep impact of relationships on other parts of our lives.

So how does this relate specifically to medicine? And why is this particularly important for current and future doctors?

So let's think about a possible scenario, right? We've all been there. You're filling out the last chart of the day. You feel as though 90% of the note is the exact same as the 20 patients before this.

And your mind wanders to the dinner with your family that you missed or that basketball watch party that your friend is hosting tonight. And you begrudgingly speed through that note.

You don't read it over and leave for the day, dreading coming back the next morning.

So in this particular scenario, the idea is that without knowledge and pursuit of ideals, the practice of medicine just falls into bitterness and burnout.

It's this idea of the checklist mentality where we're just going through our day, checking off things and getting them done, but not really seeing what's behind or the why behind the things that we're doing.

And medicine attracts Healthy idealism. But often in the rigor and training of our practice, we tend to let this idealism slip.

And it's not to say that medicine is a tough field and we learn to keep, in a certain sense, a distance from our patients in order to maintain a healthy work life balance,

in order to ensure that we preserve the sense of self. There are also larger systemic issues. Right. Overworking means not having enough time to develop some of those meaningful relationships outside of work,

as well as a lack of time for physical well being. I mean, even just basic physical well being, such as sleep, or mental and spiritual well being.

And medicine also has more logistics and coordination that a doctor has to do more paperwork and time in front of a computer.

And all of that makes it really feel like it's just things that we have to get done. It takes away from the time with a patient,

which is, if you were to ask why most people came into medicine, that's what they would say to be with patients.

And so the idea is trying to regain a sense of the ideals that can help us find more meaning and joy in medicine and to revitalize both our lives and how we approach our jobs.

Wow. So burnout is highly related to this loss of idealism and a loss of the emphasis on the relationship with the patient.

So what can we do to bring that back into medicine or at least bring that back into our own practice of medicine?

Thanks, Michael. As you were saying that, I just remembered that when I was in medical school, I would bump into this resident who,

let's call him Jeff,

and he remains in my memory because it seemed like everyone in the hospital knew him and they all loved him. He was extremely caring, always cheerful. When even if he just finished a 28 hour shift or was just starting another eight hour shift, you just couldn't tell the difference.

He seemed to be always full of energy.

He would volunteer to take on shifts of others when he felt like they were having a hard time.

And talking to one of his classmates, I had found out that his mother had been suffering from cancer and had been suffering tremendously for the past few months.

I got to have a chance to talk to Jeff and ask how he did it, how he got through it all, despite the fact that he was going through a lot himself.

And his immediate response was that he gets up every day in the morning and goes to work knowing that he could spend the whole day helping people who are suffering like his mom and learning the process of healing that type of suffering.

What more could he ask for?

I was deeply Moved by Jeff's response because it had such a strong, healthy sense of the ideals that drive what he does.

And identifying one's ideals and the relationships that we work for is a matter of reflection and silence and putting that into practice.

And so we have to make time to have silent reflection to keep our ideals in mind before we go about our day.

Most people have a vague idea of how they want to be,

but taking the time to reflect on the ideal version of ourselves requires just that. Setting aside time, we have to identify how our ideals are not yet achieved and think of what we can do and what we can change in order to get closer to achieving them.

When doing tedious tasks, we can place them in the wider context of patient care and see how even those tasks are benefiting the people that we want to help. Or at the very least, an opportunity for us to grow in one of those ideals, whether it be patience,

cheerfulness when working with colleagues, humility when being humbled by an attending, all of these ideals that brought us to medicine, and especially, I think, the most important ideal that is most frequently mentioned, the ideal of service for others, this idea of giving self for our patients.

And so I would say one action item could be to write a list of people that are really important to us as well as those ideals. And it could be three to five that that brought us medicine in the first place.

And I would go back to those ideals frequently throughout the day. First, you could start with just closing your eyes in front of your computer as it's warming up in the morning, and take those one to two minutes as you're waiting for the computer to load.

So just practice mindfulness, practice a moment of deep silence,

and then bring those ideals to mind and see how can I grow in this particular ideal today of patience?

And maybe what comes to mind is that there's this family that you have to talk to and that you've been feeling a little anxious about because they tend to be a little aggressive.

Great. How can I grow in that virtue of patience when approaching that family today?

If we get into this habit of practicing that each day in the moment in which we get into work,

then we could start to do that throughout the day, where we take pauses of one or two minutes before major kind of tasks or activities.

And therefore that task or activity can then be focused towards how I could live out this higher ideal within this context of finding a moment of deep inner silence.

So I would say that try that. And the more frequently we could do that during the day, sometimes things could Be super busy. So once we get good at this, you could actually find a moment of inner silence just by taking 10 or 15 seconds and recalling an ideal.

But in the beginning, it might just take a little bit more time to get into that practice of finding that inner silence and then bringing those ideals to mind.

Wow, that sounds very helpful. Definitely something I would want to implement myself.

So let's briefly return to the scenario from the beginning, kind of as a summary. So you're on your deathbed, as you said, surrounded by those you love, and you've truly become the person who is patient, sincere, caring, cheerful, self giving whatever the ideals that you thought of.

Maybe.

So how did we get here? How did you become this person and for the people that you love?

Yeah, and I think that this is a great way to just end this part two of the podcast, Michael, because it brings this idea that it starts with the little things of finishing all our tasks well,

and within all of those tasks, finding that deeper sense of purpose, that deeper sense of meaning,

and that deeper growth that we can find within each of those tasks.

And when we find that we can bring back that ideal to everything that we do, then each of the things becomes something that is an opportunity for growth. And then we see that our life is made up of countless opportunities,

of ways in which we not only grow in the virtues and ideals of patience, humility, generosity, but perhaps most importantly, love throughout our day and through our work.

Wow. I'm thoroughly inspired, John, and I hope our audience feels the same. Thank you so much for showing us how to truly pursue our ideals in our work and all we do.

Thank you very much for joining and reflecting with us today. Keep up with new episodes by subscribing to the Hippocratic Society Podcast. For more information on the Hippocratic Society, visit us at hipsoc.org. The Hippocratic Society is a 501(c)(3) and depends on the generous support of its listeners.

And as always, we'll see you next time on the Hippocratic Society podcast.

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