Remedy Reflections - 3 Years and Counting
As we approach Remedy’s third anniversary, I am filled with so many feelings – pride, gratitude, contentment. I was recently asked about future professional goals and I had to stop and pause. While still relatively early in my career, I think I have reached my greatest professional goal. The goal of opening Remedy and making it sustainable has come to fruition and I could not be more pleased. To say I was reluctant about becoming a business owner is an understatement, but the drive to have more control over my professional life and my patients’ care overpowered my reluctance. Remedy is alive and well and I have enjoyed the twists and turns we have faced and the wonderful people we have met over the last 3 years. Keeping Remedy thriving means keeping quality patient care the focus while also caring for our team.
As a 21 year old, I was reluctant to consider medicine as a profession. It seemed challenging and life consuming. When I finally made the decision to apply to medical school, a tiny dream sparked. A dream where I would take care of a wonderful group of people, grow old with them, solve some medical mysteries, and support my patients when there were medical issues I could not fix. As I went through medical school and residency, these ideals were tempered by the need to endure. Endure meant getting through the next long shift, staying on my feet, finding something to eat, and moving past difficult moments. I tried to be present with patients, to reflect on my experiences but there was not a lot of space to process. Starting practice after residency, I felt I could return to my dream and that was mostly true, but the space to sit with my thoughts or to sit with my patients was limited.
Internists are often teased in the medical profession as being the over-thinkers. We like to get every detail of the patient’s history, sit and mull over objective data, and fit all the pieces together. This fits my personality perfectly, but I was finding the traditional system had no space for thoughtful reflection. The last few decades have brought incredible leaps in medical care and technology. Patients are living longer with cancer and heart disease and children with genetic disorders or chronic diseases are living into adulthood. Medical advances are so exciting, but it makes every patient more complicated and more unique. Most patients do not fit perfectly in an algorithm and caring for them takes time and patience.
What I love about Remedy is that we have the time to sit and think about our patients. We get to know them well which improves our care. You cannot imagine how many times we read a journal article or talk with a colleague and immediately think of a patient. Sometimes it hits us out of the blue and we think- I have an idea to make their care better. We get to care for a beautiful and diverse group of people in the exciting and rapidly evolving world of medicine. The dream I had 20 years ago is happening and we are also carving out time to be kind to ourselves and present with our families and our communities. Our hope is that primary care is not dying but changing and perhaps Remedy means we are leading the change for the better.
