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Anesthesia and Critical Care Reviews and Commentary (ACCRAC) Podcast

Episode 239: Determined: How Burned Out Doctors Can Thrive in a Broken Medical System with Dr. Jimmy Turner

Anesthesia and Critical Care Reviews and Commentary (ACCRAC) Podcast

Jed Wolpaw

Health & Fitness

4.71.5K Ratings

🗓️ 10 October 2022

⏱️ 61 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In this 239th episode I welcome Dr. Jimmy Turner back to the show. Jimmy is an academic anesthesiologist at Wake Forest in North Carolina and a certified coach for physicians. He is also the founder of The Physician Philosopher blog and podcast. In addition to this, he is the author of a book that came out in July of 2022 entitled Determined: How Burned Out Doctors Can Thrive in a Broken Medical System. We discuss his book and it's messages about burnout and resilience.



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Transcript

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0:00.0

Hello, and welcome back to AGRAC. I'm Jed Wolplaw, and I am really thrilled to have with me today a returning guest. I have with me, Dr. Jimmy Turner, who frequent listeners may remember what's on the show in 2020 Jimmy is an academic anesthesiologist at Wake Forest in North Carolina. And he's

0:28.0

a certified coach for physicians. He's also the founder of the physician philosopher blog and podcast. You may know him from that. In addition to this, and very excitedly, he is the author of a book that just came out. And if you're not listening to this right when this is a release, it came out in July of 2022. The name of the book is determined how burned out doctors can thrive in a broken medical system. Jimmy's passion is teaching doctors how to master their money and mindset so that they can create a life they love. And he goes through that in detail in this book, and I'm really excited.

0:58.0

And he highlights that in his books and podcasts, as well as his coaching that he does. So Jimmy, really thrilled to have you here. Welcome back to the show. I'm excited to talk to you about your book. Yeah, thanks so much, Jed. I couldn't be more excited to be here. Appreciate you having me on. Awesome. Well, you know, tell us a little bit. Obviously you were on the show in 2020. Folks may or may not have heard that episode. So talk just a little about kind of what you do in general. And then, you know, anything that particularly other than, of course, writing the book, which we'll get to that you've been up to over the past couple of years since we last talked. Yeah, you know, it's actually.

1:28.0

Yeah, a bit of a, you know, business journey in addition to a personal journey. So, you know, I, I started out as, obviously, an academic and a sociologist and then started my, my blog like six months after my fellowship in regional anesthesia was over. And it was pretty much strictly on personal finance in the beginning. So, you know, that's what I was, I was predominantly focused on. And, you know, my tagline on my website for a while was, you know, fighting burn out with financial independence. And as hilariously as what life would have at the irony is not lost on me. I ended up burning out

1:58.0

myself and found out pretty quickly that, you know, money wasn't, wasn't the answer. And so I, I think that a lot of doctors turn to the financial freedom because it's very measurable. And they're like, well, you know, I feel stuck or trapped in finances would be the easy reason. I mean, there's a reason why there's a, you know, there's Facebookers with a hundred thousand doctors in it trying to learn about side gigs. And so, yeah, I doubled down and I tried to grow my business and I did and it was successful and it didn't fix my burn out. And so, you know, I started taking a journey into, you know, figuring that stuff out. And I

2:28.0

figured out what caused my burn out and how I could solve that. And, you know, taking that journey through that myself, I found coaching and then I kind of ran my head around exactly what the phenomenon is that's going on in medicine. And so, yeah, that I took that journey myself and then ended up writing this book as as a part of that after coaching hundreds of docs, you know, that are burned out to and figured out exactly what people need and what the problems are in medicine that are systemically and systematically broken that lead to this, this phenomenon that is now an epidemic in medicine. So,

2:58.0

I'm super excited to talk about that on the show, but yeah, so I ironically went through burnout myself and that's how I ended up writing a burn out book, if you will.

3:07.0

Yeah, great. Thanks for sharing that, Jimmy. And, you know, I should say, not only congratulations on the book, but I believe in its first few weeks out, it's been at the top. It's been number one in several Amazon categories, you know, that really has shown that there is a, there is a need and a desire for this kind of information. So, I think you really have put this out at a great time.

3:27.0

I'm sure it was a huge undertaking and can't imagine how much work it must have been to write it as well as get it published it, of course, while practicing full time.

3:37.0

Talk a little bit about the process of writing a book, you know, you told us how it came about in sort of the concept, but, you know, when did you do it, how long did it take, how did you find a publisher, talk a little bit about that.

3:48.0

Yeah, so that's a great question. So, you know, in writing a book, yeah, I'm acting about several different things to talk about on this one, but, yeah, so a lot of people have an idea.

4:00.0

And then they start with the, you know, the weeds are like, oh, you know, like, how do I do this? How do I write this book? And really, I'd encourage you to the opposite, right? Start with a very big picture. That's what I did. I started with, okay, what, what is this book and who am I trying to help?

4:13.0

Right, because this book could have gone two very different directions. And in fact, there's probably going to be a second book because of that.

4:19.0

So, you know, in this book, I focused on, you know, basically what systemically or systematically broken and medicine, how that impacts individual doctors.

4:26.0

And the second half of the book is helping doctors figure out what they can do until that system is fixed.

4:30.0

Because I think it is a, you know, a both and situation. And so I saw, you know, I solved that problem upfront, who am I trying to help?

4:36.0

Well, in this case, it's the individual doctor, right? I very easily could have said, you know, actually my goal, my focus is, is fixing the system and focusing on systematic solutions.

4:45.0

And so you need to figure out early on what you're trying to do in terms of who you're trying to help, a problem you're trying to help them solve.

4:50.0

And then once you do that, you know, the process of writing an outline for how you might help them get from A to Z, filling in those details.

4:57.0

But then when you get down to the nitty gritty about what you're talking about, you know, it's really interesting, right?

5:02.0

So the book that I wrote 60,000 words, I'd say the average book in the nonfiction space is somewhere between 40 and 50,000 words.

5:08.0

And so yeah, it's just ended up being what it happened to come out to. And as I was getting done with this book, I started looking into all of the options that you mentioned, right?

...

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