S3E04: Kevin Pho
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
physicians, patients, people, kevin, medicine, social media, podcast, clinicians, healthcare, pandemic, medical, worldview, question, point, read, years, online, necessarily, consumer, experts
SPEAKERS
Female Age 61, Dr. Philip Ovadia, Kevin Pho, Jack Heald
Announcer 00:10
He was a morbidly obese surgeon destined for an operating table and an early death. Now he's a rebel MD who is fabulously fit and fighting to make America healthy again. This is Stay Off My Operating Table with Dr. Philip Ovadia.
Jack Heald 00:36
Welcome back everybody this is the Stay Off My Operating Table podcast with Dr. Philip Ovadia. I'm Jack Heald, the talking hairdo, and the co-host. And we are thrilled today to have Dr. Kevin Pho with us. I asked Phil, who is this guy? And he starts telling me all about it. Okay. Phil, you're gonna have to take it from here to bring Kevin in on the conversation.
Dr. Philip Ovadia 01:06
Yeah, definitely and I think any of the physicians in my audience will certainly be familiar with Kevin, but the non-physicians may not be as familiar. But Kevin is a board-certified internal medicine physician. And he has really been one of the leading physician voices on social media, one of the leading physician presences on social media for almost 20 years now. He has appeared numerous national media. He has a daily podcast and a platform, Kevin MD, which is really probably one of the largest health care podcasts, if not the largest health care podcast out there. And Kevin's also written a book, Establishing, Managing, and Protecting Your Online Reputation: A Social Media Guide for Physicians and Medical Practices. So really excited to get into this conversation with Kevin. And first I'll just let Kevin, kind of introduce yourself a little bit more to our audience. Tell us how you kind of got involved in social media so early, really before there was social media.
Kevin Pho 02:21
Well, first off, Jack and Phillip, thank you so much for inviting me on. It's an absolute pleasure. And as Philip says, I am an internal medicine physician. I do primary care in Nashua, New Hampshire, which is about 45 minutes north of Boston where I trained. And I got involved with social media back in 2004. So that was almost 20 years ago. And back then it certainly wasn't what it is now. At that time, there were a handful of blogs, right? And you would go on Blogger, right? I don't know if that even still exists now.
Jack Heald 02:54
It does actually. It does. I just checked that here in the last month. I have a Blogger blog that I started right after Blogger hit the world. And by God some of that stuff is still sitting out there. So
Kevin Pho 03:10
Absolutely. I know. So, some of the stuff that I wrote back then I still cringe at. And I think one day, I think one of my family members said you have a lot of opinions about medicine, you should start a blog. And at that time, there weren't many physicians really blogging, right? So, I started to write a few articles, share my thoughts. And I think there was a drug recall one day, Vioxx, which is an anti-inflammatory. Yeah. And then I remember, it got recalled for whatever cardiovascular heart conditions that it would sometimes precipitate. And I remember I wrote something about it. And a day or two afterwards, I walked into this exam room with a patient and she said, “Dr. Pho, I read your blog post this morning. And I was comforted by what you had to say about Vioxx.” And at that point, that was kind of that light bulb moment where we can use, at that time, blogs, I think it was just blogs, there wasn't very many social media. But there were these user generated platforms where we can write an article, share voice, and really impact patients not just in the exam room, but outside of the exam room as well. And that's kind of where it started. And as both of you know, social media has been really evolving certainly by the year. There's so many new platforms, so many different media's where we can express ourselves and but that was the really the start of my social media journey.
Jack Heald 04:28
So, Phil, why, other than the fact that he's been on social media and as a doctor for a million years, what is it about this guy that that got you excited about having him on the show?
Dr. Philip Ovadia 04:42
Yeah, what really gotten me excited and I've been aware and been following Kevin and the various platforms for a while now, is just that sort of outside the box thinking because let's be honest, most traditional physicians still kind of poopoo social media and the internet in general and they worry about the patient who came in and Google their condition and has whatever information, whatever quality of information. So, for large part, I would say healthcare still is very hesitant about social media. And I really was looking forward to getting Kevin's perspective on that. So, I'll start by asking your colleagues, let's call it the day job of being an internal medicine physician and having a medical practice and interacting with your colleagues, do you get a lot of pushback about what you do on social media?
Kevin Pho 05:46
Not anymore. I think at first, during the first few years, it was a little bit of a novelty. So, I was probably maybe one of a few dozen physician bloggers back in the early 2000s. And there were some newspaper pieces. Oh, I was like the blogging doctor, right? So, I think at that time, it was a novelty. But now we have everyone has that voice on social media. And, as you mentioned, a lot of patients, they get their information from online resources. I think the third most popular reason why people go on Google is really for some type of health care question that they're not necessarily getting. And for those clinicians who still think patients shouldn't go online to research their health conditions, like that horse has already left the bar. So, I think that patients are already going online to get their health information. And as you know, especially during the pandemic, a lot of that health information online isn't necessarily the most reliable, right? It's heavily politicized. It's sometimes created by people who don't have the requisite medical credentials. And, and that's a lot of information that I have to clear up in the exam room. And that takes up a lot of time, energy, and effort. So, one of the narratives that I always push in the last, like 15 to 20 years is that we need more medical professionals, certified medical professionals also to go online, either to create reputable sources of health information for our patients, or to dispute and clear up a lot of the misinformation that's out there. And it's been an ongoing journey. So, to answer your question, I think that there's certainly much less pushback now. And I think there's actually a much more support among the medical professionals saying that, hey, we do need to get online. And I think that has been certainly clarified over the last three years of the pandemic, where a lot of the misinformation has caused a lot of public harm.
Dr. Philip Ovadia 07:42
Yeah, and I think you make an excellent point, that I certainly share that if we're not out there putting medical information as medical professionals, someone else is going to be putting the information out there. And so, I really view it as an essential role, an essential part of our role as healthcare practitioners, to be putting the information out where the patients are going to be getting it.
Kevin Pho 08:12
Absolutely. And, as we all know, people consume information in different ways, right? Some people would go online to say, The New York Times or The Washington Post, some people will read it in emails, some people will get it on their Facebook or Twitter channels, and some people will just get it delivered to their door, right. So, I think that we all consume information in different ways. And it's important that the medical profession, we've been behind on this. I think that we don't realize the value of being where our patients are. So, we've been a few years behind, and we've allowed other proverbial bad actors to take that online space away from us. So that's one of the things that I always try to talk with whenever I give talks to other clinicians. I say, hey, we do have a responsibility to be online, and be where the patients are, because that little time that we spent in the exam room with patients, whatever, what 10, 15, in my case, 10, 15 minutes every, every year or so that's not nearly enough time to give information to give patients the information that you need.
Dr. Philip Ovadia 09:16
Talk a little bit about your, I guess, education, your journey along the way. Obviously, you're drawing upon skills that we're not taught in medical school, public speaking, writing, speaking, having a podcast, something like that, these are there are certainly no classes in medical school. When we went to medical school, and I doubt even today, there's anything in the medical school curriculum about hosting a podcast or having your own social media platform. So, what kind of education, I guess, have you gotten along the way to be able to do that so well?
Kevin Pho 09:57
So, it's a lot of trial and error. So, there are very few books that you read. And like you said, it's not taught in medical school and residency. But one of the things that I've learned in medicine is that if you look at trends in other industries, and you apply those trends to healthcare and medicine, you'll always be ahead of the curve because medicines always like three to five years before any other trends. So, I looked at, say, technology and look at how people are communicating technology and how they're getting online and social media and I thought to myself, “hey, why can I use some of those ideas in healthcare?” And all of a sudden, when those ideas are applied to healthcare, all of a sudden, you're on the cutting edge, when really those ideas are just like, commonplace for a long time and other areas. Social media has been constantly evolving, there's certainly new platforms that comes up almost every year. So again, you look at other industries, and see how they're using these new platforms and applied to healthcare. And then you just have to have that growth mindset and use failure as a guide and see what works and what doesn't. And there's a lot of trial and error in terms of what you can say, what doesn't, what you can’t say, what gets politicized. And there's a lot of backlash, of course, when it comes to social media. So, it's an ongoing trial by fire learning process. But after doing this for almost 20 years now, I think one of my strengths is that I'm able to stick with something for a long time now. So, I played on that strength, and that I'm able to be consistent, I'm able to be persistent, despite failures. And that's actually served me well to overcome a lot of the obstacles that I've had during those 20 years.
Jack Heald 11:34
Phil, I have... I don't want to interrupt, but I do have a question that's going to happen eventually here.
Dr. Philip Ovadia 11:41
I was just gonna follow up on that comment. I think the being willing to fail is a challenge for many physicians. I know, certainly, coming from my background as a surgeon, obviously, you can't fail too many times in that arena. But when started doing all this other stuff you can kind of learn sometimes you just put version one out there, and then you iterate and you get better as you go along.
Kevin Pho 12:14
Because you look at every other industries, and obviously, in surgery you can't have version 1.0 and improve on version 2.0. Because then the patient would be dead. But if you look at how technology runs, right? For instance, let's take a look at Microsoft Windows. It just ships a version 1.0 whether it's like done or not, like you have all these bugs, and you have version 1.1. So, you have that mentality in technology, where you just ship at a certain date, no matter what shape it’s in, and then you just fix it in subsequent versions. And I think you're right, a lot of physicians really don't have that mentality of that perfectionist mentality. And when it comes to embracing new technologies, that's what really holds us back. We're not afraid to... We're actually afraid to work, like you said, afraid to fail, because that's not the mindset that we are trained in. But sometimes you can't apply that mindset to things like social media, because if you do, if you wait for things to be perfect before you start a podcast, for instance, then you're just never going to start one. So, I think it is a different mentality, that it's an entrepreneurship mentality. And that is in stark contrast to what we're trained with and medical school and residency.
Jack Heald 13:28
Okay, do I get to jump in here now? Okay. Remember, I'm the resident idiot. I represent the patient who doesn't have a medical training, and doesn't really speak the language except got a very superficial level. One of the things that has been blindingly obvious over the last two plus years is that there has been an appeal to authority as a reason to believe somebody without a concomitant demonstration of actual authority. And I'll drill down into that. We've gotten an unbelievably complex and internally contradictory set of instructions about how to deal with this pandemic came from all kinds of different experts in air quotes. Is there a heuristic that you can use, that I can use as a consumer? I mean, the reality is I am a consumer of the medical product. I am not a provider. I am a consumer. We've had so many experts contradict each other. Experts, I mean. Do you have a strong heuristic that you use? Or that you can recommend that I can use to know who's just full of crap? And who isn't? Yeah. So, I think that there's a lot of that.
Kevin Pho 15:17
I think that's a wonderful point in question. I completely agree with you is that there's so many experts out there. And they all have great credentials. Oh, they and they could contradict each other. And one person can say one thing, and the other can say the other. And part of the reason that is, is because of social media itself, right? We're all caught in these echo chambers. Because for instance, let's say you go on Facebook, on your Facebook feed, who do you tend to hear most from? It tends to be people that you already agree with, or people who share your worldview. Because otherwise, you wouldn't like the posts that come on your feed if you don't necessarily agree with them. And I think what's happened is that we're all caught in these little echo chambers where we only want to hear what we already agree with. We already want to hear with what confirms our worldview already. And the other thing about social media is that it gives everyone a platform no matter what their credentials are. So, you could have someone who sees things through a very political light and may have zero medical credentials, but they will be at the same standing on social media as someone with an MD or a PhD. And I think that also contributes to this expert confusion. So, the question then becomes who can you trust? So, like, go back, who can you trust? Right? So, I would normally say you would trust the government, you would trust people with expert credentials that hospitals, and medical schools, and universities. But if I say that, there's going to be people who obviously, inherently distrust those institutions already. The biggest rule of thumb that I use when I read something is that people who admit they're wrong. I think when I read a certain columnist, or I read a certain authority, and they could admit sometimes they're wrong, or sometimes they agree with a point from the other side of the political equation, that to me, would give that person already more trust on my side. People who are not so dogmatic in their worldview, people who can admit, hey, I may have got it wrong in the past. But now because the science changed, this is what I think now. Or, hey, I am a progressive Democrat. But sometimes, this point from this Republican, conservative Republican, makes a lot of sense. That to me, would, it would give me a lot of trust in that person, someone who could admit that not only they're wrong, or at times, someone from a different worldview may agree with that. Or you may agree with someone from a different political worldview. So that to me will be the heuristic that I would use in terms of trusting someone that I read online.
Jack Heald 18:14
In other words, you're talking about humility, someone who's got the humility to acknowledge their own fallibility and their own likelihood of not always get it right. That's a pretty good one. That's a pretty good one. What is the most challenging set of circumstances that you have faced in your work over the last couple of years?
Kevin Pho 18:42
Well, I think it goes back to what I said about people being dogmatic in their thinking if someone who believes that they shouldn't... COVID vaccines are harmful or they'll downplay the severity of COVID. Or if they take drugs that are proven not to work, and if they come into an exam room, and they're just dogmatic in their thinking, and I would explain what I believe the science is, and we'll talk them with the guidelines. And they continue on that dogmatic thinking, and then something bad happens to them because they refuse to believe some of the science that is out there. And that, to me, is incredibly frustrating. Not only for me, but for a lot of those of us in the healthcare professional, healthcare community as well, because we've seen a lot of the worst effects of COVID that people may not necessarily know about. We've seen people on the ventilators in the intensive care units. We've seen people die and the only way that they can connect with their loved ones through the iPad because of isolation procedures. So, we've seen some of these terrible, terrible effects of COVID and yet, sometimes in the exam room you see some people downplay COVID or believe things that simply aren't true. That, to me, is remains the biggest challenge over the last few years.
Jack Heald 20:13
People believing things that are not true.
Kevin Pho 20:16
People believing the things that aren't true. People adhering to a certain worldview that contradicts the science and facts that are out there. And sometimes that leads to just terrible consequences. So, it's... When it comes to my biggest challenge that that that I would say is, would be at in the last couple of years,
Jack Heald 20:38
Would it be accurate to say then that the information environment that people inhabit is the single biggest obstacle to good medical care and good health?
Kevin Pho 20:56
I think it's a huge detriment to good health. It goes to certain worldviews, because there are some worldviews out there that are against science and scientists and physicians and against authority in general, I think, like you mentioned, and sometimes it is a challenge to care for patients who adopt that worldview and are unwilling to change or unwilling to consider new information to adapt that world view. So, I would say yes, when it comes to, and then this leads to that whole question of misinformation, online misinformation on social media, and we, in healthcare, we do have to spend a lot of time in the exam room, dispelling a lot of the myths that are out there, when we could be doing more preventive care, for instance, but instead have to spend a lot of time kind of dispelling what this person read on someone's Facebook group, for instance. So, I do think that it is a huge detriment to a lot of people's care.
Jack Heald 22:00
Go ahead, Phil.
Dr. Philip Ovadia 22:02
I was just gonna, I want to explore a slightly different kind of angle of that, I guess, and how we, as physicians deal with the changing information environment. And like me, you probably heard many times during medical school that half of what you learn in medical school is going to be proven wrong, by the end of your career, we just don't know which half. And we can point to many examples in medicine where things that were accepted as absolute dogma, we now would find crazy that anyone ever believed that. Yeah. So, as we kind of go through this information environment, and this comes up a lot for us, a lot for me, in the nutritional space and what we've been told for 40 or 50 years was healthy ways of eating are turning out not to be very healthy ways of eating. So how do you as a physician kind of approach that problem? And do you think it's been magnified in recent years, because we do have all the social media and the things get out there. Medical journals used to be... They would show up in our office, and we would maybe read them in a month or two, and the information maybe got to us, but patients really didn't have any access to medical journals. And today the medical journal is on social media, and the article is being interpreted, oftentimes misinterpreted by the media and so how do you deal with that today as a physician?
Kevin Pho 23:44
Yeah, so I think it goes to what Jack said earlier, it has to be dealt with humility. And when science changes, and we believe one thing with a certain set of facts, and the science evolves, and those facts may change, we have to admit that the science has changed. And if we were wrong back then I think that sometimes we admit, hey, we were wrong. And that goes to both sides of the political spectrum. It goes to those that applies to conservatives and progressives too, because there has been multiple instances over the past few years where both sides weren't necessarily correct at a certain amount of time. And as the situation's evolved, there's been kind of a lack of humility, a lack of admitting that, hey, I maybe got it wrong on both sides. And I think that's contributed to this lack of trust that one side has for the other. And I think that if we did have a little bit of humility, and admit that hey what I said back then was wrong. And my stance has evolved as the situation in science change. I think that that can only help the problem. But as we don't live in a society where that's readily available, we live in a highly politicized environment where people don't like to admit that they're wrong, it's sometimes interpreted as a sign of weakness. And until that happens, or until that changes, it's difficult to imagine that situation improving.
Jack Heald 25:19
My guess is... I haven't listened to your podcast. So, I'm just guessing here, help me out. Is your primary audience people like me, consumers of health care, or is your primary audience providers of health care?
Kevin Pho 25:33
I would say that my app is primarily clinicians, I would say about 70 to 80% of my audience, not only my podcast, but on Kevinmd.com. They are physicians and other healthcare professionals, like nurses and advanced practice practitioners. But I do have 20 to 30% health care consumers and other patients. And I think that is one of the things that we may talk about later in terms of why I do that. I do think that there's a little bit of a chasm and a gap between clinicians and patients. And sometimes we do need to share our stories from each side to understand, to bridge that gap. A lot of times I don't necessarily know what it's like to undergo some of the tests I prescribed, like I've never had an MRI before, but I prescribe MRIs a lot. And I've never obviously taken a lot of medication and prescribed. So sometimes I just don't have that patient perspective of what's going on at healthcare system. So, what I try to do is really use my platform that I've built almost 20 years to really elevate those voices so we can better understand each other. And when I say we, it's like all entities of the health care, millio, right to be clinicians, nurses, patients, administrators, politicians, anyone involving healthcare, because we do need to share our stories from each of our perspectives. And I think that's the only way to bridge that gap and really realize that shared purpose of improving our healthcare system.
Jack Heald 27:02
Well, as a consumer and not a provider, I am in violent agreement with your diagnosis. Yes, there is a massive gap. And I think my story and experience is representative particularly for those of us who've been on planet earth for a while. Over the years, I've had so many experiences of physicians giving me advice, or recommendations that were later proven to be not just wrong, but harmful. And I can point to my own personal experience as a reason to have a high level of distrust for what the experts say. I'm old enough to remember when butter and eggs were bad for you. The official word was butter and eggs were bad for you. And I could just, I could list instance, after instance, over the last 40 years, where accepted medical truth was later proven to be just wrong and worse than wrong, but actually harmful. And I'm stuck, I think I represent, I think I'm a good avatar for the typical medical consumer. The longer you've been on planet Earth. consuming at least Western medical services, the more likely it is that you've run into crappy advice. This podcast, I'm sorry, I'm kind of ranting a little bit, but this podcast is focused on primarily on metabolic health and how it can improve your life. And yet, as Dr. Ovadia has been saying for the last year, the whole idea of the metabolic health is it's almost a fringe movement in medicine. And yet we have, week after week, we have physicians and people who've dramatically changed their health outcomes by getting metabolically healthy. So, there is no question here. I apologize. I just, I have a lifetime of frustration with being told to trust the experts, trusting the experts, and then feeling like doing so screwed me. Yeah. I'd love to hear both of you address these poor consumers problem.
Kevin Pho 29:38
No, I think that I agree with what you're saying. I think that traditionally medicine has been very paternalistic in terms of having that prescriptive relationship between doctor and patient. And I do think that's evolved over the last few years. I think that when I see patients, it's less prescriptive, it's more of a partnership, there are a lot of decisions that have many options. There are a lot of decisions that have varying advantages and disadvantages. And every individual patient has different values, right? So, they may have a different tolerance when it comes to side effects or different tolerance when it comes to incidental diagnoses from tests and a different risk tolerance, right? And that's laid bare during a pandemic you're seeing everyone's different risk tolerances. And that kind of influences their worldview when it comes to the pandemic. But I think that, in general, the doctor-patient relationship needs to evolve more into a partnership, I see myself more as a guide in a patient's medical journey, and a lot of the decision making has to be shared. I do my best to give my pros and cons to any medication, diagnostic tests, or treatment path to the patient. And unless it's something egregious that I know will harm the patient, I think the final decision always should be the patient's and as long as it's an informed decision, and physicians should have unless, like I said, a situation where the patient actively harms themselves, I think that the final decision should always be patients.
Dr. Philip Ovadia 31:17
Yeah, and I think one of the things that gives me, I guess, hope about the future of healthcare is that I've been seeing that more as well. And as Jack mentioned, we've now had countless physicians on here who have that humility you were talking about, have admitted that we were wrong about this or that, and are looking to move forward, are looking to have that partnership with their patients, as you said, and I view my role, exactly, as you said it I'm an educator, I'm a guide, I'm not here to tell you what you need to do, or when I'm in my heart surgery role, and I'll have a conversation with someone, and it will be glaringly obvious that heart surgery is the best option for them, according to all the science and the literature and all that. But if the patient doesn't want heart surgery, I'm not here to force them to have heart surgery. I'm here to say, okay, you don't want to hurt heart surgery, what's the next best thing that we can do for you to help you meet your goals in life? And as you said, that's a very important part of it what the patient wants out of this encounter? Not necessarily what the physician wants out of the encounter.
Jack Heald 32:46
What's the biggest win you've had over, let's just let's call it the last couple of years during the era of COVID, what's your biggest win as a health care provider or health care practitioner?
Kevin Pho 33:01
I would say the biggest win is elevating the voices of those who normally don't get a voice on mainstream media platform. So, one of the other goals that I have and Kevin MD is using that platform to elevate voices, like I said, across the healthcare spectrum. But there are a lot of stories that clinicians face that patients don't necessarily know about, right, we talk about things like clinician burnout. If you look at the statistics, more than 50% of physicians experienced symptoms of burnout, and this was before the pandemic. So number is only higher now. And sometimes I walk into the exam room and patients still say they read Kevinmd.com, or listen to my podcast, and they'll come up to me and say, hey, I really didn't realize that the suicide rate among physicians is so high. And that story about that physician who was a so burned out because of what he or she saw in the pandemic and had to quit medicine because of that, or realizing some of the tremendous family challenges that a lot of physicians have. I think that in the early days of the pandemic, you have these two physician families, and they both have to work and there were no vaccines or therapeutics available. And they literally had to just redraw their wills because of what was going to happen to them because they could have got sick from COVID and died just from going to work and leave the young kids behind. And these are all things that weren't necessarily reported in mainstream media and just having other people just realize, to read the stories and realize some of these underreported effects that pandemic would have on the healthcare community. I would say that would be, that is a huge win for the platform and in terms of just sharing these stories and just letting people know what goes on behind the scenes.
Jack Heald 34:56
I want to confirm I went online and checked out Kevinmd.com. And I'm not really a science medicine nerd, but I am a well written or interesting subject nerd. And listen, guys, I'm talking to the to our listeners. Now, there's a lot of cool stuff on that website, I guarantee you, if you read at all, there's something on Kevinmd.com that will be interesting to you, then I can tell that you've been working on this for a long, long time. So, kudos in that regard.
Dr. Philip Ovadia 35:41
I'd like you to talk a little bit about your experience as a physician-entrepreneur, and I think entrepreneurship has largely been kind of driven out or discouraged from medicine. We know that the number of physicians who are in private practice anymore has dropped dramatically and continues to drop. So how, how do you see entrepreneurship as part of physician life? And how do you, I guess, encourage others? And how do you balance it in your life?
Kevin Pho 36:17
So, I think that it's critically important for clinicians to have interests outside of medicine. Now, before I go on, I'm going to say, if your passion is medicine, and if you're passionate is seeing patients every day, then absolutely double up on that. And continue doing that. But I would say for the majority of physicians, if they do that, if they double down on medicine every day and see 20 to 30 patients a day at the expense of their family life and work life balance, that is a sure path to burnout. And if physicians leave medicine, if they cut down hours, that really isn't going to do anyone any good. Patients is going to have longer wait times, and they're just not going to be able to see a doctor. So, I think that it's important to have a passion outside of clinical medicine to balance that. And for a lot of physicians, that is entrepreneurship, it is a proverbial side gig, right? There's a whole entity of physician side gigs. If you go to Facebook, and Nisha Mehta, who is a radiologist in North Carolina. She runs a very popular physician side gigs group, and you see plenty of doctors who have interests and passions outside of clinical medicine. So, we have to ask ourselves why are clinicians burning out, right? And I think one of the biggest reasons is that it is a lack of empowerment, right? Because medicine isn't what it used to be 20 to 30 years ago, a lot of us, a lot of things that we have to do is dictated to us, it doesn't necessarily improve patient care. There's a lot of bureaucracy, there's a lot of checkboxes that we have to click on. Electronic medical records are very archaic. And there's a lot of things that are forced upon us that don't necessarily help patients. And there's a complete loss of physician empowerment. So having an entrepreneurial spirit allows us to at least take some of the pressure off medicine where we don't have to do medicine because we have to, but because we can enjoy what we're doing. Like we're not forced to practice five days a week, we're not forced to save 30 patients in a primary care clinic, but maybe we can cut down and see the patients that we want to see because our income isn't necessarily reliant on what we do every day as a physician. And because there's less pressure, we can actually continue in medicine longer than we would have otherwise. So, to answer your question, this is kind of a circuitous way. I think that there is a role for entrepreneurship in medicine, but more broadly speaking, I think there's a role for passions outside of clinical medicine for every physician.
Jack Heald 38:59
Cool, I love that. I want to follow up if it's alright, Phil. I want to follow up with, while we're down to like four minutes left, what, I'm not going to do that. I know you've got a heart out at a quarter, a quarter till so we're not going to get started on any more questions. Good start. I have many more questions. It's going to have to wait for the next time. Appreciate you being with us Dr. Pho. I want to port point our listeners to your website, Kevinmd.com. And I guess they can get to virtually everything else from there. Where I see you got your podcast is linked to, your book is linked. Real quickly, just give us a do a quick commercial for yourself in terms of the additional things that you provide as a speaker, a teacher, a coach, those kinds of things.
Kevin Pho 40:02
So yes, go to Kevinmd.com. And you'll see 20 years' worth of stories from healthcare perspectives across the spectrum. I also have a daily podcast there where not only you can hear the stories, but you can see the stories by these Kevin MD authors, in their own words. And I did interview Philip, a couple a couple of weeks ago. And I think that if you go to Kevinmd.com, you'll see everything that I do, including speaking, including coaching, including my podcasts, and of course, reading all the perspectives on healthcare. So, thank you so much for letting me talk about that.
Jack Heald 40:43
It's pretty cool. I love it. I love it when a guest provides me enough information to have a have get a picture of who they are. I will say without question. This is the most thorough that I've seen so far. So, future guests, the bar has been set pretty high. All right, Phil, anything else you want to say before we let Kevin go?
Dr. Philip Ovadia 41:09
No, I just want to thank Kevin for all that he's doing. I think this is a very important aspect of the of the health care system that he's putting his stamp on and kind of showing the way for other physicians so that we can become more empowered. And we can really take back control of the health care system, which is what I think ultimately physicians need to do to benefit our patients.
Jack Heald 41:40
Yes, please, guys. Take back control. Please.
Kevin Pho 41:46
Thank you so much both for having me
Jack Heald 41:47
on. All right. Well for Dr. Philip Ovadia and Dr. Kevin Pho, I'm Jack Heald. This is the Stay Off My Operating Table podcast. We drop a new episode every Tuesday at midnight Pacific Time subscribe, all that stuff. You guys know how to do this. You've used podcasts before. And we will talk to you next time.
Jack Heald 42:13
America is fat and sick and tired. 88% of Americans are metabolically unhealthy and at risk of a sudden heart attack. Are you one of them? Go to ifixhearts.com and take Dr. Ovadia's metabolic health quiz. Learn specific steps you can take to reclaim your health reduce your risk of heart attack and stay off Dr. Ovadia's operating table. This has been a production of 38 atoms