My vision for educating the healers on how to heal and prevent burnout

Dear medical student/fellow doctor/allied health professional, 

Doctors are not taught nutrition and lifestyle medicine in medical school adequately despite the fact that upwards of >80% chronic disease is driven by it. We cannot deny how far modern medicine has come when it comes to resuscitating a dying patient, or diagnosing and treating an acute myocardial infarction, but there are more ways to manage diabetes and hypertension and chronic migraines and PCOS other than prescribing pharmaceutical medication. How about the fact that Type 2 Diabetes can be reversed or put into remission solely with lifestyle changes? Or the fact that if we were able to recognise the true impact of chronic unrelenting stress on our mind body and soul we would be a much healthier nation?

As the years go by, medical students and health professionals like yourselves go through university, graduate, and are forced into the world of shift work and stressful situations day in and day out as we navigate the hospital system. Some of us leave after a few years and branch out into other non-hospital fields of healthcare but our health still deteriorates. Before we know it, we are the ones gaining weight, losing sleep, eating junk food, binging on Netflix day in and day out or doomscrolling on social media to escape our lives, becoming depressed or anxious, withdrawing from close friends and family, and burning out fast. Our lives and identities revolve around our jobs, complicated by additional training and exams.

But we push through! Why? Because everyone else around you is pushing through. Because our seniors did the same. Because we are indoctrinated into this incredibly powerful and established institution that is the medical field thinking that is the only way to succeed. That once we become specialists regardless of which pathway we take, our lives will miraculously get better. Yes, perhaps, in some ways they do, but not in others.

This model is not working. Burnout, depression, anxiety and suicide are at all time highs in our caring professions. We are quitting our jobs and our careers left right and centre.

I want to tell you that it doesn't have to be this way.  

I acknowledge there are many things that are often not in our control - our rosters, where we get placements and jobs, who we get assigned to work with in a team, how understaffed the department is, how many patients decide to show up to the emergency department or your GP clinic etc. But what we can control is our response. Our response to what this exhilarating and yet sometimes soul-sucking career of medicine can throw at us. There are sustainable ways to practise medicine, but you have to first acknowledge that something in your life has to change and that perhaps the way you are currently living your life is not the most sustainable or enjoyable (if you indeed find that to be the case).

When I became unwell with burnout, I had to start from scratch and pick up the pieces one by one. I had to go back to basics; learn what it means to eat nutritious food, sleep well, exercise, and manage my stress and work load. I had to learn what it means to REST. I had to learn to be okay with that. I had to learn what it means to be well, and not just to survive, but thrive. But I had to do all of it on my own. I had to do the research - read the literature, read books, watch Youtube videos and lectures, do online courses, attend multiple conferences and workshops, heck even embark on not 1, but 2 entire additional fellowships of integrative and lifestyle medicine. It should not have been this hard.

As I continue to recover, my energy now turns to you. I want to teach you all that I have learned going on this journey and continue to learn every day so that you don't have to suffer as much as I did. 

Join me as I meet you face to face at my workshops and I teach you the latest evidence-based tools and strategies in a concise and compact way to look after your own health and wellbeing and simultaneously learn to look after your patients too!

See you there!

Malini