081 - A Crazy Medical Story About a Physician Quitting During the Last Year of Residency Training- Casey Means, MD’s Story

Have you ever wondered what would drive a top medical school graduate to leave medicine just before completing residency? This week on The Independent Physician's Blueprint, we unravel an astonishing story that challenges the conventional path in the medical field.

In this episode, Coach JPMD shares a jaw-dropping tale of a Stanford-trained physician who walked away from a promising career in her final year of residency. Despite being at the top of her class and on the verge of a successful ENT career, she chose to pivot, battling burnout before ever practicing as a physician. Her story raises critical questions about the pressures in medical education and what it takes to truly take control of your life and career.

Listen as Coach JPMD dives into the factors that led to this surprising decision and how it can inspire you to evaluate your own path. Discover why this physician's journey could signal a need for radical changes in medical education, particularly in addressing root causes of diseases, nutrition, and overall healthcare delivery. Plus, hear Coach JPMD’s thoughts on how these issues are tied to broader societal challenges like processed foods, medication overuse, and the U.S.'s declining life expectancy.

Don’t miss this crazy medical story that could change the way you think about your medical career and patient care. Click here to listen now and subscribe to ensure you never miss an episode of The Independent Physician's Blueprint!

Good Energy -  Amazon Link by Casey Means, MD and Calley Means

Discover how medical graduates, junior doctors, and young physicians can navigate residency training programs, surgical residency, and locum tenens to increase income, enjoy independent practice, decrease stress, achieve financial freedom, and retire early, while maintaining patient satisfaction and exploring physician side gigs to tackle medical school loans.

Transcript

Coach JPMD (00:00.61)
Welcome back to another episode where I help younger physicians decrease stress and increase income by transitioning from corporate to independent practices, even without any business experience. Welcome to another crazy medical story or also known as CMS with your host Coach JPMD.

also known as Jude A Pierre, MD. And this week's crazy medical story is actually about a physician who really burned out and left medicine. But before we get into that story, I wanted to correct the diagnosis I made last week on the podcast, episode 79, where we talked about the complications of hyponatremia as being the cerebral pontine demylinolysis. That's wrong. It's cerebral pontine myelinolysis.

which is a complication that occurs after rapid correction of sodium in severe hyponatremia. So my bad on that. Should have done the research before I actually recorded the episode, but hey, there we have, here's my correction. So have you ever thought about leaving medical school? Have ever thought about leaving residency or even fellowship training? Well, recently I heard an entire podcast with a doctor, Stanford trained doctor.

undergrad, graduated with honors. She went to Stanford Medical School, and then sort of residency training program in ENT, and was going to be you know, she she was top of her class top of her game. And she ended up leaving medicine in the fifth year of her residency, the last year of residency, she left medicine.

So she actually burned out before she was actually a practicing physician. And that was pretty crazy. I don't think I've ever heard of someone doing that. And so she took control of her life and went down another path. She's the author of Good Energy, where she describes her journey, where she describes her journey of being top of her graduating class and becoming an MD and left to fight.

Coach JPMD (02:13.312)
against big corporate pharma and the food industry. I kind of sympathize with her because I think there are a lot of things that I see in medicine these days that really don't make sense, especially with processed foods, the number of medications that we're giving our patients and not necessarily helping them with nutrition, the obesity rate. And all of this is...

is not happening in other places in the world. So we in the United States spends a ton of money on healthcare and we don't get the results that other countries get. Look at our life expectancy in the United States. We talked about in the Blue Zone episode where we ranked 46th or 47th in the world in terms of life expectancy. So.

Dr. Casey Means is her name and she wrote the book Good Energy. in the process of reading that book right now. Her mission, along with her brother, Kali Means, is aimed to transform the way healthcare is delivered in this country by attacking the root cause of disease. I've been recently exposed to that thought.

or that concept by my functional medicine doctor who actually did a neutral valve test on me. And I think I discussed that in one of the previous episodes where I was able to discover that my mercury level was a little bit high. My B2 level was out of whack. I was deficient in vitamin C, all of which I would never have known if I hadn't done a specialized blood test and a swab test that was able to help me identify some of the root causes of things that may be causing

dysfunction in my cells So from the food that we eat the water we drink the toxins we expose ourselves to the limited physical activity These are things that I think are discussed at least in the podcast that I heard with with Casey on talker. It's crazy to hear the story her story and things that she's exposed in terms of numbers and the disease patterns that are related to

Coach JPMD (04:20.822)
The things we talked about above so why is this crazy? Well, this is crazy because I don't know anyone who's left a medical school residency in the last year resident I don't know someone who's taken that control of their life that much control over their lives to become independent So how can this help you? Well, if this is true and if a lot of things that she's saying is true in this book then medical medical school training Just needs to be radically revised. We have to have more courses on nutrition

more courses on root cause analysis, which can really help us understand how to treat diseases. And obviously, there's no substitute to basic sciences and learning how the cells function. But there is room for improvement in how we treat diseases. We also need to be more curious about why in the US we don't live as long as we do.

as long as other people do in the rest of the world. It's almost like the thing that makes you say, hmm, something that Arsenio Hall used to say in his show. It's one of my favorite talk shows actually. It was in the 80s or 90s, I think. So if you haven't had a chance to listen to Arsenio Hall, on YouTube and maybe pull him up. But these things are things that make you go, hmm.

I encourage you to read the book if you haven't. I'm in the process of reading it right now. And if you want to learn something different than what you've learned in medicine, and if you want to learn about root cause analysis and root causes of diseases, I think this is a good place to start. that's my crazy medical story of the week. Hope to see you next week with another crazy medical story.

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