105 - Forget Medical Practice Burnout Recovery: New Series on Longevity and How Independent Physicians Can Design Lives That Prevent It Entirely

Are you building your medical knowledge beyond the textbooks… or just stuck in survival mode?

 As physicians, we’re trained to investigate, solve, and adapt — but somewhere between the EMR clicks and late-night charting, that curiosity gets buried under burnout.

In this kickoff to our Curiosity Series, we’re diving into one of the most important questions we should all be asking: Why do people in 47+ countries live longer than Americans — including physicians like us?  I’ll walk you through what sparked this series, revisit key ideas from the Blue Zones, and challenge us to reawaken our drive to learn, explore, and live better.

In this episode, you’ll discover:

• Why curiosity might be your most powerful tool for better practice and longer life.
• The global life expectancy stats that should have every physician asking hard questions.
• How the top 10 longest-living countries compare in diet, income, healthcare access, and more — and how that affects you, your patients, and your profession.
  
  

Ready to disrupt the status quo and take your curiosity off autopilot?
 Tune in now and follow the Curiosity Series every Monday — as we uncover what the longest-living populations are doing right… and what we as physicians must do next.

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 (00:00.088)
Hello, CoachJPMD here. So, we're back. We're back to releasing episodes every Monday. So expect to see an episode drop in your podcast app every Monday, and hopefully every Thursday coming soon. Took a little break over the past couple of months. And we also rebranded our podcast last year to the Independent Physicians Blueprint. So stay tuned for new episodes releasing every Monday morning. By the end of this episode, you'll know why I think all physicians should be forever curious.

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. In this episode, you'll discover my why again, the top 10 countries with the highest life expectancy and the shocking place the United States ranks. Hey there, it's Coach JPMD here again with another episode.

another Monday episode and this episode is going to be an introduction to the curiosity series that I'm going to introduce. It's gonna be an episode that kind of defines what we're gonna do over the next couple of weeks and in terms of what I think all physicians should be, we should all be curious. And I think the busyness of the profession, practicing.

taking care of patients, taking care of your families can sometimes be overwhelming. And so my goal is to bring up some things that you might be curious about, at least I have been curious about it after learning about it a couple of years ago when we had episode 25 on the Blue Zones and where we kind of went over the characteristics of the five countries where patients or people live.

to be centenarians more than the rest of the world. So what is curious? What is curiosity? What's a marked desire to investigate and learn? And that's what we do in medical school, right? We learn and we try to figure out things on our own. And one of the things that I want to figure out is why do we in the United States don't live as long as most, don't live as long as 47, 48 countries in the world?

Coach JPMD (02:20.28)
So we all have things that we wonder about and this is one of them. And this is part of my why. And if you go to my episode, episode zero, first episode of the podcast, you'll know that one of my deep desires is to help populations live long, especially physician populations by increasing physician awareness of spiritual, mental and physical health globally. And so why do other countries live longer than the United States?

We have some German listeners and even Germans rank 36th the world-ometer ranking of countries that live longer than the US. If you look at the top 10 countries and their life expectancies, have Hong Kong ranking as number one, Japan number two, South Korea number three, followed by French Polynesia number four, Switzerland is fifth, longest-lived population, Australia,

Italy, Singapore, Spain and Reunion, which I'm going to have to look up where Reunion is. But that's the top 10. And what what happened to the US? Why is the US not in the top 10? Well, when we scroll down, we see that the US now ranks 48th in the world with an average life expectancy of 79.6, which took a really it took a big hit around Covid. And we can talk about that in the next couple of episodes.

But we actually dropped from the time that I recorded the Blue Zone episode, episode 25, where we talked about the Blue Zones. And so I think that at that time we ranked 46th, now we're 49th. And that was only two, two and a half years ago.

So what are the blue zones? If you don't recall that episode, check it out. But they're the zones or the areas in the world where we have the highest concentration of centenarians and they are the Okinawa, Japan, Sardinia, Italy, Ikea, Greece.

Coach JPMD (04:19.702)
There's a Nicoya Peninsula, a Nicoyan Peninsula in Costa Rica and the Seven Day Adventist Community in Loma Linda, California. So in the next couple of episodes, I'm going to explore these top 10 countries and why they may be doing better than the U.S. And so we'll start with...

Number 10, we'll start with reunion because I am actually curious. So what country that is? And if you know and you want to shoot me a comment in the, in your app before I get to it, you can do so. But what we're going to look at is what are the diets in these countries? What are the total populations? How many hospitals do they have per capita? How many pharmacies do they have per capita? What's the dominant religion?

What are the top three, top five causes of death? And their median income and some other stats. So one of the other things we should definitely look at is the suicide rate. As you know, physicians, and I've said this in the past, physicians, unfortunately in the United States commit suicide 1.8 times more than a general population. And I think some of the stuff that I've been reading so far have noted that there is an increased risk of suicide in the US.

And so what's driving that? So we'll delve into some of those things over the next couple of weeks and our curiosity series. So stay tuned next Monday when we start. And I guess we're going to start with Reunion. And if you guys want to hear what characteristics or what, if you think, you know what some of the characteristics are, definitely drop me a note. Love to hear your thoughts and we'll see you next week. Thank you so much for listening to the podcast.

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