Photo by Rémy Penet on Unsplash
For a long time, decades even, I used to hesitate to tell people that I am a doctor. People would clutch their pearls in horror. Wait you’re a doctor and you don’t practice? Why?
Here is an incomplete list of statements people have said to me:
Don’t you think maybe you wasted a medical seat?
You could have helped so many people!
You did MBBS and then you did an MBA? That’s weird choice, no?
Did you really need an MBBS degree for the work that you actually do?
To be fair, there is plenty of support and validation too, and it has increased with every passing year. The dataset of people making unconventional career choices and transitions has continued to expand, as has the definition (and acceptance) of “weird choices”. I seem to be living in a brave new world, externally and internally. Externally, my world is now made of people who live freedom-filled, values-driven lives themselves, and have little headspace or inclination to judge me. My internal environment is also better: that part of my brain that worried about people’s opinion of me seems to have shrunk significantly. One day might disappear altogether, that’ll be even more fun.
In this brave new world, I feel ready to examine the reasons why I walked away from a career in medicine (especially now that I am sauntering back in). The short answer is that I was miserable. One hour of working in the hospital felt like 7 hours outside the hospital: I was living the reverse of a dog’s life. With my newly trained coaching mind, I ask myself: why was I miserable? I find a lot of answers. The profession seemed to demand from me a single-minded focus - at the cost of my wellbeing and joy – that I simply wasn’t capable of. There was a constant celebration of hierarchies and power imbalances that sucked my soul. I was too young, too exhausted, too terrified to see any purpose or meaning in the work I was doing. And unsurprisingly given the above, I was convinced it wasn’t meant for me, and I had chosen it purely out of social pressure.
And so, as soon as I could, I walked away. I wandered a bit, worked in the Indian Navy and in strategy consulting, found my feet in the world of global public health, and found purpose and contentment. The work-life I have been able to build for myself sometimes feels almost too good to be true: it feels like I get paid to play with jigsaw puzzles which have meaning. My colleagues are some of the sincerest humans on the planet who spend their lives untangling the complexities around tricky global health challenges – Tuberculosis (TB), HIV, Sexual and reproductive health (SRH), non-communicable diseases (NCDs). This work has given me everything: credibility, the conviction that I have contributed to the creation of health equity, a love for building excel models.
To answer the two questions I used to get asked most often, in the days before the brave new world:
Does my MBBS degree feel like a waste? No.
Do I actually use anything that degree? Yes. Big time. The three biggest gifts that pay off every single day are:
The friendships and the community. What would I be without the friends I made during my MBBS days? They literally made me. From a confused 17 year old who entered med school because she wanted to impress people to the 23 year old who said eff this, this is not my life – this chosen family of mine saw me, held me and continues to take care of me.
The focus and discipline. My StrengthsFinder analysis says I am a learner. But of course I am. I spent my party-going years with Grey’s Anatomy and Harrison’s Principles of Internal Medicine. Learning is a constant source of joy for me because my neural circuits were forged in med school.
The respect and attention. We still live in a world where to be a doctor is an instant ticket to respect. “She’s a doctor” – is how my then-boyfriend-now husband introduced to his parents to fast-track their approval. From Delhi to Lilongwe to Manila, ministry of health folk were more open to working with me because of that MBBS degree.
Powerful as these gifts are, they weren’t enough to keep me in medical practice. I am convinced we all have a powerful inner compass that gives us extreme discomfort when we move towards territories that aren’t right for us. I have never been able to ignore those inner instructions – sometimes I listen and act right away, at other times there’s a lag between my listening and acting. When I look back on the terrain we (my inner compass and I) have covered, my life makes sense to me. My “weird choice” to quit medical practice brought me the experiences that were meant for me: to travel and work in over 40 countries, to meet people who would inspire me, to build friendships that expand my heart and mind, to meet and partner up with a lovely man.
But this joyful life that combines love, safety, stimulation is just a pitstop. We are all living our own hero’s journeys, the next adventure is just around the corner, so we know to never get too comfortable. My inner mapmaker is sending me on strange new side quests. Over the past couple of years, I have been finding myself covering unexpected new terrain. Last year, I did a yoga teacher training (YTT) course because I wanted to deepen my own yoga practice. I also did an ayurveda foundations course because the ashram where I did the YTT had the world’s most charming ayurveda teacher and I wanted to study with her. And then I learned that Martha Beck, who is one of my favourite writers and thinkers, teaches a coaching certification called the Wayfinders Coaching Program. As I was evaluating the decision, my partner invited me to notice that I have been coaching people for years. As he said to my brother: “At any point in time, Manjot has an informal cohort of 5-7 women who speak to her regularly as they navigate challenges in their health, relationship or work. Anytime someone wants to quit a job they don’t like, or a relationship that isn’t working, somehow, they find her, and she talks them through the process of making the leap”. Of course you have to do it, said my brother, and decided to sign up too. So here we are, brother and sister, learning to become Wayfinder coaches. He’s one of my favourite humans in the world, and it is utterly delightful to do this learning journey together.
The new terrain has been expanding rapidly. About halfway through my coaching certification, I received (and followed) yet another set of inner marching orders for yet another learning journey. In March this year, I started a yearlong course in lifestyle medicine (LM), which is an emerging medical specialty that uses evidence-based lifestyle interventions to prevent, treat (and when possible, reverse) a range of conditions: diabetes, hypertension, obesity and mental health issues. More on this later.
My multiple side quests are clearly converging towards something, but I don’t know what it is yet. How does a coaching, yoga, and lifestyle medicine come together to create something? What am I becoming? A wellness coach? A lifestyle medicine doctor? I don’t know yet, but I am excited to find out. I seem to be re-entering a persona I believed had put aside for good: that of a healthcare practitioner. It feels like a full circle moment. Or is it a moment on a spiral? Didn’t Julia Cameron say something like growth being a spiral process, doubling back on itself, reassessing and regrouping? At this point on the spiral, I’m stepping into the world of medicine again. This time, on my own terms, at my own pace. I am building expertise in the things that interest me and make sense to me: the whole person approach, women’s health, the linkages between human habits and disease. It feels like returning to an old home and finding that it’s not just that I have changed, the home has changed too.
This is the adventure now, balancing my day job in public health - which continues to bring joy – with the demands of lifestyle medicine education. It helps that this line of education is very aligned with my personal values and habits. My tendency to go down rabbit holes is not only okay but actually rewarding. I read an interventional study on diabetes remission, and I started wondering what other diseases can see remission through lifestyle modification. And down I go, spending the next 4 hours discovering something called “deprescribing” (the opposite of prescribing meds). I read the history of Ancel Keys and his 7-country study that changed the way that we look at saturated fat, and I spent the next three days reading about the controverses around fat, the challengers to “Fat is Bad” hypothesis and the more nuanced take we have now landed on. Just like me, the fat hypothesis is evolving rapidly.
I look forward to a year of learning, getting lost in rabbit holes, essays to write, viva-voces to prepare for. This is my Candyland. And in the process, I am becoming my next iteration: a coach who combines a knowledge of medical science and life coaching skills to create optimal health outcomes.
As I learn, I’m going to write (because that’s the best way to learn anything) - about health research that blows my mind, about my reflections on health inequities, about anything that I find interesting and useful. I am hoping to build a community of people interested in learning with me. And if you’ve read this far, and if you’re interested, come say hello to me in the comments! And tell me: what health conditions are you thinking about the most? What questions should I dive deeper into?
Next week: What is Lifestyle Medicine anyway?
