Physician finance bloggers seem to be dominated by shift-based specialties (anesthesia and emergency medicine come to mind), so it’s nice when a different specialist weighs in. It would be impressive enough that Dr. Brent Lacey’s career as a gastroenterologist requires him to handle Texan-sized colonoscopies, but there’s more – he’s also a physician finance blogger at the Scope of Practice …
Delivering Her First Album: How FIRE Helped An OB/GYN Find Her Voice
The best part of writing a physician finance blog is the delightful assortment of true-to-their-internal compass folks you pick up as friends along the way. I feel fortunate to count Dr. Kristina Dervaitis, a Canadian OB/GYN, among the menagerie of misfit docs who make life more interesting as they redeem our profession in my eyes. I’ve invited her to share …
Announcing WCI CON 2022
[Disclosure: If you register for WCI CON 22 using this link, I make a modest commission at no cost to you.] Enrollment has begun for the upcoming Physician Wellness and Financial Literacy Conference 2022, offered every 1-2 years by the White Coat Investor. You have 5 days to score early bird pricing on in-person attendance. I was a speaker at …
A Good Mid-Life Crisis
It’s the first swell of the autumn that’s above knee high, and I find myself in a lineup in cold water with a handful of dudes. If I had to guess, these surfers constituted what remained of the precocious puberty crowd from high school – they shaved more at age 14 than I do today, and were socially popular – …
Encore Careers And Applied Vs. Bench Research
I’ve spent a great deal of time thinking about what my encore career might look like. Some of that thinking has to do with how to go about deciding on that first action. Do you dip a toe in the water to an interesting idea? Do you commit fully and completely to your best option? How much is the right …
Is Your Investing Process- Or Outcome-Oriented?
An acquaintance relishes trumpeting his large bet on bitcoin and intent to hold on for dear life to a group of us repeatedly via text. He insists it demonstrates his investing prowess. For proof of his skill, he holds up the considerable increase in value he can demonstrate since he initially invested. When I ask to understand why he invested …
The Sisyphus Year
It’s been a brutal time to be in medicine. The start of the pandemic caused an unexpected and precipitous drop in patient volume. Those docs who ran their own practices and relied on elective or non-emergent procedures for their livelihood faced significant adverse financial consequences for the evaporation of their patient base, although the Paycheck Protection Program offset some of …
Virtuous Or Vicious: Understanding Incentives In Value-Based Care
I’ve been taking a tour through the world of value-based care, which is the most recent place where the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS) have changed the rules of the game for reimbursement at the organizational level. Value-based care is defined as as positive health outcomes divided by cost. It’s a new and interesting body of knowledge to learn …
Off-Season Arbitrage
For the past year, my wife has been on a mission to find a reasonably-priced Sunbrella© outdoor patio umbrella. When she began looking early last spring, the world was reeling from a wicked winter COVID spike and it seemed that everyone had the same idea to improve their homes’ outdoor living spaces all at once. We had a frustrating experience …
“Doctors are sadists who like to play God and watch lesser people scream”
The title of this post is a quote from the film Juno, a cleverly dismissive bit of venom spoken by the protagonist’s stepmother in a rejection of medical authority. It came to mind today as I listened to a fascinating podcast recalling the history of laetrile in the U.S. during the 1970s. Laetrile was a drug made from the extract …