When my wife and I opened Dr. Fischer, MD on February 6th of this year, we had just one single patient. This past week, we signed up our 100th patient. That’s 100 patients in just nine months.
When we first opened, many people asked me how we could possibly be successful with this business model. I was very confident we would be, but of course you can’t know for sure if something is going to work until you actually try it. Well, we’ve tried it, and here are a few facts:
The consultant who helped us set this practice up (and who was also very confident we would be successful) projected that we’d be at about fifty patients at this point. We are now at double that amount.
We are already profitable as a business
In roughly another forty patients, I will match what I was earning at my last job
If you are a fellow physician thinking about setting up a practice like ours, my advice is to get off the fence and do it. You won’t fail. And feel free to reach out to me if you’d like to ask any questions.
If you are a patient who is thinking of checking out our practice, don’t delay scheduling your free meet and greet. At the rate we are growing, it will only be a few more months before we have to slow down the number of new patients we can take on.
Finally, a heartfelt thank you to all of our patients who have made us a success. It’s a true honor and privilege to be entrusted with your medical care.
This blog post is going to be a little different than usual. I’m not going to cover a study or discuss a particular medical topic. Rather, I just want to share some personal thoughts on this political moment.
I am not going to endorse a particular candidate, nor a particular set of policies. Like any other citizen, I have my thoughts and ideas about this stuff, and I will be voting today for my preferred (or, more accurately, my less non-preferred) candidates. But as a doctor, I am meticulously non-partisan. I take care of Democrats and Republicans and anybody else equally, and it’s my job to stay out of the political fray and do my absolute best for each and every person who comes to me. I took an oath when I entered this profession, and that was to serve my patients to my utmost. If a person whose politics were truly loathsome showed up at my office (let’s just imagine Adolf Hitler himself, to make the point clear), I would still do my very best to help them with their medical issues.
I’ve been meaning to review this study for some time now. A few years ago, a cardiologist at the University of Texas by the name of Dr. Ben Levine conducted a study that ought to be on the minds of anybody who is interested in living a longer and healthier life.
Dr. Levine and his colleagues put middle aged adults (around age 50) who were previously sedentary but otherwise healthy on an exercise protocol for two years, and performed various tests on their hearts before and after the study. They found that after two years, the subject’s hearts had effectively reverted back to those of a 30 year old’s. In other words, exercise made these people’s hearts age in reverse by almost twenty years.
In my last blog post, I took the New York Times to task for incorrectly suggesting that new research demonstrates a connection between alcohol consumption and the rise of cancer in younger adults. And then just a few days after I wrote that, a patient asked me my thoughts on the health risks of alcohol. So I thought I’d dedicate a post to the topic.
Let’s start with a simple fact: alcohol is toxic to the human body. There is now a lot of research to suggest that even moderate alcohol consumption may play a role in the development of some cancers and in neurological disease. It’s also well established that alcohol consumption is tied to an increased risk for atrial fibrillation, a common type of heart arrhythmia that can increase the risk of having a stroke. And the longstanding belief that moderate alcohol consumption is protective against cardiovascular disease has not held up under closer scrutiny. No, one glass of red wine per night will not cut your risk for a heart attack, and wine consumption is not the reason that countries like France, Italy, and Greece have lower rates of heart disease than we Americans do.
Add to this the long established fact that heavy alcohol consumption is terrible for the body, and substantially increases the risk for liver, cardiac, and brain disease, and we can reasonably conclude that alcohol is bad for humans. Period, full stop. And looked at purely as a substance examined in isolation, this is a correct conclusion. However…
Recently I watched the documentary “Hack Your Health,” which is available for streaming on Netflix. The film covers the emerging science of the gut microbiome (the population of trillions of bacteria, most either harmless or beneficial to human health) that live inside our GI tracts, and that are increasingly being found to play a role in everything from our tendency to gain weight, to our mood, to our risk for various chronic diseases.
I really wanted to like this film, because I think the gut microbiome is a fascinating and important emerging area in medicine, but the film suffered from some major flaws. Overall, I’d give it two out of five stars.
