The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – The Wounded Physician Project by Curtis G Graham MD

Episode Date: December 5, 2024

The Wounded Physician Project by Curtis G Graham MD Amazon.com The Wounded Physician Project is a fresh investigation into and the solution for the primary causes of private medical practice financial failure which today impacts not only the disintegration of private medical practice but also the overwhelming increasing attrition of physicians today. The root cause has been ignored completely by medical educators for a century in spite of knowing the importance of resolving this issue and the enormous value and benefits it provides for every practicing physician today. The complete elimination of these problems that all physicians in private medical practice have always had and now today is responsible for the frustration and deep disappointment over 50% of physicians have with their careers in medicine, can be resolved almost immediately. The implementation of some very critical educational elements into the medical school curriculums is the answer to this persistent egregious enigma that is far overdue and mandatory. The healthcare and medical profession are going through a revolution now that will not only destroy professional healthcare providers careers but also will become the greatest impediment for quality medical care in our nation if the contents of this book are not heeded.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. It's Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the big show. We certainly appreciate it. As always, the Chris Voss Show is a show who love you but don't judge you,

at least not as harshly as your mother-in-law, because, I don't know, you need to get on her good side. So tell her to go to goodreads.com, 4chesschrisvoss, linkedin.com, 4chesschrisvoss, chrisvoss1, the TikTokity, and all those crazy places on the internet. Today we have an amazing young man on the show. Today we're going to be talking about his latest book that came out August 10th, 2021

called The Wounded Physician Project. Dr. Curtis G. Graham joins us on the show today. How are you, doctor? Welcome to the show. Fantastic, and thank you very much for offering me the opportunity to spread my words and see if people on the other end like it. Now, you're one of the rare medical practice business and marketing experts in the world today with extensive knowledge and experience in both professional fields.

And you can teach and consult with physicians who commonly lack business education and knowledge never taught in medical schools. Tell us about, and I believe this is your fourth book, is that correct? I've written several other books outside of medicine, but attached to the side of medicine for various reasons of interest that I had at the time. I've co-authored a book also with a professional writer, but that was years ago. Give us a 30,000 overview of what's inside your new book. I have a mission. I lost my medical practice for financial reasons when I was at the top I walked out of my office that I did not understand why I would ever lose my practice. And that I brood around for days and weeks and then made a promise to myself that when I reached the time in my life, I would find out what the cause

was, because I had no way to figure out what it was. And I found out that I was totally business ignorant. And that made me mad. And I said, how could that happen to me when I went to the number one best medical school in the country? And so it really angered me. So I read the original book to wake up people. And so it's been updated, I think, correct? Yes. Written in 2014 and then updated. And so the Wounded Physician Project,

tell us about your journey through this experience and what you kind of recount in the book. Well, once I discovered, I decided to research the whole problem after I retired from medicine, which was in 1999. So I've been about 24 years researching the problem. And as far as I know, my book and my mission now is something that no one else has done. My book was the only one in literature published on the topic of financial problems of physicians related to the medical education problem where it starts and so after all those years with dan kennedy and learning all that i needed to know about the medical and business tools and how to use them and what not to use and how to get it all together,

I felt that I could probably do some teaching to a lot of doctors who never got it. And the idea of when I see the private medical practice physicians in this country losing their practices because of the lack of their knowledge of business education. Then I look back through the research and then I find out reasons for that, that in the United States, there are no medical schools in this country that have ever offered or provided a business education for physicians, and they've never provided a legitimate and acceptable reason for doing that. So I say to myself, how can hundreds of thousands and millions of medical school professionals and scholars see that medicine is determined by how well someone knows how to run a business. Why haven't they done anything at all in the last century to cure the problem? And that's what I'm shooting at. I think it's an impossible mission, but I'm going to win.

I love your gumption. You know, I can see that. You know, there's a lot that goes into medical school and what people are taught. I mean, the doctors who eventually become doctors, you know, they go through, you know, 18-hour, 20-hour shifts. They go through a lot of trial-by-fire sort of training. I think that the private, public people are not educated about what's happening to doctors. I don't think they see the background of how we live and what happens to us in that process of providing health care in this country.

So tell us more about it. Like, what are physicians experiencing? The experiences that doctors are having, well, they're overwhelmed with paperwork and with burnout and all the stress associated with that. And they've been tolerating that for now for 50 years. And they're at a point now as which they're quitting. So it's been reported by various people that about 30% of American doctors have already quit practice. Yeah.

And this is just early. So if you continue with the same problems not being repaired, then we're going to lose all the physicians that normally practice in this country. And, of course, the government, as soon as someone quits, they replace it with a foreign doctor. So that's why when we walk into a medical practice situation, that people often see foreign medical doctors who can't speak very good English, who have trouble explaining things to patients and stuff that our culture has, but they don't. So it's a problem with that. But I want to just have every doctor in this country who graduates from a medical school to be fit to run a business,

a small business. And when I look at small businesses, I think immediately was the kind of business that we call small businesses in the United States commercial businesses, where the 95% of them go bankrupt and fail within five years. Now they are people that run small businesses, and so doctors are in exactly the same spot. They go out, they create a medical practice, they run a small business, and they have the same disadvantage. out of management or use all of the fantastic tools that would make them happy about what they're doing. And now doctors are not happy about anything. That's one. And we've seen, we've had doctors on the show that have talked about this, that there's

a coming glut of doctors, not enough doctors, because doctors who leave in the business, you know, they're tired of tussing with insurance companies that, you know, it's hard to get them to pay the bills, the insurance companies to reimburse them. And there's not a lot of people that want to go into the industry as much anymore, especially after COVID. Let me tell you a little bit. Let me talk to you a little bit about that. You may be aware of this,

but male college students are no longer applying to medical schools. So medical schools are having a terrible problem. and punished one way or another by the government mandates and fee restrictions and things that create lesser incomes. And as a result, they are going to lose their practice if they don't have medicine. And comparing the two, it seems like physicians are the same. Now the only difference that perks the subject is the fact that medical doctors are pretty smart to begin with so they have more accumulation of business things. I mean working at Wendy's when they're in high school is one thing but they carry this superficial knowledge into

practice of medicine, and it gets them nowhere. And every small business, ones who are successful owners, always know that the key to being successful is having a business education, because it provides all the tools they need to make as much money as they want. But they never get that. Yeah, it's pretty interesting. So tell us about your journey. What made you want to become a doctor in the first place? Where were you motivated to get into the business and all that good stuff? I was from a very small town, Pennsylvania, during World War II. And I had an emergency appendectomy, and they hurried me over to the doctor and then to the hospital with a ruptured appendix. And so after the surgery, I was in

hospital for about 10 days, and the nurses treated me so well. And the doctors were so nice to me. I said, I'd like to do this the rest of my life. People laughed at me because I decided what I was going to do when I'm eight years old. And that seemed impossible to me. But I never changed. The rest of my life. It never changed. So as I borrowed my way along my family split up. I went to live with my grandparents on their farm i never thought i'd have any economic way to go to college or to medical school i had no idea i had the brains that i could have to go to medical school so it was all guesswork all the way along

finally i got in college and I did pretty well in college. And so I was able to at least apply to medical schools. And then when I got in the number one medical school, the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, now called the Perlman School of Medicine, I just was overwhelmed by the knowledge and information and teaching techniques. But I assume from my experience that, and I know that, medical school students receive no information about getting a business education. They're not told about it. They're not lectured about it.

They're not told about all the advantages that it has for their whole career for the next 50 years or however long they practice. And they're not told. And apparently, there's some club over their head, all the doctors who do the teaching and the head of the dean of the institution or whatever. Somebody, a deep state, medical, industrial, complex, whatever you want to call it. They're in total control of what's happening in the medical school education problem. I can't even get my medical school dean to even

read my book i can't get him to let me talk to the medical students are now in medical school and no medical school will let me talk to any of them because they don't want the secret to get away i guess i thought probably they'd send a hitman to knock me off before I said all these things publicly, but I haven't seen any yet. So here I am, small fish in a big bowl. Small fish. I'm doing the best I can to awaken people about the problem because people have no idea how bad it is. And this is important for consumers because, you know, if there's a lack of medical people in the field, the costs of medical visits to doctors are going to go up

because there's going to be fewer of them. The wait times are going to go longer. And it's very tough. We're going to be into third world medicine in the next five years. Third world medicine. That's really what Europe has been putting up with for many, many years, socialized medicine. But they also have private medical doctors who practice outside of the government business. And so they wind up coming to America. a lot of them come to the United States,

a lot of them go to Canada from England, and you don't hear about that. So we got some support in our group of doctors from that. And I've met and been around a bunch of those guys who are smart as hell. They're really top-notch. So I'm trying to, if I can, force medical schools, if I can get backed up with something, because I don't have the money. I don't have the knowledge of communication in the deep end side of all of this to affect people and believing in what I'm talking about. That all the problems that doctors have with losing their medical practice because of financial

failure, because they never make enough money, and the other five or six or eight major problems that have been paying to doctors for years and years nothing ever done about it still exists and persists and when i go to the american association of medical colleges where all this information is coagulated at, put into in libraries and unload the information and one can look at what's happening in medicine. But the big problem I think is no one is taking the time in any medical group, committee, university, or whatever, none of them are measuring the number of doctors that are quitting medicine. Nobody has any statistics on that. They don't want the public to know that because that's going to put pressure on them.

It's going to put pressure on the medical schools. And maybe after a century, we can get at least one major scholar to decide that maybe it would we don't have time in our curriculum to permit a business education to be taught. That's true if they don't hire the right kind of people. You take Dan Kennedy and you put him in there giving the lectures and all his literature, then they would be able to probably offer business education for, I figured about, oh, $1,000, $1,500 added to their total business cost at the university or medical school they're in, then that would be a fair, reasonable thing. And I think that no one is even thinking about a digital education of those doctors, because then they could forget putting them on a curriculum, but they could give them all the package the

day they walk into medical school with all the CDs and DVDs and boxes of studies, whatever they need, and put it in the library. And any time a medical student wants to learn about this stuff, and most of them don't want to because they don't know they exist. And so they would, if you had a smart student, then you start thinking about, hey, you know, I am going to start a medical practice. And, you know, I don't know how to do that. And so they, do you know how doctors create their medical practices and have been for the last century? You know how they do that? How? Every single doctor goes into private practice, goes out to the local

community, they talk to all the doctors, they get information while they do their bookkeeping and how they do their list of appointments and how they run it and what the variety is. So they learn from all the other doctors in the community and nurses and whoever's interested in helping them. And that's how every doctor has been doing for 100 years, has been starting a platform of a medical practice by their past experience with business as much as it is and that their knowledge about what needs to be done that they can pick up from what they hear and see. So it's something that puts a barrier ahead of a medical student.

Now, if you tell a medical student, you're going to be doing a business education in the four years that you're in medical school, and you can take all your time off and all your stuff that you have. Of course, they'd say, I don't have any time off. I went to medical school. I had a job in medical school in the hospital. Well, I earned enough money to add to my medical school bill. And when I look at the schedules that the medical schools have now, they have, it's like the government. The medical schools now have curriculums for physicians to go around the

hospitals with a priest or a pastor, and they want them to learn how to soothe the medical problem that the patient has through religious means. And that is useless. You may know that about they're trying to stuff into the heads of every medical student in this country and Europe probably all that they can get in there, even knowing that about it's been estimated 30 to 40% of that medical education is never used in that doctor's life life for the rest of his life and medicine never used. So there's a lot of stuff that needs to be brushed away from the curriculum so that doctors have enough time to have that business education. And I guarantee you that if you take 20 doctors out of a medical school class, you does medical students, and you put them in a separate session, and you give them all those cds and dvds and lectures off and on while they're in

medical school for the four years they will know a lot more than i do because it'll all be new stuff and they'll be smart enough to earn as much money as they want anytime they want to and they are never been told that. They don't know it. Yeah. Because there's no limit to what they can do when they have those tools to use in business. I'm just so sad about that. I've written about 300 articles and published them in various media, a lot of it on kevinmd.com one of the shows where

they have doctors write all the things that are bugging them and you can read each one their their articles and their ideas and stuff and i don't think they're even censored at all because you really get the juice of what's causing problems with doctors. And the brain that exists in this country in the medical profession is now intolerable, and there's going to be bad trouble for the next two years for sure. Probably long-term in the future, right? So I have been trying to set up a website with my 154 articles and then adding one every week till the end till i die and then having them learn more about what's going on on that website and they can read the articles and look at them and go back to them and it'll all be available to any doctor. And I tried that after I wrote

my first book in 2014. And I found out that I never got a doctor sign up. I had 86 articles telling them all about business education, because I just finished with Dan Kennedy on that stuff. And I was hot in the head i was ready to go not one doctor ever saw my website or elected to take my newsletter at all no one interested who i got there were the paramedical people who you know the breathing people at the hospital and the other people that work with the doctors to help patients. Those were the people that got on my list, not the doctors. But then I find out that the doctors don't want to hear what the problem is.

I believe that they have been essentially in a very, I don't know how to describe it, but I would say in a brainwashing environment that medical schools have, is that if they don't tell medical students about what's available to them, then they're never going to have a business education. Because when they get out, they're not going to pay anywhere from 40 to 60 000 for a two-year education and a good college a good education in medicine and not an mba an mba is too superficial it has to be an academic business education And it's going to cost them $20,000, $40,000, $60,000 a year for that. Maybe total, I don't know. But those are figures I've seen.

And it looks like there's a 7% turnover per year of people leaving the medical field, according to some sites. And burnout seems to be the biggest thing dealing with their issues. It's a hard-working environment. It's got to be mentally hard as well. I mean, you're seeing people die. You're seeing people, like I could never be a veterinarian. I love dogs so much.

And God bless the people that can be in there for that. But I can never, you know, it's hard enough for me, a dog, to die every few years. And I wouldn't want to do that otherwise. Yeah, nobody wants to hear what I have to say i'm going to say it anyway but i hope somebody catches on no medical organization is willing to help me i contacted a lot of them and when i say what i'm doing they don't want to touch it wow dan kennedy came up to me one day. He says, hey, he says, Kurt, do not write a book on this. Don't waste your time. You will never get to him.

I said, I don't understand. He says, I quit helping medical doctors many years ago when I found out that I couldn't even get an office appointment. And then they wouldn't talk to me, and then if I told them what to do, they refused to do it, or they quit early on a marketing plan. You've got to wait six, eight months to see the results. They want it done in a week or two. All the doctors are quickie, quickie, quickie. And so that was another problem.

Definitely, definitely. Give us your final thoughts as we go out. Tell people where they can pick up the book, any dot coms you want people to learn more about you. My next book is going to be much more complete and a lot more detailed about all of these things. And I'm about to complete that with a very professional book publisher. And I think, I hope I don't die before I get this done, but I want to have a course and I want to have a website on top of all the other things that I would do that I can just continue. I've been pretty lucky. God's been good to me.

You know, I figure I got that impression when I got taken out of my medical school process, which means my board that was bringing people in, drafting us, drafting doctors. And I said, hey, wait a minute. He says, I'm not going. I am not going to let you tell me what military service I'm going in. I'm going in the Navy. I'm going to get on a ship somewhere. I'm not going to be on land for Vietnam at this time.

So it turns out that while I was in the Navy after my internship, I became a flight surgeon. Then all of a sudden I get assigned to a squadron. It wasn't a carrier. It wasn't a Navy. You know that the Marines do not have their own doctors, and they don't have their own dentists. They don't have their own corpsmen. So they get assigned.

So I get assigned to a helicopter squadron, Marines, and was in Vietnam combat 14 months out of my internship. So that's when I found out that God was helping me. Thanks for coming to the show. We really appreciate it. And people should definitely read your book. Thanks, Curtis. Thank you very, very much. I'd like to express my opinions.

I know I get very pushy, but I don't know how to handle this other than that. You can order up, folks, wherever fine books are sold. It's called The Wounded Physician Project out August 10th, 2021. Dr. Curtis G. Graham. Thanks for everyone for tuning in. Be good to each other. Stay safe. We'll see you next time.