Summary: Dr. Jack Cochran, the author of <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Healer-Leader-Partner-Optimizing-Leadership-ebook/dp/B07K9GCQNJ/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Healer, Leader, Partner</a> has been repeatedly named on Modern Healthcare’s list of influential physician executives. He worked extensively with national health policy development, including working with the White House and United States Congress.<br> In this episode, we talk about the rapidly changing world of healthcare and the demands that it puts on physicians. Jack believes that physicians need to be healers, confidants, and caregivers while developing skills as leaders and partners.<br> By the end of this episode, Dr. Cochran will lay out a roadmap for physicians to become more effective, compassionate, and confident leaders and transform healthcare into what patients really want and deserve.<br> <br> <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Healer-Leader-Partner-Optimizing-Leadership-ebook/dp/B07K9GCQNJ/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"></a>Get Jack’s new book <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Healer-Leader-Partner-Optimizing-Leadership-ebook/dp/B07K9GCQNJ/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Healer, Leader, Partner</a> on Amazon.<br> <br> Jack Cochran: I started out wanting to be a pediatrician and a surgeon, pediatric surgeon, and pediatric plastic surgery, taking care of kids with deformities and those kinds of things. Tremendously gratifying, tremendously challenging, and yet a great advance for kids’ self-esteem and their sense of wellbeing. A marvelous clinical career.<br> As I was going along that pathway, I began to find this very kind of annoying reality, which is my colleagues from the insurance companies would often write me back, well that sounds like it’s purely cosmetic.<br> I would write them back. I said, “I know that this is not going to make their heart beat better or their lungs work better, but there’s no more functional organ on a six year old than their face.”<br> If you talk about the development of their life, the development of their expectations, their dreams, their self-esteem, deformity of the face is a very significant obstacle.<br> <br> If you don’t see it from what I’m saying because I’m not saying it clearly enough, spend an afternoon in my clinic and see the parents and the children that experience these things. Then say to them, maybe to their face, this is cosmetic. As if that was some sort of a pejorative judgment on their motivation and my recommendation.<br> That sort of occurred over time that got me interested in not only the clinical side of medicine but the more total approach to the patient and their care and really perked up my ears to the dilemma of the patient.<br> As I often tell my physician colleagues, I call these the big contrasts.<br> One big contrast in medicine is the reality of the patient versus the reality of the physician. Now, I say that because many physicians are becoming less happy and are more grumpy and more disillusioned with healthcare and I don’t discredit the reasons that they feel that way, there are reasons that have made it harder to be a doctor and made it more difficult to practice.<br> But, physicians who are still respected, delivering tremendous professional care and experiences in caring for people in need, becoming progressively more unhappy, I contrast that with the patient because the role of patient is involuntary. I know there are patients who are hypochondriac. But the rule of patient is involuntary.<br> Nobody wakes up in the morning and says, “It’s been a while since I had a real sickness or an injury. I’d like to take that, try that out again.” The role of patient is involuntary, and often instantaneous. You go from healthy to a car accident, you go from well to a cancer diagnosis. You go from feeling perfect to having a heart attack.<br> The contrast between physicians becoming progressively more unsettled with their...
