Dr. Tea  0:01  

Practicing medicine without insurance is possible. Imagine a private practice where you get to see your best patients every day, providing medical services you truly enjoy, all without the hassle of insurance. My name is Dr. Tea Nguyen, and I'm a recovering specialist who was completely burned out from insurance based medicine. I pivoted into direct care, where patients pay me directly for my medical services, and have never looked back. If you're a private practice owner or planning to become one who's looking to be free of the grind of insurance and you're craving it, simplicity, efficiency and connection with patients, you are in the right place. This podcast will help you map out your exit plan and uncover the mindset needed to thrive in today's economy. Welcome to the Direct Care Podcast For Specialists.

Dr. Tea  0:53  

What is the most radical thing a doctor can do? It's asking for help. The future of medicine depends on doctors reclaiming their autonomy. Too often, we're being controlled by the system, and this really isn't just about creating a direct care practice for yourself, but it goes beyond that. We are recreating a system that also helps our patients as well. Direct Care is not just a temporary solution, but it's scalable. This is a systemic shift that I hope to have you join along with me, because what happens if we do nothing? Well, we get stuck in this age old system that exploits our medical degree and it puts profits before patients. But that's not why we went to medical school. 

Dr. Tea  1:44  

We wanted to be able to create a sustainable living doing the thing we enjoy. Those two things can go hand in hand, so when we have a real doctor patient relationship, when we can restore that and exclude all of the noise in between, what can actually happen? This is the direct care model. We give patients better access. They don't have to wait on referrals, which means patients can have an earlier diagnosis. We also reduce long term expenses, because we get to catch and manage and educate chronic diseases before they happen, or if they have them, we can help mitigate long term consequences through lifestyle changes, through longer discussions and better relationships with the patients. We also get the opportunity to reduce unnecessary surgeries and coming from a surgeon, I do want to reduce unnecessary surgery. In fact, a lot of surgeons don't want to do surgery and have sleepless nights, day in and day out. And ultimately, what Direct Care offers is humanized care. People get to see doctors as real humans, as a parent, as a friend, as a family member, we get to humanize what it means to be a healer and to help those who need the healing. This is really a ripple effect. When we have happier doctors, we are able to make better decisions. We can become better leaders. We can become better mentors for the next generation. 

Dr. Tea  3:22  

To make it more concise as to what Direct Care offers to doctors. Doctors get time freedom. We get to align doing the things that we enjoy and excluding the things we don't want to do anymore. We get rid of it. We let somebody else take it over, somebody who loves doing that thing. Instead, we don't have to take on the burden of trying to do everything, especially when it's not something we truly enjoy. We can sort that out in private practice. We also get to have more control over our price points. You can go higher, you can go lower. It's totally up to you. We have control in the workflow and how we want the experience in our practice to be for patients, for employees, for ourselves, and we also have better control of our outcomes in a direct care model, doctors have mental clarity. They can focus on one thing at a time. When you have a practice you're seeing 30 to 60 patients, there's a lot of mental shift that has to happen. You have to take care of the patient you're running behind. You have to do a prior authorization, you have to correct a prescription. Right? We have all of these things we have to handle. And a lot of us think this is just multitasking, but what it really is is mental shifting. And every time we shift from one thing to another, it takes time to reset and refocus, which ends up being very energetically expensive, and then we feel like we're always behind. We're chronically behind. But when you take away that chaos and you get that chance to have thinking time and mental clarity, that's how you get to reignite the joy in practicing. Medicine now for patients, they get to have better access, because they can just pick up the phone and tell the doctor they need to be seen, and it's easy to fit a patient in the same day without added stress. This also allows for a better trust, because we remove the middlemen that often interfere with the process or with the flow of the patient doctor relationship. And it also allows price transparency and just general transparency as to how your business is run, what that's going to cost. And if that patient trusts you enough, they will pay that. They will find a way to pay for that. And I've had patients tell me they trust me enough to find ways to pay for their service, whether it be extra, babysitting their grandchildren, or they pick up a work shift, or they realize they can not spend on something so that they can spend on something else, right? They reprioritize their expenses, and that's for them to decide. I never have more of an influence other than you. Decide how you want to spend your money. I'm here for you if you need it. Patients also feel a lot more whole. They feel seen when the doctor spends more time with them. Instead of just being a CPT code, right? We are humanizing the patient's experience too. We spend a little bit more time with them. We are more focused on them, and this allows for real healing. We're not just pumping them with medication, steroid injections. You know, it's not just disease management. We actually talk to them about holistic living so that they don't have to deal with chronic issues that get expensive down the road. 

Dr. Tea  6:42  

So in the direct care setting, medicine is more like a conversation and is a lot less transactional. So why is it so hard for doctors to ask for help? Well, let me tell you, I have a hard time asking for help because there is this mentality where, in our medical culture, suffering means you are working hard, therefore you deserve what you earn. Right? We equate working hard with success. It's a real cultural paradigm in medicine. Even in our medical training, we are told to not ask questions, to look things up yourself, which I agree with, but it kind of builds in that mentality to don't ask for help, at least not quite yet, right, that you should be able to handle things yourself, or you should not show signs of weakness, because people will see that and take advantage of you, or they think you're weak or incompetent. So this is a cultural problem we have in medicine. It's very toxic, but we have to recognize that it exists in order for us to ask for something else, to demand for something else. So we go through this shame spiral where we are trained to help others, but it's shameful to ask for help, right? Or we shouldn't need to ask for help. We should be able to figure it out ourselves. And you can see how discouraging that could be to somebody who is trying to learn something, but is not given the tools to know how to cope or how to ask for help, or they're just simply too afraid to ask for help because they don't want to appear incompetent and so on. So how do we collectively break this shameful spiral of asking for help? Well, I promised myself that 2025 was going to be the year of ease and flow, and I, myself, used to love being busy. Used to equate chaoticness with success. Used to think that doing a lot of things made me more valuable, but the thing is that I finally realized when I finally had my multiple accounts of breakdowns, and I broke down by myself because I had a very hard time asking for help, because I myself have figured out a lot of things on my own, and it was just kind of this badge of honor that I erroneously wore, like I proudly displayed, that I can handle it myself. But the reality is, when I say ease and flow, it doesn't mean being lazy. It means simplifying. It means leadership. To do things in flow is to do things in alignment with the things that you enjoy, right? It's focusing on making it easy for yourself, so that you can help more people and have the focus and energy to be around those who love you. So here are some tangible steps as to what that really means and what that could look like. Take inventory of all the things that you're doing that might be joining you and write it down on a scrap piece of paper if you have to, or type it in a notepad, in a Word document, where you type out the things that you are actively doing that you dislike, and you don't have to make decisions or make a judgment about what you're writing, you can just write it all out. So an example might be writing an email. Email, writing multiple emails, creating a newsletter, finding somebody to do research on a topic that you want to write about. These are things that you can outsource. If you don't love it, just write it down. Figure out where your energy is being drained. Now in another column, write out the things that energize you. What are the things that you truly enjoy? For me, I really like to think I can spend endless hours creatively, thinking about things I want to create, or problems I want to solve, or just mindlessly sitting around thinking about not doing anything being what we think is unproductive, but it's actually very productive for your brain to be able to let go of the logic and really embrace the creative flow that your mind is likely craving this time in your life. Now I'm halfway through my life. I don't know where you might be on your timeline, but I really do want to make the most of living, and that doesn't mean I'm going to go out and bungee jump and skydive. I've done skydiving. You know, when I was 21 I was young and a little bit reckless, and, you know, I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about just deciding what you want to do and do more of to live is not being reckless. It's actually to enjoy and embrace the present time. This is what we call mindfulness. It's really accounting for every minute and every day, not just waiting for the next exciting thing to come through. It's slowing down. So if you need help, you can get support through a professional coach, a therapist, a counselor, a mentor, even a good friend who is a good listener, or through a community, some people have church or other social gathering, networking, whatever it is, get support and ask for help. And it doesn't even have to be like, I need help. It could be like, I'm looking for a solution, or want to grab coffee, want to grab lunch, right? It could be so super casual in how you get that support. And I would say the most important thing to focus on is really deciding what success means to you. So if you've taken my course, this is the second to last module, where I ask you, how do you define success? Because success cannot be merely a financial goal. Because if you listen to those who put money first above everything else, and you ask them, Do you feel successful? They're going to say, Well, I have money, right, but I can't take it to the grave. Now, don't get me wrong. Money is important in the way that electricity is important, right? It's a tool. You need it for things. You need to buy things. You need it to invest in things. But it's not a bad thing. It's great to have it, and having financial freedom is amazing. But don't let that be the only way you define success. Redefine it on your terms. Don't look at others. Make it your own. And I'll share with you what success for me is it's having time freedom and creative freedom. Yes, money is great. Money helped me get the time and creative freedom. But it wasn't the only thing, right? So that's what I'm saying. It's like a buffet. You get to pick and choose what works for you. So instead of looking to somebody else who has different goals in life, look within and get quiet and sit on it and meditate about it and journal it, write out what it means to you to be successful and for it to be sustainable, you need to give yourself permission to want what you want. Just admit to yourself you want something else, and that's really okay to admit that you want more. Give yourself permission to do it with ease. And find your people, find your help, your mentor, your consultant, your coach, your community, a mastermind. And then start small, find ways to get clarity. Maybe it's not thinking about the problem you currently have, maybe it is socializing, grabbing a nice dinner with a friend, or somebody who can just help you unwind a little bit and just put aside the need to hustle every minute of your life, and then think about what it means to be successful. Define it in terms of not just the income, but the energy, the impact, the freedom you may have decided what that looks like for you. For many of us, what we are seeking is not to do more. Is not to work harder. It's not to accomplish more.

Dr. Tea  14:53  

But it might be an alignment. Is this thing energizing me or is it draining? Eight, that's a question you have to ask yourself. So on a personal note, I have been struggling since the election right in November. I'm not about to get politically relaxed, but I am going to share with you that I've been struggling to find balance and peace. It's a constant battle because everybody needs my attention, and I also am built in a way where I feel like I can do things better and faster if I did it myself, or I feel like I just don't want to explain myself to anyone. I'd rather just do the thing, do the job, or I have some trust issues, right? That should be no surprise to anybody. Or I simply just don't have the time to make SOPs or standard operating procedures, right? These are things we have to create and work in order for things to eventually become easy. So it's hard up front, but it does pay off down the road. And what I've done for myself is I've really taken a lot of breaks. And I'm not talking about a nice little lunch break. I'm talking about periods of time of not doing anything, just allowing my brain to run free, to be in the garden, to wander in a shopping mall, because those things still exist, to play with stickers, to play with my daughter, things that make me not think, because I'm trying to get into a place of ease and flow, to relax my brain, to move my sympathetic nervous system and to calm it down so that my parasympathetic nervous system can take over and release me from the chronic stress that I've had in the last, I don't know, 30 years or so, 40 years, probably all my life, I don't know, but I still find myself struggling, and that's because I want to accomplish a lot. I want to help a lot of people, but there's not a whole lot of time I'm halfway through my life I mentioned earlier, and to me, maybe that's a midlife crisis. I don't know, but I do know I can take action to change the place that I was at to where I want to be by being a lot more intentional about the work that I choose to do or choose not to do. And the first step was admitting that I had an addiction to doing stuff right. It's a positive feedback loop. I say to myself, I don't feel like I'm achieving enough, so I go do more stuff, I get the little accolade that lasts for a whole few minutes, and then I'm back to chasing something else, because I get that dopamine hit on doing things. So my challenge to myself was to do less new things, but refine the things I'm already doing, and to do it better and to be patient with myself. So if I can share anything about that, it's really to understand how you self soothe, because I do it through accomplishments and task completion and just finding new things to entertain myself, you know, confront that and realize you don't have to keep doing that to yourself and also confront the other lies you might be telling yourself. Like mindfulness feels unproductive, because if you continue to think that way, you will burn out a whole lot faster, even if you have a direct care practice. I'm so grateful that you're here with me and allowing me to share my story with you. I've got more coming up. I'll catch you next week. Take care. 

Dr. Tea  18:28  

If you enjoyed this episode, please give it a review and share it with a friend so more doctors can learn about direct care. Let's keep the conversation going on LinkedIn so we can help more doctors escape insurance and thrive in private practice. Thanks for listening. I'll talk with you next time take care. Bye.