Reading: Rethinking How Doctors Deliver Healthcare with Suzanne Seinbaum

“It’s important to understand that you must go through life happy,” says Dr. Suzanne Steinbaum. “If you wake up every day and are miserable, you don’t stay in that.” So says this unconventional cardiologist who just left big-hospital life to join an acupuncture and Ayurveda group to create a more “personalized” kind of care for her patients. “I believe no one needs to get heart disease,” she tells Lesley. “Using genetics, physiology, anatomy and data” she says she can figure out where her patients are on the spectrum toward heart disease and create a specialized prescription for diet and exercise that helps arrest, or even reverse, the progression. “People see me when they are ready to feel good and be the best they can be,” she’s says.  “When they really see changes they are motivated.”

Dr. Steinbaum’s Top Advice
When you are planning on changing your life, and in reinventing yourself, that you open your mind to the options that exist outside of the bubble and the world that you live in. If anyone told me 10 years ago, 5 years ago that I would do this, I would say it’s not possible. So always look at what has potential and what was possible, and open your mind to it. And really understand your strengths. I knew what I was capable of from starting way back when in a prevention fellowship. And what I’ve been able to create for my patients now is not what I learned a year ago or five years ago. It’s what I’ve been studying for 20 years, and it’s a culmination of everything I’ve known.

You get one shot in your life to be as happy as you can, and the second things start going in the opposite direction, that’s the second you start planning.