In this podcast we explore topics and ideas center around the practice of urology and the field of medicine. I am a urologist based in Woodbury and St Paul MN.  

Patients ask me all of the time if anything is “new” since their last visit as they try to figure out what options they have as they consider treatment for whatever condition ails them.

This is a challenging question because something is always “new.” There is always innovation, ideas, and new iterations.

Change is constant.

The reason this is top of mind for me is because within the last couple of weeks my partners and I have been exploring and discussing opportunities to innovate within our practice, as well as seeing some significant changes outside of our practice in our local medical community that have the potential to significantly change the way we practice.

And I have lost a lot of sleep because of the expected changes. I am concerned that some of the ideas I have heard are a bit too much, impractical if not damaging to our practice if not executed or navigated properly. 

There are only two responses to innovation, ideas, and iterations. The first response is to be skeptical, to find the fault in the ideas and to figure out all of the holes in the idea and to determine all of the ways in which the idea doesn’t work. The second opposite response is to look at a half baked idea and to say, “Maybe there is something here” and then to build it despite its imperfections

I wonder which of the two I am, a skeptic or a dreamer.

The reason I have been thinking about this is that I have spent a fair amount of time this past couple of weeks shaking my head, skeptical of ideas, concerned about radical change, I see and essentially asking over and over again, “Why? why, why, why?”

I am afraid that as an older physician, one who views myself as starting the last phase of my career, I am too resistant to change, and afraid of the new, the bold, and the crazy.

But I think I should still be dreaming, to see the things that never were and ask, “why not?”