I Was An MIT Educated Neurosurgeon Now I'm Unemployed And Alone In The Mountains How Did I Get Here?

hi I'm Gooby from Gooby and doobie so I used to be a neurosurgeon I trained or I went to college at MIT and did uh four years of medical school and six years of neurosurgery training and and I I was a neurosurgeon for almost 10 years after after all of that so that's 20 years of my life and I quit I quit last year and nobody understood why I quit uh people would ask but you know a decision that involves 20 years of your life you can't really answer in a couple minutes and most people

don't have time to sit and listen to uh a 10 or 15 minute story or however long it takes to explain why someone's doing something that most people would never do and they don't really understand why I would do that so that's why I'm making this video uh first to help sort my own thoughts out about the whole thing because there's a lot of factors but also to maybe help somebody else who's in U in a tough spot uh if they're in a tough spot like I was maybe hearing my story will help them get

out of that tough spot um I'm going to put my hood on because there's some mosquitoes out here so I can think without being distracted by them so I became a doctor uh to help people and I remember at the beginning of medical school when um I was just starting there was a u there was a ceremony and we all took a hypocritic oath I remember there was one of the old older faculty docs and he said that your job as doctors is to relieve suffering it's not to it's not to uh do a surgery

or give a pill it's to relieve suffering that that might be for from doing a surgery or pill but it might be just listening acknowledging what someone's going through that stuck with me all through medical school and residency and afterwards um how I became a neurosurgeon is is um well I've always been interested in how the brain works how Consciousness Works how how our our brain and body is able to perceive this mountain side um the stream that's nearby um we have so many choices in life like is there such thing as a good life

and if so how do you live that those are all questions that I was curious about and that led me to be C ious about the brain and at that time at my medical school there were some researchers and they still they still are working on this um uh working on connecting brains to computers uh through a brain machine interface so this was this was like science fiction um like uh creating a robotic arm or leg that's controlled by a person's thoughts that was really interesting to me and there were people working on that so

I wanted to go into neurosurgery and learn about that and do research on it and maybe one day do do a surgery like uh a Luke Skywalker replacing his arm kind of surgery so I went into uh neurosurgery training I got in and uh I spent six years learning how to do brain surgery and most people don't know that neurosurgeons spent half their time also learning how to do spine surgery because um spine problems are more common than brain problems so I spent six years learning how to do both brain and spine surgery and I

did some research uh working on rats and electrodes putting electrodes in their brain and and um I was slated to go go up to Toronto to work with the guru of uh brain machine interfaces but as I did more research into the problem I I found that um this dream of being able to give people robotic arms or legs I don't think will ever happen and that's because the brain the brain knows that these small electrodes that listen to the brain are are not part of the body so it rejects it builds up a wall

of Scar and then the electrodes they can't hear the they can't hear the neurons the little tiny cells in the brain that send the signals so so the the goal that I wanted to to accomplish which was to become a neurosurgeon who specializes and does research on on um brain machine interface work um I thought that that would that would not work out in the end because of those limitations and after putting in 4 years plus at that time 5 years of my life that's nine years of my from 20 to 29 years old it's

like the prime of my youth I I I I had put it invested it in doing medical school and learning how to do brain and spine surgery I at the age of 29 I realized that where I wanted to go I I would never be able to make it it's just not not possible and after putting N9 years of my youth into that job um I didn't want to throw that away so in my last year of residency I um I learned how to do spine Serv urg cuz that's what most neurosurgeons do it's the

most common thing is what a regular neurosurgery job is is fixing people's um worn out necks and backs and I had good teachers to do that and and uh you know I graduated and I I got my first job and um yeah I knew that some something was not right right away it you know I had good partners I had good hospitals that I worked at uh but something was not right I was very unhappy I I and on the surface it didn't make sense I had um I was getting paid very well it was

a very well-respected job I had good colleagues had good support but I was the most unhappy um that I've ever been and I couldn't really figure it out for a long time um I had gotten married before uh just before getting the new job and and and that's the best decision I've ever made uh my wife is so understanding and supportive she tried to help me out uh but um really I didn't know what was the problem I couldn't I couldn't describe it uh but you know now I know what it is so it's really

complicated and I I'll do the best I can to explain it going back to medical school when when I took that oath and I had that um older Professor say that your job is to relieve suffering you know that's what I understood to um of what it means to be a good doctor and I had learned all these fancy spine surgery techniques to do all this incredible surgery work through tiny cuts and it's called minimally invasive spine surgery it's the latest technology we use navigation like a GPS inside the operating room like all all the

latest techniques you know I learned and I learned how to do well and I I did them and I I helped I helped a lot of people out but there were way more people that I couldn't help and that's because um you know surgery surgery like if if someone's got a what's called um degenerative spine that means their spine degenerated it wore out could be a bulging disc pinching a nerve or a disc is just worn out and bones are rubbing on each other or there's a loose joint and the joint is banging on nerves

causing pain I can do surgery to cut out like a buling disc to to remove something and make more room for a nerve or I could I could do a surgery where I put titanium screws and rods into the spine and lock it down and remove motion it's all removing things the only thing that was adding things was putting in a little electrode to to block pain signals uh if there was nothing else you could do but th those were the tools I had I I learned to use them really well but what I what

I realized later on is that you those those aren't fixing the problem there's so many people with with back problems neck pain back pain nerve pain down their arms and legs surgery surgery might make him better for a little bit but it didn't address what caused that disc to wear out or the disc to bulge or the joint to get loose or the the the disc in between the bones to disappear and then the bones are rubbing on each other those surgeries they don't address that so what what I was doing so what I I

was doing was um there's a lot of mosquitoes so what I was doing was I was doing the surgeries that I learned how to do I was trying to help people but these surgeries they weren't fixing the problem they would help some people feel better some people would feel the same some people would be worse u a lot of people I saw in clinic I had to tell them that oh surgery is not going to help you and of course they would be devastated because I was sort of their last hope that all weighed really

heavy cuz I thought I was going to relieve suffering and I did relieve some suffering but I saw so much more suffering that I couldn't relieve even if I tried even if I tried to do surgery I'm going to change the battery so um a PA a PA a physician assistant that I worked with um he made a good analogy that the surgeries we're doing is like this it's like you have a house and the roof the top top of your house has a leak somewhere and rain water is coming down into the house and

it's ruining the drywall and you can see it you can see water damage the surgeries that I could do were like going into that house tearing down that drywall ripping out the moldy insulation putting in brand new insulation and rebuilding the wall but not not fixing the leak in the roof that's what I was doing and the way I I realized that is that I could do a perfect surgery and some people would get better some people would stay the same some people would get worse even though I did the exact same perfect surgery and

some people would get better before I could oper praying on them even with gigantic bulging discs they would get better if I scheduled a surgery a month out they would sometimes they would call me a week before surgery and say oh hey Doc uh you know my my nerve Pain's gone um do I still need to do surgery yeah I got a big disc in there a big bulging disc right and you that that was uh that was very confusing to me you know I had learned some of that in nurse in residency but actually

being out there and practicing and seeing seeing what happens to people I realized that whoa wait a second wait a second this this isn't quite what I thought it was I thought that um if I do a perfect surgery people are going to get better it wasn't always the case so over the nine years that 9 to 10 years that I I was a neurosurgeon I it really bothered me it really bothered me I felt that um I felt that wait there's something missing here you know I my surgeries are not they don't seem to

be they don't seem to be addressing what's causing people's health problems in their spine I mean it they sort of do but but not um not in the way that I thought not in the way that I thought when I was training and so over 9 years I did everything I could try to do to try to figure out but how do people actually get better and how do they get worse and um you I had help along the way I had a really good partner who was a pain management doc at my first job

and he really clued me into um a lot of a lot of the things I'm going to explain here but I just started asking patients like everything I could think of um what do you what do you normally do what's your job what do you eat what do you drink do you smoke do you you elicit drugs do you uh you have a lot of friends do you you how's your family are you stressed out do you sleep well I I just would ask all my patients just kind of this whole bunch of questions about

their life and what I found was that um patients that did certain things would get better and patients who wouldn't do those things would get worse my surgery might help them out a little bit but they would get worse after that um and those things that I I saw were the following it's um people that got better people that healed they were doing following and not exactly but in general and this is my observation uh they they were having a diet well diet seemed to be the most important the food that people ate and the

liquids they drink the ones that would heal up they had a low salt diet like not it wasn't really salty and most of them ate mostly plant-based Foods you know like vegetable vegetables fruits whole grains beans and this is not this is not like a vegan rant or anything I I I'm not vegan I enjoy a steak or sushi every once in a while I'm just describing what what I saw over N9 years of doing spine surgery people that got better were having a mostly plant-based diet they weren't eating too much animal foods and they

were definitely not eating salty and they would do things that would make them sweat like exercise being outside hiking like this going to a sauna um or they live in a warm place um they didn't smoke they didn't drink much uh they usually had a good soci social support like uh loved ones family members children friends um like a way to socialize they would sleep they would sleep like eight hours every day and they weren't stressed out or they if they had a stressful job or something they they they found a way to like be

mindful or meditate or like just be present and um release the stress back into the Universe um that's what I saw and I saw that the people who did that they would heal so quickly that I couldn't operate on them I mean sometimes I could but if I was booked like three or four weeks out a lot of times people would that were doing that they would heal before I could do the surgery that I thought would fix the problem and the opposite was true you know patients that patients that um so they smoked like

a chimney they sat on the couch and they ate hot dogs all day they had no friends they were super stressed out and um they didn't sleep well yeah th those patients like I I could do a really good surgery I would get them temporarily better but 6 months year later the same part of their back would have a recurrent problem or a different part a different joint of their back would have a similar problem and I would operate on them and they might get better for 6 months and then yeah then the same thing

would happen so it's the it's the Leaky Roof problem so that that was my that was my aha moment it's like oh I know what's going on wait to actually heal you you need to like eat a certain way sleep a lot not be stressed out I have a good social network exercise move your body stretch if you do all those things you heal and when your body heals it doesn't just heal worn out joint in your neck or your back it heals everything it heals a worn out joint in your neck your back it

heals the skin problem it heals um your digestive tract problem it heals your hair [Music] issues when when your body heals it heals everything and that actually became a huge problem and uh let me explain why that's a huge problem because most people will say wa how is that a problem that you figured out how people are healing uh it's a problem because our medical system isn't set up isn't set up this way our our um our you know I'm I'm not knocking any hospital or group that I worked with I've I had the privilege

to work with really amazing people and amazing hospitals amazing institutions but the way that everything is set up in the whole country it's not any particular Hospital the way things are set up is that the hospital needs to make money they need to make money they need to they need to grow economically they need to grow economically and the problem there is that if you figure out a way to help patients heal and that in that way doesn't include a pill or a surgery well then the hospital and the doctor are in big trouble because

if you figure out a way to help people heal and you can't charge them for it well then you've just um worked yourself out of a job let's just say let's just say um like for example there's a hospital in a town and um you know there's an x amount of people with back problems um and the hospital that there's a doctor say it was like me Dr Gooby was doing we'll just say 100 spine surgeries in a year to fix those the people in the community's backs and the hospital got paid Dr Gooby got

play paid and um they Contin every year 100 people needed surgery from Dr Gooby well the hospital's happy Dr gooy gets paid Dr gooy may not be happy with his life but he's getting paid and the do the hospital is getting paid but if Dr Gooby figures out hey um yeah you know what this surgery can help some people but really the best thing that people can do is eat a certain way exercise sleep meditate be mindful you not be stressed hang out with their loved ones and friends and then their back problems will get

better and if Dr Gooby actually recommended that to his patients and they actually did get better well it's a big problem for Dr goobie's paycheck and the hospital cuz let's say in that town let's say everybody everybody ate more veggies and fruits they really watched the salt intake they did things that made them sweat like being outside in the summer exercising enjoying fresh air and the nature and and uh spending time with their loved ones and they slept 8 hours every day and they they meditated and they weren't stressed out let's just say everybody who

had back problems in that town did that and they got better they healed then nobody needs spine surgery anymore in fact they probably don't need a lot of things anymore and then Dr guy's office is empty and the hospital's operating room is empty at least for Dr Gooby surgeries now I'm not saying that that's exactly what happened because not everyone's going to do all those things that I that I talked about but I had a lot of patients that did do those things and they got better I never had to operate on them and they

were very happy that they never had to be operated on and they got better better that the pain went away and um yeah so that that was that was what I figured out over N9 years and I I still did surgery because you know not everybody could can do all those things I talked about I mean just practically speaking and so I I I still did surgery but I really felt like really felt like the focus of medicine wasn't in the right place it wasn't in healing it was in making money from surgeries and pills

and images whatever you can make money from uh again I'm not knocking any particular place that I work I work for very good hospitals people have good intentions but the incentives are not not right in the whole system this whole country's medical system probably not just this country but most countries um it's not about prevention it's about therapies so yeah once I once I figured out this problem or figured out what was going on it was a huge problem for me ethically I was doing surgeries that I knew weren't fixing the underlying problem they may

be fixing the drywall and taking out the insulation and putting in brand new insulation and putting a brand new drywall and some pretty color of paint on the wall but it wasn't fixing the Leaky Roof um and so I didn't know what to do I I I was doing a job that I didn't believe in anymore it was the way I was getting paid and I don't know how to do any other job at that time my wife wasn't working I was the only paycheck we don't have kids thankfully makes things a lot easier uh

we have dupy our doggy our doggy child and she's 7 years old and but yeah we don't we don't have like a a human child and um yeah I I was thinking well I'm the only paycheck I I need to keep working I need to keep going to this job that I don't believe in anymore and that tore me apart I gained 40 lbs uh I was really sad I was really angry frustrated didn't have hope I thought I was stuck I was stuck and then um this was the year before last year before last

I was like I don't know how I can do this for the rest of my life most surgeons they keep operating till they're 60 and that time I was 38 I was like I don't know I don't know how I can I don't know how I can operate doing this doing surgeries I don't believe in even though I I can do them I can do them very well and I can help some people out I helped out a number of people but I I it was a moral dilemma or moral injury I think there's the

term moral injury it was a moral injury um and it devastated me and I kept going to work and I kept doing my best to do a good job but um yeah it tore me up inside and I knew that if I kept going back to that job every day for another 20 years uh I would die before 20 years I I my body and mind and soul they would have they would have just broken down and I don't I don't think I would have made it I wouldn't have made it to 60 uh so

so I I I knew that something had to change but I was stuck I I was the bread winner and I think a lot of people can relate to this I think a lot of people may may feel this way um and uh I knew that I was dying I I was dying inside and my body was dying so you know I I talked with my wife and I said well you know would it be okay if if I I just work part-time maybe I'll cover the ER neurosurgery job for couple weekends a month or

a week or week and a half each month and do something else something that makes me feel good like being out here being out in nature uh the rest of the time and my my wife you know I was I said earlier that she's amazing she said I see what you're going through I've I've lived with you through it you should just quit and I I said what H how can I quit you know you're not you're not working yet she's she was going to school for a second career and and she said well you

know we'll be okay we we saved up some money it's not enough to retire but it's something to live off of for a few years why don't you just quit and I thought about it thought about it really hard and I knew that I couldn't keep going back but I didn't know what I was going to do instead for work but I knew that I would die if I kept going back so with my wife support I went to my job and I said hey I can't do this anymore I will do it for another

I think it was nine months at that time I'll do it for another nine months until you can find someone to replace me so that our that hospital still have a spine surgeon um so I I I I just worked another nine months and I quit and nobody understood why I quit I I would try to explain but this video is probably already 40 minutes long and people don't have 40 minutes to listen to me explain why I quit you so I would tell them oh yeah I was burnt out or um it's just too

stressful I I just want to take a break or um it said I said all kinds of things like like that I mean they're all true but they weren't the full picture um and you at first I was like I was really embarrassed to say that I'm quitting and that I have no plan of what to do afterwards that was embarrassing too um but after after some time had passed and a lot of people had asked me that question and I told a lot of people I have no idea what I'm going to do afterwards

it actually felt good if if it feels good to not have a plan it's um it's freeing it's I got because I don't have a plan I I don't have to be anywhere I don't have to do something at a certain time um and then I just kind of like leaned into it and someone asked me oh what's your plan I said I don't know and I felt good about it and I could tell they felt embarrassed for me they felt uncomfortable where where whereas I was feeling uncomfortable initially saying that but yeah over time

I you know I I just accept it like I know I can't do neurosurgery anymore and I don't have a plan and I'm quitting and I won't have a paycheck uh I got I got some money saved up and I can live off of that for a while but I've got to work again at some point I can't retire um but yeah no I need to do this I I knew I needed to do this and I and I did it so that was last September I quit haven't gone back and um you know at

first oh so so you know this is I think what most people call a midlife crisis um but I would say the crisis part was really the nine years that I was super unhappy that was the crisis so I think that's what most people call a midlife crisis is what I would say was those 9 years I was really unhappy I I I knew something was wrong and I knew I couldn't live like that but I I felt stuck felt stuck in that situation felt like I couldn't um Escape it that was a crisis now

that I've left I haven't been this happy in my whole life it does not feel like a crisis right now I mean maybe financially it might be a crisis that's some point but I I've never been this happy before ever it feels right um so so what I did when I quit is I just walked a lot outside cuz I you I had gained 40 lbs like I said earlier and yeah I ate healthy I slept a lot because you a neurosurgeon they don't sleep very well because they're they keep getting called about emergencies you

I nobody was calling me I slept every night for a really long time and I walked and I spent time outside I spent time with my dog I did the things that I wanted to do which like be out here um my dog she's Dobie she's seven years old and for the majority of her life she um unfortunately had a very boring life because I was so busy my wife was busy and we take her out for a walk every day for half an hour to an hour and then she would just lay at home

the rest of the day and yeah made me sad made me sad that that's her life or that was her life and so I I wanted to spend time with her and spend time with her outside because she loves being outside um and so so I first started out I want to lose weight get back to a healthier weight I want to help my dog live a full life you know the way she's having fun she's smelling things she's experiencing things outside that's kind of where things started and I um I made that made this

YouTube channel Gooby and doobie to to um record the experiences I have with uh with dubie because she's not going to live forever if I live a fulllength life you know she's going to pass pass away before before um before I do and um I wanted to be able to remember the times that I've had with her and so that's that's why I made this Channel and recording our hikes um where I'm going with this is is that you know I didn't have a plan but so where I'm going with this where I'm going with

this is you I quit I quit I had no plan but when you let go of something that you're holding too tightly even though it's hurting you and you let go of it then you're able to pick up something else that hopefully is better for you um I I wanted to spend time outside I wanted to help my dog live a full life by being outside with me and then I wanted to record those moments so that if I live longer than duie I will have those memories I can look back at them and uh

appreciate the time that that I have with my dog um that's how this Channel got started and uh being outside with her I I started taking video of these Pleasant nature scenes and um I found them very therapeutic for myself um there were a couple stressful times over this past year due to family family health issues and I found that hearing those uh nature sounds really helped helped me feel better helped me process what was going on better be more present and aware and and um kind of release that stress stress and anxiety um and

so yeah that's that's that's how I that's how I I am I came to where I am now by letting go of Nur surgery I am able to be outside be healthier my dog is able to live a fuller life and I figured out a way that I can help relieve people suffering by sharing nature scenes with them it's not a surgery but but it it definitely works to at least one of those several things that help people heal which is to relieve stress so yeah that's my story that's that's how that's how um an

MIT educated neurosurgeon got to the point where they're unemployed and out in the mountains by themselves well that was a really long that was really long and I hope that that might help somebody um I hope that you have a wonderful day if you're listening to this and uh you know trust your heart trust your heart lean on the people that love you and do what you need to do whatever that is