Spontaneous Drawing For Understanding

By Bernie Siegel MD

As a surgeon I was not made aware, by my training, of the many uses of spontaneous drawings and dreams, as psychotherapists are. What I am about to share stems not from my beliefs but from my experience and my work with patients and their families. I have always been an artist and a visual person. In 1977 I attended a workshop presented by Dr. Carl Simonton and in 1979 one presented Dr. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross. The former led to my first experience with guided imagery and the latter with a spontaneous drawing. Both revealed incredible insights and information about my life, and so I became a believer and returned to my practice, where a box of crayons became one of my therapeutic tools. I was also quite angry about what is not routinely taught in medical school, about the significance of dreams and drawings as they relate to somatic, as well as, psychological factors.

Click to read more ...

New Concierge Medicine Series: Royal Pains

Want to know how to start your own concierge medical practice?

Well, you can attend the Medical Fusion Conference and have a chat with Steven Knope MD, or you can tune in to Royal Pains on the USA Network and see what the media makes of a concierge practice setting up shop in the Hamptons. (I've been to the Hamptons a fair amount and it's prime real eastate for this a as a show... much better than the Jersey Shore.)

Click to read more ...

Free Resource Report For Physicians

To access this free report you'll need to login to Freelance MD. If you're not a Member, you'll need to join Freelance MD first.

Our Free Resource Report for Members

In this report you'll discover the products, services, tools and resources that we use to build our businesses or that we have researched and recommend on a daily basis to our friends and colleagues.

Of course this is a free report for our physician members. If you're not a Member yet, you'll need to join Freelance MD. (We'll also be adding to this report from time to time to keep it up to date.)

I Don’t Want to Eat Your Vomit

Are you just regurgitating what everyone else is saying?

Via Zen Punk Marketing

Regurgitating the same old wisdom is a problem for a lot of advice blogs (and podcasts), whether the topic is marketing, fiction writing, motorcycle safety or parenting.

“Build your business through relationships.” “Show, don’t tell.” “Point your chin in the direction you want the motorcycle to go.” “Don’t allow your toddlers to play with live hand grenades.”

It’s so easy to write a post on a topic that has been done to death. And I am guilty of this, too, at times. Let me tell you, regurgitating the same old wisdom we’ve heard multiple times from other sources is no way to market. It doesn’t encourage readers to stick around.

So how do you break out of this trap? How do you come up with original ideas that are genuinely helpful?

Well, I’m not going to tell you. Because then I would just be regurgitating someone else’s wisdom. And I know you don’t want to eat my vomit.

So where can you turn to get some origionality back?

Most of what keeps us uninteresting boils down to conformity, consistency, shared values, and yes, thinking about things the same way everyone else does. There’s nothing wrong with that necessarily, but if you can mentally accept that it’s actually nothing more than groupthink that helps a society function, you can then give yourself permission to turn everything that’s accepted upside down and shake out the illusions.

One way to view creative thinking is to look at it as a destructive force. You’re tearing away the often arbitrary rules that others have set for you, and asking either “why” or “why not” whenever confronted with the way “everyone” does things.

This is easier said than done, since people will often defend the rules they follow even in the face of evidence that the rule doesn’t work. People love to celebrate rebels like Richard Branson, but few seem brave enough to emulate him. Quit worshipping rule breakers and start breaking some rules.

If you'd like to learn from some rule breakers, here will be plenty at the Medical Fusion Conference

Keep It Simple

It’s ridiculous how complex most patient visits are. It’s not our fault — we’ve got to deal with legal issues, patient satisfaction, understaffing and so on. Instead of telling the patient, “It’s just a cold,” we order a CBC, CXR and nebs. A patient with every complaint in the book — I like to call positive review of systems — gets a CT scan when really we should just say “You’re crazy!”

That’s similar to how I’ve seen many of you or your financial advisors manage your money — making things far more complex than they should be. So let’s apply Ockham’s razor to your finances and simplify your financial life.

Too many accounts

Do you have more than one IRA? Perhaps you opened one years ago at Scottrade and then another with a mutual fund company. Maybe you have another with your financial advisor. What about your 401(k) from your previous group or employer? Is it still sitting in the same place with poor investment choices and high-cost funds? If that’s the case, then it’s time to consolidate.

Rather than have multiple IRAs spread out over multiple custodians, combine them into one IRA. You can even combine your traditional IRA with your Simplified Employee Pension IRA and transfer your old 401(k) in as well.

Lump your spouse’s taxable account with yours and see if your 401(k) allows incoming account transfers.

Instead of having a separate checking account for personal expenses, make your taxable investment account act as your bank account.

Too many investments

When you’ve got too many accounts you’ve also got too many investments.

Here’s a real example of a physician’s portfolio I reviewed recently:

• 150 individual stocks
• 30 individual bonds
• 80 mutual funds

How in the world do you keep track of all this? Imagine the number of transactions--buys, sells, dividends paid, dividends reinvested, capital gains distributions, stock splits, etc. If you’ve got a taxable account, you’ll have to hire a CPA just to keep track of this.

Do you or your advisor really think you can adequately research so many companies and money managers? Think about the financial statements, charts and economic data you have to pour through. Is this really worth your time and money?

Then there’s the illusion of diversification. Sure, you’ve got a ton of funds and it looks sophisticated. Suppose you own all of these funds:

• American Funds Growth Fund of America
• AllianceBernstein Wealth Appreciation Strategy
• Oppenheimer Main Street Opportunity
• Davis New York Venture Fund
• Wells Fargo Advantage Capital Growth

The fancy sounding names might make you feel good, but it turns out all of the funds are invested in the same asset class. That means there’s a ton of overlap in their underlying holdings. If you think you can pick the winning money managers, just pick one fund and toss the rest. Better yet, if you own a bunch of funds in the same asset class, you own the asset class in an inefficient way. Why not just invest in the Vanguard 500 Index Fund and be done with it?

The bottom line: Consolidate your investments and your accounts to simplify your financial life.

The Importance of Investment Benchmarks

I dare you to ask any of your colleagues, or even your financial advisor (if you have one), about how their investments are doing.

Most people will say something like, "I'm doing fine" or "I don't know."  Most advisors will simply print some standard brokerage report for the accounts they're managing and tell you the return number.

Either way it's wrong.

One problem is that most people and advisors don't look at the whole picture, which includes your and your spouse’s investment accounts, including your 401k accounts.

The second problem is that most people don't use the appropriate benchmark. A common mistake is that people compare their investment returns with the U.S. stock market averages. But if your overall portfolio contains some bonds and international stocks it is no longer valid to compare your portfolio to a benchmark that consists only of U.S. stocks.

So what you need to do is break down your entire portfolio into its components and then design an appropriate benchmark to evaluate investment performance.

For example, let's say that your portfolio has 50% in U.S. stocks, 20% in international stocks and 30% in bonds. The appropriate benchmark to use is a combination of a U.S. stock index, an international stock index and a bond index in the same proportions as your portfolio.

However, you must realize that your portfolio percentages will change as each asset class has different returns. This will throw off your comparisons to appropriate benchmarks, which will be static.

Finally, if you have an advisor who is trying to sell you a mutual fund that has "beaten" the market, one of the first things you should do is look at what benchmark the fund is using to make its claim of outperformance. If you do this, the outperformance goes away for the vast majority of funds that claim to have skillful money managers.

The bottom line is that when you look at your portfolio performance, look at the whole pie not just the pieces. And make sure you're comparing it to a relevant benchmark.

In future articles, I’ll discuss different ways of calculating investment performance. It looks deceptively simple, but in reality it’s more complex.
?

Physician Startups & Hemorrhoid Rap: Or Why I Want To Leave Clinical Medicine...

Lyrics

Click to read more ...