Dr. Jaffe Interview Structure for Functional Medicine

1. Intro

• I will share your 200ish word bio then turn it over to you to fill in the gaps.
• I will ask you to share a little about yourself and your decision to go to medical school (not residency or beyond) in the first place.
  • We will hit the story of how you fell into functional medicine hard in Part 3.

2. “Tell us about your specialty, functional medicine”

• I will read a description of your medical specialty, let you opine, and then ask what you think medical students should know about your specialty to be well informed, before I jump into my follow up questions.
  • Description:
    • [I usually source these descriptions from the AAMC’s Careers in Website website, but in the case of functional medicine, they don’t have one, so I may need you to help me find one.]
• My follow-up questions will include:
  • Functional medicine is a relatively new specialty and only recently gaining wider acceptance in medicine. Can you give us a brief history of the formation of functional medicine as a field?
    • What need does the field address, what area of expertise do its practitioners provide, and why has functional medicine started to emerge only now?
  • Respectfully, whenever I mention functional medicine to other physicians, they either don’t know what it is or they associate it with alternative medicine, that is, medical practices that are either unproven, disproven, or have even been shown to be harmful. Why do physicians make this association with functional medicine? And can you differentiated functional medicine from alternative medicine, from integrative medicine, from integrated medicine, from holistic medicine for us?
    • What is the scientific foundation of functional medicine?
  • Great, so you’re set on going into functional medicine. What does the training pathway to get there look like?
    • Do functional medicine residencies exist?
  • Great, so you became a functional medicine physician. What does the practice of a functional medicine physician look like?
    • What does a typical (daily/weekly/monthly) routine, a typical patient, and a typical outcome for this patient look like?
  • What is generally considered to be most exciting about your specialty, and what is considered to be most mundane?
    • Note: many physicians lament that “charting” and “paperwork” are most mundane. However, because these things are not unique to any one specialty, I encourage you to share the mundanities that are unique to your specialty.
  • You didn’t enter your specialty functional medicine so much as help to establish it as one of its thought leaders. As such, what would you encourage a medical student to think about in earnest before committing to going into functional medicine?
  • How does the practice of your specialty change based on setting: inpatient vs. outpatient; academic vs. private vs. public; urban vs. rural; civilian vs. military vs. governmental; national vs. international; clinical vs. research.
  • Others.
  • What is the biggest challenge facing your specialty, and where do you predict your specialty will be in 10 or 20 years?
  • Is there anything that I haven’t asked you about functional medicine that you think listeners should know?

• I will then ask about resources you used and would recommend others use to learn more about your specialty.

3. “Tell us about how you decided functional medicine was right for you“

• I will ask you to tell us the STORY of how you chose (established?) your specialty, including struggles, insights, and the eventual ‘ah-HA’ moment when it all made sense. We’ll expound upon any lessons you gleaned from this process, and then I will ask you how you would recommend a medical student facing this decision today should work through it.
  • In this section, I would like to retrace the path of your career starting from your time at the NIH as a young researcher and your quest to debunk any and all types of medical practices that had no basis in Western medicine.
    • As you went around debunking (Eastern medicine, acupuncture, alternative medicine, whatever else), what did you find that was true quackery, what did you discover that Western medicine was missing, and how did these experiences lead you to functional medicine?
• Again, I will ask about resources you would recommend other use to help make the choice about what specialty they want to go into.

4. “Give us advice for long-term career planning irrespective of choice of specialty”

• You have practiced medicine for some number of years now.  Take a moment to tell us what you have learned about what it takes to ensure a maximally fulfilling career, irrespective of the choice of one’s specialty.
• My follow-up questions will include:
  • If you could go back and do it all again, what would you do differently, and what would you do the same, and why?
  • What is a career mistake that you have seen other physicians make? What is something you have seen another physician do well that has made you want to emulate it?
  • What is one thing you are struggling with or lamenting about your career today, what are you doing to remedy it, and what would you encourage a medical student to do right now to help avoid this problem entirely in the future?
• I will then ask “What book(s), medical or non-medical, do you think every person pursuing a career in medicine should read?”

5. Finale

• We’ll end with you sharing any final thoughts.
• I will then ask if there is anything you are working on that you would like to listeners to be aware of; if there is somewhere where they can go to find out more about you (if you want them to); and what the best way to connect with you is (if you want them to).
• Say our goodbyes.

I will call you via Skype at the appointed time.  My Skype ID is Semidecent. This is an audio only interview.

*Disclaimer*

Recording: By participating in the UndifferentiatedMedicalStudent.com interview, you agree to allow UndifferentiatedMedicalStudent.com of Iatrocast, LLC to record, distribute, and disseminate the podcast in any manner. You also agree to allow UndifferentiatedMedicalStudent.com and Iatrocast, LLC to retain rights to the produced media for potential future use in speeches, books, and in all other public distribution.