Written by Christopher Kelly
May 22, 2020
[0:00:00]
Megan: Hello, and welcome to the Nourish Balance Thrive podcast. My name is Megan Hall, and today I'm delighted to be joined by Keira Fiore [Phonetic]. Keira, how are you this morning, and did I say the last name right?
Keira: Yes, you said my last name right. And I'm good, thanks. I'm really happy to be here.
Megan: Good, well, I'm really excited to speak with you. First I'd like to give listeners just a little bit of background. So, you and I connected a handful of months back, if I'm not mistaken, to chat about medical school. As many people know, I went through the process of taking all my premed classes, applying to medical school and then I decided to continue my work with Nourish Balance Thrive rather than pursue medical school.
Anyway, that's a long story. This podcast isn't about me. It's about you. When Keira and I spoke, I was really impressed by how she was thinking and also excited that I found somewhat of a kindred spirit in somebody who is young, with aspirations of entering the medical field but with knowledge and appreciation of the importance of Ancestral Health and also a desire to make change from inside the system.
Today I think the plan is to talk a little bit about her path to medicine, some of her less conventional views about health and what it means and then dive into how she'd like to implement these concepts into her future practice as a physician. Does that sound good?
Keira: Yes, that sounds great.
Megan: Okay, awesome. So let's start with your path to medicine. Can you talk a little bit about that? I know that there was an injury involved somewhere along the way that played a large role in your decision. Is that right?
Keira: Yes, totally. So, when I was 12 -- Well I guess I should start with saying that when I was 4, I started dancing, so that has always been a big part of my life. When I was 12, I was diagnosed with a chronic foot injury, and I remember that doctor's appointment very clearly. They told me that I had to stop most physical activities, which is a really big part of my life, and I was either given the option to get surgery or to do physical therapy. At the time, neither of those had a great prospect for my recovery.
So, I was sent to a physical therapist. His name was Jeff, and he had ten years of experience working with dancers which is really lucky for me. After six months of working together, I had over an hour of physical therapy that I had to do every night, which I did very diligently. I thought it was so cool that I was able to do these exercises and strengthen different muscles, and I was able to heal and eventually get back to dance which was really amazing for me.
After that, I was really dead set on being a physical therapist, and I thought, this is what I want to do. After that, I went -- well, I guess there was a long time gap after that. Then upon entering college, I thought, okay, I'm going to be a physical therapist. I always loved science. I always wanted to understand why things happen and how they happened. I had a million questions, much to my parents' and some of my teachers in school's dismay.
So I did this internship where I worked with the Division One athletes at sporting events and in the athletic training room. I got to to work with physical therapists. I got to work with sports medicine doctors. I was really surprised because I really liked what the doctors were doing more than the physical therapists. I thought it was a lot more interesting to understand why things were happening than fixing the mechanics.
That's not to say, I still have a huge appreciation for what physical therapists do, it's just that, for me personally, figuring out why it was happening and diagnosing things was much more interesting. That's when I switched from thinking, okay, maybe I would like being a doctor a little bit better.
Megan: That's awesome. Could you talk just a little bit more about the nature of your injury and then also how you ended up solving the problem from, it sounds like, multiple perspectives? I know that a lot of times, athletes are active individuals, one injury causes another. It can be a little bit difficult to maybe find which injury caused the problem in the first place, and taking a systems approach to injury recovery and prevention can be really a beneficial thing. I guess another way to put this was what was the root cause of the injury, or do you know?
Keira: Yes, the cause of my injury, of my foot injury is I have this tiny, little extra bone on the side of my foot. We all have a bone there, but I have a tiny, little extra one. It's actually in both feet but for some reason, where it falls on my right foot, falls at a particular place over the tendon that is particularly irritating, I guess. It's really common. It happens in approximately 10% of people but only gets commonly diagnosed in dancers and gymnasts because of the nature of the activity.
[0:05:00]
I'm sorry, I'm forgetting what your exact question was. How exactly did we solve it?
Megan: Yes, I was wondering what -- because it sounds like there were -- we talked about hip injury as well before. Everything probably stems from some kind of root cause injury. Is that right? I would assume.
Keira: Is my hip injury related to my foot injury?
Megan: Yes.
Keira: No, that's a different thing.
Megan: Oh, completely, okay.
Keira: I think my hip injury is a better example of a systems approach than my foot injury, to be honest.
Megan: Okay, well then can you talk a little bit about that?
Keira: Yes, there are so many injuries. My hip injury is a lot more recent. For that one, what happened was probably, gosh, my junior year of high school, I was doing an audition, and I just felt this twinge happen in my back. I thought nothing of it because in dance, it's like, oh, yeah, everybody has pain. You just keep on dealing with it, which I'm sure is common in a lot of the athletic fields.
Then it started to affect me a lot, so I went to a doctor. They did tests. They said nothing was wrong. I saw my chiropractor. They said nothing was wrong. So then I just kept dancing, and it got worse. I went to college, the same thing. I saw different doctors. They said nothing was wrong. My dance teachers told me to work through it. Everything just kept getting a lot worse until I got to New York. At that point, it had been five years.
Finally I got an MRI and then they found a labrum tear in my left hip so then we did treatment for the labrum tear. Because when you have a labrum tear, there are routine symptoms. You have this deep popping. You have different pain. All that, I was having. Those symptoms went away, but then I was still having other pain and weird symptoms.
When I was in New York, I have Kaiser for my healthcare. There's no Kaiser in the State of New York and so then I went to a physician. I took a train, a three-hour train ride to Washington, DC because that's the closest Kaiser, to see a doctor there because I was still having symptoms.
He refused to look at my MRI and then he told me, "Well you don't have a labrum tear." I was like, "Well could you please just look at my MRI?" He was like, "Your symptoms don't match with it." I was like, "Okay, well what do you think is going on?" He was just like, "Well, you can't have this because this doesn't match up. You can't have this." So I just left feeling really confused and defeated.
Eventually I came back to California, and I have the good fortune, my mom is a neuropsychologist that works in a sports medicine facility and so I have access to a lot of really good doctors there. I got to see a sports medicine doctor who works with a pelvic floor specialist, who worked with a physical therapist, and eventually a podiatrist, which is like a whole team of people. They took another look at my MRI and did a whole systems approach. Even though the labrum tear was a factor, it wasn't the only thing.
This is getting long. Sorry, I apologize. Basically, because there was a labrum tear that was untreated for so long, that caused my muscle mechanics to be off, which caused all these other issues and compensated for things and compressed nerves, caused inflammation, yada, yada, so a whole host of other issues that then all those things have to be treated. You can't just treat the labrum tear and expect all those other things to go away, if that makes sense.
To me, that speaks to so many things that it's like, okay, well if somebody had just listened to me at the beginning then my treatment would have been a lot simpler. I also think it speaks to, I have so much respect for the team of people that figured all of that out. Because the human body is so complex that it's not so easy to figure out, well what's going on here? Because especially if you look at the inside of somebody's hips, so many things come together there that I know that that was not an easy thing to figure out.
Megan: Wow, that's quite the story.
Keira: Yes.
Megan: It sounds like that integrative systems approach that the ultimate medical team helped you with, I would guess helped you to -- or maybe this is a leading question, but did that help you with your decision of transitioning from wanting to be a PT to wanting to go into the field of medical practice?
Keira: Yes, it most definitely did. I would say that experience really solidified it for me. Because when I was in New York, for sure, I felt really alone and probably angry with the medical field, and having that experience made me feel like, okay, there are people who care.
I think from a young age and even now when I feel upset or when I'm just having a bad day, as cheesy as this may sound, the one thing that grounds me is I think about how amazing the human body is. Even right now, here, as we're talking, my cells are doing all these crazy, amazing things that I don't even have to control. It was like even though my body is messed up right now, it's cool that they're able to look at how all these things connect and fix that, and I want to do that.
[0:10:28]
Megan: Oh, yes, absolutely, and I'm intrigued with the complexity and the amazingness of the human body as well. I also want to point out that empathy, which is a really important thing in healthcare, which is oftentimes severely lacking sometimes, and there's a great Brene Brown YouTube video on empathy that we'll link to, in the show notes. It sounds like with your past injuries and I'm sure other areas of your life, as a physician, you'll be able to be a more empathetic physician, which I think is really important as well.
Keira: Thanks for saying that.
Megan: Yes, of course.
Keira: That's something that's really important to me. I love that video, the one you're talking about.
Megan: Yes, it's a good one. Also, I know you talked a little bit about the influence of psychology. I was wondering, and I know that you're a yoga teacher, right?
Keira: Yes.
Megan: Could you talk a little bit about psychology and yoga, and how that's also transformed some of your thinking as far as what medicine is?
Keira: Yes, totally. Let's see. Well, I would say I started yoga, my second year of college, as a purely physical practice partly because I took my passion for exercise, let's just say, a little too far in college, and my body was not so happy with me. So yoga was a gentler way to approach that. Then I took a break from yoga, and I was like, I don't feel that great anymore, so then I started practicing yoga more regularly. I got certified, and I learned a lot more about the mental perspective of yoga. I think that it helped that there is a lot more science and literature coming out about meditation and all of those benefits.
Then I started to just be a lot more interested in, I don't know, how to live a more fulfilled life because I think that the first year of college was really hard for me and really stressful. I was so focused on getting the grades and succeeding and da-da-da-da-da. It was like, okay, now I did all these things, but I'm really not that happy. That's when I started listening to, honestly, The Minimalist Podcast, which is how I found Nourish Balance Thrive and how we connected, and that's when I started learning about Brene Brown and all of these other people.
To me, Western psychology and yoga are two sides of the same coin. I have such a hard time seeing how those things are separate from medicine, I guess, because to me, it's like, well here's my brain and then there's my spinal cord and there's my body, and they're all connected. Our brain is also the thing that regulates the hormones which direct our bodies to do all these different processes.
So I think that psychology is so important, and I know that there's, I don't know if a stigma is the right word, but I know that some people in medicine think like, oh, well this is woo-woo stuff, I am all for science, please, all of that. I just think that it's really important to integrate mental health and physical health into just overall health.
Megan: Yes, absolutely. I know that a while back at Nourish Balance Thrive, we brought on Dr. Simon Marshall onto the team. He's a brilliant sports and performance psychologist, and I can't tell you how many clients have benefited from speaking with him while simultaneously working with health coaches, meeting clients to reach their health and performance goals. I'm really not quite sure how we managed without him before he was on the team. He's just an invaluable member. So I absolutely agree that everything from the neck up is really not just from the neck up. It's affecting everything from the neck down as well.
From a psychological perspective, transitioning into talking about prevention, things like yoga, things like meditation, I'm sure, can be used from a primary perspective and also probably from a secondary perspective as well. I know you have some thoughts and you've been involved in some research on the area of prevention. Do you want to talk a little bit about that?
Keira: Yes, for sure. Right now I'm working on a research project with a very brilliant physician. His name is Jeff Wilkins, and he's an addiction medicine specialist. He's based in LA. We're working to put together a systematic review of primary prevention efforts primarily for adolescents but also dabbling into children and young adults, for alcohol, tobacco and other drug use. It was interesting when he and I first spoke, he told me that there has been some resistance towards primary prevention in his field.
[0:15:10]
Megan: Could you just, very briefly, for the listeners, define primary versus secondary prevention?
Keira: Yes, of course. It was new to me too, because I was like, well prevention just means one thing, right? No, but it doesn't. Primary prevention is stopping -- or let me start over. Primary prevention is preventing a problem before it happens, so it's like stopping somebody from ever trying the drug. Whereas, secondary prevention is like, okay, somebody has already tried the drug or is already starting to show signs of dependence. Now, how can we lessen impact or stop it from getting worse or treating it?
I was not surprised when he told me that, but I was really interested to have a conversation about it because it really aligned with my views on the healthcare system as it stands right now and even as it relates to how we talked about my hip injury. Because it seems like we have a reactive healthcare system where we only treat things once they become a really big problem. I don't really think that that is the fault of physicians. I think that that is how our healthcare system is set up and how insurance companies are set up. I think that's really unfortunate for patients. It's unfortunate for doctors. I could talk about that. That could be a whole another podcast.
Anyway, so the research that we're doing is, right now, it's like two simultaneous projects going on. We're looking at a bunch of literature, looking at a lot of different clinical trials and other reviews of different intervention programs that have happened with adolescents, mainly for prevention efforts, primary prevention efforts for, sometimes it's all substances. Sometimes it's just specific substance, and usually they are a combination of factors. It's almost never just like, let me give you an education about drugs. It's usually a combination of, can I give this person's family support? Can I give them some sort of education? Can we give them community support? Also helping people in school.
I would say an interesting thing is lack of connectedness is a very big problem. I think that's interesting also. I don't know if you're familiar with 12-step literature, but lack of connection is usually the biggest factor playing into addiction of any kind. I think that there is a really big problem with that in our world today. We're more connected than ever and also more lonely than ever.
The other thing we're doing, that Dr. Wilkins is involved with this boys and girls club that is in a depressed economy, a Latino-Hispanic community in LA. He has already been involved in seeing kids already through, that started out when they were in second grade that have made it all the way through college. A lot of these kids drop out when they're in high school, and they don't even make it through college.
We're going to try and put in some evidence-based practices to help prevent them from even ever trying drugs, things like that, to help in their academic success, help them get through college because they have the extra barriers of their siblings are in gangs, or their parents do drugs or things like that.
Megan: That's fascinating. I know we've talked a lot about loneliness and social isolation and lack of connectedness here on the podcast, but it's interesting to see or hear from the perspective of drug and alcohol abuse, that that also plays a role, and it doesn't surprise me.
Keira: Yes, definitely.
Megan: Okay, so anything else about your path to medicine you want to talk about? I know we also wanted to touch a little bit about the Health at Every Size idea. Do you want to transition into that?
Keira: Yes, that sounds good to me.
Megan: Okay, awesome. I don't think this has ever been talked about on the podcast before, at least to my knowledge. Do you want to introduce the topic and then tell us a little bit about it, and your thoughts?
Keira: Yes.
Megan: Also maybe we should start with how -- I know there are certain people, Linda Bacon maybe, who have written a lot and spoken a lot about this. Did somebody in particular introduce you to the topic?
Keira: Yes, let's see, what was my path into this? I would say it started with reading Intuitive Eating by Elyse Resch. Then a dietitian actually recommended to me the book, Body Respect, which talks about the Health at Every Size movement. How did you get introduced into it?
[0:20:04]
Megan: I think I just heard about it from some podcasts and reading a little bit.
Keira: Oh.
Megan: I haven't actually read any of those particular books yet.
Keira: Oh, okay. I would highly recommend Body Respect, especially because I am not one for, as much as I love psychology and yoga, and I think self-compassion and those things are important, and I work on them; I am not a big self-love. Those books are really hard for me. So if you hear the title, Body Respect, you might think, I can't handle that, but it's very science-based.
Megan: That's great.
Keira: It's a really good book. So, Health at Every Size, I just read something really interesting the other day that said, and I think this is a common misconception, Health at Every Size does not mean that everyone at every size is healthy. It just means that anyone in any body can be healthy. Basically, just the way that you look or your weight does not define your health, which I think is a very common misconception.
So, yes, Linda Bacon is basically the person who has pioneered this movement. It is based in science. There is one study in particular that stood out to me that she did, and that was a study where they basically followed two groups of women. I am not going to have the full details for you right now, but I could probably find the article and give it you, and you could put it in the link, if you would like.
Megan: That would be great.
Keira: Yes, one of the groups of women did a traditional American -- well, not American diet, but what we would think of as a restrictive diet and exercise plan. They followed them for at least a year, might have been two years. The other women were encouraged to do intuitive eating, to eat what they wanted, to practice self-compassion, all those things.
The people that went on the more restrictive diet and exercised, lost weight at the beginning and then they gained all the weight back, as is shown, because we know 95% of diets don't work. It's like, would you take a pill from your doctor that 95% of the time didn't work? I don't think so. The other group, they didn't lose any weight.
In both groups, they measured their blood lipids and did their labs and all these different things, which I believe you guys do, some of those things, at Nourish Balance Thrive. So, these health markers, the women who dieted did not get better, but the women who did the Health at Every Size approach markedly improved.
I think the idea is that in this body shaming idea of you need to go on a diet, you need to lose weight, da-da-da-da-da, we are not improving people's health. Maybe some people could be healthier if they ate a different way or if they moved more, but in shaming people, we are not helping them at all. The current paradigm that we have around that in most of society is not helping, and there's actually a lot of people that it's hurting.
In the book, Body Respect, there's a lot of research on weight bias in the healthcare system. I personally can talk about this. You and I, Megan, we would have what is called thin privilege. If you and I go to the doctor and we say, "Oh, my knee hurts," the doctor is not going to say to us, "Well you need to go on a diet." For somebody who might live in a larger body, that might be what the doctor says instead of telling them, "Oh, let's get some imaging, let's do this, let's do that." I don't think that's fair. So, there's a lot of that, and there are a lot of people that live in larger bodies that are afraid to go to the doctor. They're all these things.
Then there's the jarring statistic that somebody is 292 times more likely to have an eating disorder than to get diabetes, but what do we hear about all the time? The diabetes epidemic, the obesity epidemic, but really, eating disorders are so much more damaging. I'm pretty sure that anorexia is one of the most deadly mental health disorders, so I just think that maybe the conversation on this needs to shift.
Megan: Sure, and by shifting, thinking about health versus thinking about body size and body weight.
Keira: Yes, exactly, and I think though that diet culture is so sneaky in that it changes. Right now we hear, oh, healthy and lifestyle, but then we're sold this idea that healthy is working out and counting your calories and doing these things. Really, is it that healthy if you're stressing out about it all the time?
I think people joking now about making these big deals about gaining weight during the pandemic, that's damaging to a lot of people. A lot of people are struggling. So maybe don't do that. Maybe there are other things that you could focus on.
[0:25:07]
Megan: Yes, absolutely. That's a pretty crazy statistics about eating disorders and diabetes. I didn't know about that. Anything you want to say about BMI? Because I know that can be a little bit controversial, and from a research perspective at a population level, maybe it's a good measure or marker to look at. Maybe, I don't know. Some people would probably disagree with that, but at an individual level, I know that it's very much not a great health marker. Any thoughts on that?
Keira: Yes, so many thoughts on that. I would say that I understand the need to have some sort of standardized marker, and I don't have the answer for what a good one would be. However, I don't think BMI is useful at all, and I think it does more harm than good. Linda Bacon talks about this in the book, Body Respect.
BMI was determined a long time ago, and it was determined basically by a company that was backed by a big pharmaceutical company who, at the time, had the only weight loss drugs on the market. So they had a vested interest in getting people to buy weight loss drugs. So, if people think, okay, I need to lose weight to be healthy, then they will spend many on these drugs and then big pharma will make money.
There is actually research from the CDC showing that people who fall in the overweight category -- for the people that aren't familiar, CDC is Center for Disease Control -- people that fall in the "overweight" category live longer than people in the "normal" category, and people in the "moderately obese" category lived just as long as people in the "normal" category. The CDC published these results and then basically said, "But don't listen to us," da-da-da-da-da, for no good scientific reason, which they would not do about something else, which just shows you how much bias and issues there are in our society.
But the BMI selection has literally no scientific backing between deciding what category is overweight, what category is normal. There are no risk factors deciding those numbers. They were just decided indiscriminately by non-science people who had a vested interest in making money off of the drugs that they were selling. The people that made up the BMI scale literally said that they should not be used as diagnostic characteristics. So, that's how I feel about those.
Megan: Wow, that's a lot of good information. I actually wasn't aware of the history of how BMI came to be, so that's really good to know.
Keira: Yes.
Megan: Cool, so let's transition now into how you plan to implement some of these concepts of, say, Health at Every Size and integrative medicine into your future practice as a physician.
Keira: Okay.
Megan: Because right now, I don't know if we mentioned this, but Keira is in the process of applying to medical school, very exciting.
Keira: Yes, very exciting and very nerve-wracking. I think it's important to mention that I'm aware that my plans now are probably going to change somewhat by the time that I'm actually having a practice. I know that I have to put in my time. I'm not just going to graduate medical school and all of a sudden, have a private practice. I don't think my convictions are going to change, and I don't think my goals will -- my core beliefs, I don't think will change.
Megan: Yes, for sure.
Keira: With that disclaimer, I definitely don't want to weigh my patients because I know that's the thing that a lot of people dread. I know that's even a reason why a lot of people don't go to the doctor. So, that's a big thing for me. I really hope to do my residency at an integrative center. There are a lot more medical schools implementing integrative programs and things. I know UCLA has a Center for East and West Medicine which is really cool, and there are a lot of other ones.
I have a lot of different friends that are in different specialties in healthcare and so my dream is to one day co-found an integrative center where there would be physical therapists, there would be therapists, neuropsychologists, there would be yoga and people doing mindful movement, maybe Qigong kind of gentle nutrition, where people could come and get everything. It doesn't feel like, well, I have to go here for this and here for that. It feels like all of the treatments is working cohesively together rather than in disparate places.
[0:30:08]
Something else that's really important to me is that I would like to hopefully be successful that I am able to charge on a sliding scale. I know that right now, a lot of private entities or most private entities don't really accept insurance. Honestly, I'm hoping that as a result of everything going on right now, we might see some changes in how healthcare and insurance work so that maybe we could have more support for everybody so that healthcare is more accessible. I don't want to only be able to serve really rich people. So, yes, those are my dreams.
Megan: No, those are absolutely fantastic. I think that accessibility to this kind of healthcare that you're talking about is going to be really critical for the future of human health, so I really hope that you're able to find ways to do this as a physician. I think that's really important.
Also, I had a dream of putting together an integrative health center as well when I was on the track to med school years ago, so it will be fantastic if you could open something like that, that has professionals of all different disciplines accessible to people and also communicating together about patients.
It seems to me, in my experience, that interdisciplinary communication between medical professionals seems to somewhat of a lost art these days. If your integrative medical practice could have physicians communicating with each other about clients or patients, that's even better for the patient. I think they would be able to get healthier if they have that team approach.
Keira: Totally, and back to what we were saying about my hip, that's what allowed me to get better. I think that's what you guys have at Nourish Balance Thrive, if I'm correct, which is what made me so interested. I was like, that's what I want to do.
Megan: Well, I'm glad you reached out, and I'm glad we connected. One last thing I wanted to talk about or ask you was, some of these things that we talked about today are a little bit controversial with conventional medicine practitioners or people that have more of a conventional approach. It seems like a lot of the medical students that are coming up these days, or the premed students or people wanting to get into the health field are a little bit more open-minded, which is great.
Do you expect push back from your colleagues? If anything, I don't know if you have any thoughts on this, what do you plan to do about that, other than surrounding yourself with this team of people who seem to be like-minded, which I think is great?
When we first spoke, we talked about Physicians for Ancestral Health which is a great group of like-minded physicians and MDs and DOs, that Dr. Tommy Wood, Dr. Josh Turknett, many others are part of. Maybe surrounding yourself with people would be part of that plan to combat some negativity that comes in around your thoughts. Because while they are great thoughts, I think that you will get push back.
Keira: Yes, I think that's a great question. Yes, I have already experienced feedback even -- or push back in the application process. I was, quite frankly, even nervous to record a podcast with you because I was like, oh, my gosh, our medical school is going to be upset at my un-status quo thoughts.
Quite frankly, I have never been a person that fit neatly into a box. I've received push back in a lot of areas of my life, and that hasn't ever been a thing that I've been willing to let stop me, if that makes sense. So, I guess throughout medical school -- this is a good question.
Megan: Maybe it's one that you think about and come back on the podcast, we can talk about, but just if you have that now, I would love to hear any of them that you do have.
Keira: Yes, I think part of it is that there are going to, for sure, be ups and downs. For me, this relates a lot to double majoring in college because I -- I don't know if I mentioned this already in our conversation right now, but I double majored in Dance and Biology which is a really uncommon double major. A lot of advisers and a lot of people told me that that was something I couldn't do, and if I was going to do then I wouldn't be successful and X, Y and Z.
There were a lot of moments throughout my whole college career when I thought, what am I doing, whatever. That is one of the things that I am most proud of now, but it was really, really hard. So I think this is going to be the same thing. Part of it is going to be continuing to remind myself, why am I doing this, what am I passionate about, what am I hoping to achieve?
For me, listening to, honestly, podcasts of like-minded people and books and things that I find inspiring, and people that are farther along in the field, to counter the more negative messages that I'm also going to hear, of people telling me, "You can't do this, and you're so naive," or, "how silly of you to think that you can do this." I think also finding those supportive communities of people that are like-minded, like what you said Physicians for Ancestral Health, and focusing on those.
[0:35:35]
I think I also have a few mentors in my life actually, literally, who I just talked to, two days ago, because I was feeling really bogged down in the whole application process both in the medical field and not in the medical field, who really believe in me and see me as Keira, for lack of a better explanation. Just speaking with them is also very helpful in moments when I'm feeling really doubtful.
Megan: That's great. I would absolutely encourage you to continue to seek those mentorships and those relationships with people who are like-minded. So, be ready for the push back, but I have a lot of hope and confidence that you'll succeed.
Keira: Thanks, Megan.
Megan: Of course. Is there anything else that we missed that you'd like to touch on about anything at all? It could be related to anything we talked about, not related.
Keira: I don't think so, unless you have any questions for me that I didn't answer.
Megan: I don't think so. I think we've covered a lot of great things. It's been a really wonderful conversation. A large part of what I was hoping to do here, one was expose you to our listeners, and then two is to provide some inspiration to other premed students or individuals considering going into medicine through more of the conventional route; and show them that there are others who are passionate about looking at health from a different perspective, thinking more about preventing diseases before they manifest versus just treating them, and also desiring to change the system from within, one patient interaction at a time.
Thank you so much for taking the time to join me today, and hopefully we'll be hearing more from you and what you're doing in the years to come. I wish you the best of luck in medical school.
Keira: Thanks, Megan.
[0:37:19] End of Audio
© 2013-2024 nourishbalancethrive