From a 2.6 GPA to Being a Plastic Surgeon: Dr. Richard J. Brown | The Premed Years Ep. 411

so i went to see the pre-med advisor georgia and i'll never forget he laughed at me and he was like uh you're a long shot buddy ricky welcome to the pre-med years thanks for joining me hey appreciate you having me yeah i i was i was gonna hang up on you when you told me you went to georgia but after you guys uh you did you win or lose you guys won this weekend luckily uh yeah they did yeah you pulled it out at the end yeah but i'm excited you guys will hopefully have a worse year than us so so i i figure i'll keep talking and maybe rub it in your face a little bit i wish you nothing but failure what um talk to me my favorite question to lead off these conversations is when did you first realize you wanted to be a physician i was a senior in college actually i was at georgia so i spent my first two years at syracuse incidentally and after two years at su i kind of got done with the lake effect snow and i was like all right this southern boy needs to head back to the warm weather so i cruised down back to georgia and i was going to be in a business guy i was pre-business and my dad owned a computer company incidentally selling computers to medical practices they were doing that stuff back in like the 80s um just more like not emr but just more automating practices so i'd always been kind of a science-minded person and i had a push-back moment um studying for an econ exam one night looking at supply and demand curves i was like uh is this gonna be the rest of my life because this sucks and uh and i literally just started soul searching in that one moment was like long story short volunteered in the hospital did a few things took some science classes and did really well and decided hey i think i'm gonna go to bed school how do you make that leap to go from i want to be in business to let me go volunteer in the hospital there has got to be some connection there because it's very easy to go this business thing doesn't work let me go look at anthropology like right why why go volunteer in a hospital you know it's weird so i grew up in macon georgia a small town in georgia before we moved to atlanta and the guy across the street was an ob gyn and so i always had kind of been around medicine in that respect and i think with my parents doing what they did i was always around doctors and i think i made sort of the science medicine connection and also just a love for people and um i don't know i'm trying to think about how i ended up volunteering i think i started what happened was really is i said to myself well maybe i'll go to pa school or do something you know something else in healthcare and i was like well let me just throw myself in and see what it's like so i volunteered in the hospital and at that point at georgia i think my gpa was like a 2-6 and i i was not a great student and and uh and i told that story on tick tock actually it's pretty funny that was one of my first posts and what happened saw you was was the post where you're in the or talking about the feedback that you got oh yeah you remember that yeah so i totally so i had an aha moment where i was like well let me take a science class and see what that's like and uh and let me volunteer in the hospital just to see what that's like and so i got an a and general chem one without really working that hard it was just something that resonated with me and then i think what grabbed me about the volunteering thing was i love people and i just enjoyed that interaction i was a patient transporter i just took people to ultrasound to people to the or wherever they need to go yeah what gave you that the audacity to go i have a 2.6 but i'm gonna go to medical school anyway you know this is a story in and of itself so i um i didn't care i went to see the pre-med advisor and i took another chem class and i got an a so i i built some confidence in myself that i was like all right i know i'm not not intelligent it was more of just i didn't really know what i wanted to do so i never really applied myself so i went to see the pre-med advisor georgia and i'll never forget he laughed at me and he was like uh you're a long shot buddy i don't think you're gonna get in i was like all right appreciate the support see you later so that was like one that was one motivating factor and then the second motivating factor was my my own father um rightfully so was like look you've always struggled in school like i don't think you know what you're up against like you know i know you're a smart guy but this is going to be really tough he never said don't do it i think those two things together made me like all right well now i'm definitely doing it yeah so i went for it it's such a common story that i hear from especially from non-traditional students or students like yourself who who realize very late in college that this is what you want and and you find yourself digging yourself out of a hole almost exclusively because you weren't interested in what you were studying you had no clue you you had no vision of what your life would look like and so you didn't apply yourself and as soon as you you had that kind of aha like oh this is what i want to do and then it's just like full steam ahead this is a piece of cake why do you think that is i i you know i feel like we are too young and thrown in to this whole scenario of go to college and know what you want to do you got to know what you want to do when you go to college like are you kidding me i mean it's just a debt for something yeah it's impossible exactly so i think that's what it is i think people go and you're not mature yet like how can you be mature when you're 19 years old and going to college to try to plan out the rest of your life so i don't know what the answer is but i think that's part of the problem is it's just hard to know what you like how did you navigate those waters i'm assuming you didn't go back to your pre-health advisor like i didn't go back to my pre-health advisor after she told me don't apply to medical school because you're a white male my grades were good i was just a white male so she told me that's funny i won't get in how did you navigate those waters i didn't care i honestly um i was just like look i know what i need to do to get there i had mapped it all out all the pre-med classes i needed to take and i kind of i went home i actually went home i drove home from athens which was like an hour and a half to atlanta and i sat down with my mom and i said listen here's what i want to do i had laid out how long it was going to take me to get through the pre-med classes and at syracuse i had taken a bunch of psych classes so i didn't really need that much to get my bachelor's of science in psychology so i took a few more psych classes and all the pre-med classes and i just laid it out to my mom i said here's what i got to do to get it to be able to apply and i just laid it all out and i just i don't know man i just never look back for me people are like what were you gonna do if you didn't get it i'm like there wasn't a chance i wasn't getting in it was my it was what was happening like as far as i was concerned it was happening so it sounded like you were naive but it served you well because unlike a lot of pre-meds these days and and you um i don't know how old you are but probably very similar age to me where we didn't have all of the websites and resources that we have now and so you you didn't know any better to go oh crap this is really hard you're just like whatever i'm gonna get in so yeah i mean first of all how old do you think i am oh man we're gonna play this game i'm gonna go 43. excellent turning 50 next month nice good job yeah so your question was what again how did i yeah i just i just went for it i mean you're right i was very naive i mean look i wasn't naive enough to know that i knew that people weren't gonna were getting in or there was a possibility that i wouldn't get accepted but i had planned to reapply and i had a plan laid out in case that didn't happen which i'm sure you you tell people to do that um you know i didn't know what i was gonna do i was to go get another degree or do something yeah just make it work whatever whatever it took i was good i was going to make it happen yeah how do you handle the scenario that a lot of a lot of students say that it was a lot easier to get in back then than now curious it depends on on define easy obviously there's more students applying now but there's also more medical schools the averages of the mcat are going up it seems like students are getting more and more competitive with the their gpa i i think it's just an awareness of everything right you you went in naive but we have so much information at our fingertips and so students at an earlier age are starting to realize what they need to do versus someone like myself it came to be junior year and i was the first one in my family to go to a four-year university and graduate and and and so i had no idea what the mcat was until my junior year or like a couple months before you're supposed to take it right before you take it yeah and i'm like i don't know and and so i think students are just more and more aware and they're preparing earlier and preparing better with with different and better test prep products out there and so i i don't think it's harder i think students are just more aware of everything going on and and making themselves better applicants but i think at the end of the day where students make it harder for themselves is they're focused on how to be a better applicant instead of just going and living their life and being the best person they can be and letting that show in their application dude that is such a great point so you know me from seeing but way back on my tic toc i love to support the pre-meds and all those people i i get 15 or 20 dms a week on my ig and probably half of those are from high school kids freshmens and seniors who are asking me what they need to do to get into plastic surgery and i am so unbelievably number one impressed that they even know and that they're asking those questions and you want to know what my reply to every single one of them is you need to do you right now stop worrying about how you're going to get in focus on just being in high school being a student enjoying your life and having a life because there's nothing that you can do right now that's going to position you that much better off than everyone else other than doing well in school and like being a well-rounded human and i try to tell them just go go volunteer at the hospital go do something i know it's hard right now but that that's my advice and i i like i feel like we always are pushing our kids to be so much earlier in the game that's scary it's not good talk about the the burnout factor i think you obviously seem like you're positive on being a physician with your career and your profession and how you're able to impact lives i talk to so many pre-med students who hear from other physicians like why do you want to be a doctor like you're you're silly don't do this go do something else right why why do you think there's so much negativity around medicine from physicians you know i just touched on this with a buddy of mine yesterday and he wants to talk about this on his podcast i you know you'll probably agree with me i think one of the problems in general medicine right now is that insurance companies have made it so unbelievably impossible to make money in medicine and you know the perception that all doctors are rich is we all know is not true yes i'm a plastic surgeon and i do well but i still do a lot of reconstructive work but back to the conversation is that i think part of the burnout is i think insurance companies have made it so hard to make money and we work so hard and we put our necks on the line medically from being sued that i think there's a lot of bitter physicians out there that just can't take it anymore because you have to work too hard for the dollar and it's just really really hard the pressure how much do you think potentially and being 10 years older than me the the difference between kind of where we are now with with admissions versus where we were 10 or 20 or even 30 years ago where a lot of the physicians who are out practicing probably were just super smart and were like i'm going to be a doctor because i'm smart and didn't really understand the empathy and compassion and patient care side of things and and that potentially takes a toll on them and burns them out absolutely i think that's 100 you know one of the things that i i feel like i pride myself on is my ability to communicate and talk to patients and it doesn't matter if i was a plastic surgeon or an oncologist or a pediatrician i just have that ability to communicate and i think that's one of those innate natural things that i have and i can see for the ones who don't have that it can be incredibly frustrating to try to communicate with patients right if you're just not that kind of a person and i you're probably right i i really think early on you know you could just say look i'm smart i must go to med school and that would fly but today i feel like the patient population is so much more tuned in to the doctor needing to actually care and have a meaningful conversation with them that if they don't find that they just go find someone else so you kind of have to have everything now i feel like let's go back to your pre-med journey a little bit more so naive going through this process i figured out i mapped it out uh you applied to medical school you get in piece of cake right nope what happened so so i took the mcat i finished mid-year 95 at georgia i had like probably about three or four months uh third quarter i didn't have to do anything we were in the quarter system so i started taking princeton review to prepare for the mcat and i was going to take the summer version at that point there was a summer version and then i think it took a fall version so i took the summer version and i got like on the old scoring system like a 25 or 26 and i was like all right well that's that's not going to fly um 27. yeah so i so i basically i had applied to and so i applied to schools but planned on retaking it and because i was a year behind in the process i had to get a job and work for a year in atlanta while i was going to apply so i retook it and got a 30 and i applied to schools and i was working as an orderly in the operating room in atlanta which is kind of where i got my love for surgery um and so what happened to me is i literally was getting rejected by every single school i applied to and um and i thought my story would resonate with them because i had a clear change in my trajectory um so what i did and this is what i encourage other people to do and if i would come back to this i have a cool story to tell you but i encourage people to call not be the annoying person but what i did was i literally came home from the hospital after a shift one day and i was like okay what can i do to maybe get some of these schools to give me an interview that haven't rejected me yet and so i literally just started calling admission offices and the chicago medical school which is where i ended up getting in there was a girl there that picked up the phone we started chatting like you and i are now and had a conversation i said hey listen here's my story didn't really know what i wanted to do i know i didn't have great grades but i ended up with like a 3 8 science gpa and brought my overall up to like a 3-0 um and so i told her my story and something with that resonated with her and she said you know what i i know everybody on the admissions committee so let me let me let me see if i can get you a phone interview and then if they like you they'll bring you in so i had a phone interview with the director of admissions and i got a letter a week later to come get an interview and a week after that i got an acceptance letter so i knew that if i could get in front of someone that that i could shine because that's where i'm good um and that's how it happened for me but had i not taken that step to kind of look out for myself i probably wouldn't have gotten in that year yeah i i am a huge fan of advocating for yourself i always talk about no nobody's going to advocate for you but they're not going to care if you advocate for yourself right if you do it the right way right you're not that annoying student going you have you looked yet have you looked at right yelling and calling every two seconds um and and it's i think it's an underutilized skill that that we don't teach enough these days to to reach out and really advocate for yourself i think uh the the kind of generation of helicopter parents our parents are the ones advocating for ourselves all the time even for me i i come from a little bit of that where my my mom set up one of my best shadowing experiences because i didn't get in i didn't have a lot of clinical experience in shadowing and i moved out here to colorado from from florida and she was just at her doctor's office one day going hey my son wants to be a doctor and he needs some shadowing can he shadow you and the doctor's like sure have him have him reach out to my office manager and so um that that definitely helped me a bunch but i think students definitely need to to realize that they can do that obviously doing it appropriately yeah it's easy to be annoying in that process and i i think you know for those that are watching this or thinking about to advocate for themselves i would say find something you find unique about yourself that's different and talk about it and for me it was my story um it wasn't me telling them why i thought that they should accept me or interview me because i'm such a great guy it was like look here's my journey i'm just looking for a shot like i just want to talk to somebody you know that's how i was yep i have a shirt i didn't wear one of one of my shirts is your story matters totally a huge huge advocate of telling your story talk about it from obviously right now during the pandemic shadowing clinical experiences are are basically non-existent but from from kind of pre-pandemic and post-pandemic talk about shadowing experiences obviously you being a physician a little bit more public facing i'm sure you get asked all the time to to have students shadow you what are good ways and bad ways that students reach out to you to really hopefully get in and shadow you um i don't see any bad ways most people are reaching out to me via social media they've either found me on instagram or tic tac um and they'll send me an email or a dm um i don't really have people calling my office so much it's mostly been social media has been the request for me and then there's um there's a do school in my town out here in the west valley and uh midwestern university and so i've i've had a couple of uh people that i've crossfitted with who've gone to school out there have said hey can i do a fourth year rotation with you so i easy street kind of a thing but no i mean honestly it's it's um it's social media i mean i i don't there's no bad way to reach out to me i if they call or email or or just dm me on social media i try to respond and the problem right now is you know with kobit it's impossible it's just it's so hard to bring outside people in which is really a shame yeah yeah which is why we're setting up this e-shadowing thing yeah it sounds cool our first one's tonight as we're recording this and we have almost 4 000 people registered to show up wow so people want it it's needed uh so we're gonna have fun with that yeah i'm gonna have to do it i think it'll be fun yeah yeah so talk about the transition to medical school right you talked earlier about not being the best student early on you realized what you wanted to do with your life you did better 3.8 science gpa did that success carry over into medical school or was that a whole new league for you uh it did it did in the respect that um it set me up for a moment where i said okay you're not stupid like you can you can do this nor do you have to be some unbelievable iq to do it it was a lot of elbow grease and hard work so i think what spilled over for me was i always had to work 10 times harder to get the same grade as some of my buddies who just kind of studied and got it and didn't study half as much so i think i realized early on that that was my that was my trip that was going to be my journey and so i accepted that and while a lot of my friends were in med school studying and done early and would go play and hang out i would just grind away in my apartment and i think that served me well because i knew that for me to get there that's what it was going to take was for me to put in a lot more effort than those guys and that's okay i mean that that i'm glad that i figured that out right so so we were we we didn't get grades i mean but i i passed everything and did great and um and i didn't kill tess and i didn't get killed on test i was always kind of upper middle or middle you know and i was okay with that yeah it's one of those one of those quotes i don't know if it was tebow that said this or someone else a famous florida gator of course teaver is is the hard work beats talent right and so yeah just grinding away and doing what you need to do which is something that that i didn't do well at i wasn't very good at delaying gratification uh in in my pre-med years during my uh medical school years obviously i was i was talented enough smart enough to get through it um but i probably would have been a lot more successful had i grinded as as you did um but then i probably wouldn't be here today i'd be in an operating room well do you mean you mean grade wise or just just grade wise i i spent a lot of time because i'm a huge tech nerd i spent a lot of time programming in medical school i wrote software and sold it and so just i've always been very kind of diverse in my interests and even in medical school i couldn't focus just on medicine i needed to do other things as well yeah talk about the the journey to actually picking a specialty you talked about kind of where you fell in love with the operating room as you were in between applications and waiting and stuff um talk about the the actual ending up as as you are now as a plastic surgeon yeah so for me um i went through all my third year rotations kind of with an open mind even though i kind of knew i wanted to be a surgeon i just didn't know what i wanted to do um and as i knocked off specialties um and we don't we didn't really get exposed to orthopedics or subspecialties it was general surgery so when i saw general surgery when i did general surgery i was like okay yeah surgery for sure is what i want to do i didn't know what i wanted to do so i applied for general surgery and ended up getting in in chicago at mount sinai in chicago which is my school was in chicago and um i spent three years in knife and gun club just trauma trauma trauma heavy trauma chest tubes central lines i mean you name it um and so northwestern would send over their general surgery residents to get their traumas because they were more of a certain academic type of a place so some of the plastics residents that were in their combined six-year program where they go straight into plastic surgery were over and uh became friends with him just being on the trauma service with them and they're like hey you know you should you should jump in the lab with us next year we have to go in after our third year and we're going to be in dr musto's lab he's the chairman of plastic surgery at northwestern wound healing scarring it'd be really fun i think you'd enjoy it and i was like you know what i need a break because three years of trauma was just getting rough and so i took a break and i jumped over in the lab with them and as i was in the lab i just started learning more and more about plastic surgery and everyone sees it as the cosmetic space but but we know the people who do it know it's a way deeper specialty than that from the reconstructive standpoint and i got to see some of that in trauma so i think at that research here i really was like okay i think maybe i want to do plastic surgery and uh but i was i was just three years deep and i said you know what i'm gonna finish general surgery because i've come this far why why not finish so i actually ended up matriculating and transferring over to northwestern because they had a couple residents that stayed in the lab another year and they had some openings in their fourth year general surgery class and i figured hey if i'm going to stay in general surgery it'd be nice to have that pedigree and do some surg not just trauma and then hey if i get into plastics cool so i applied and i think one of the things that helped me was um dr musto was a very loyal guy the chairman of plastic surgery and if you wrote papers he would go to bat for you and i wrote three or four papers while i was in his lab and i got it done and i kept my end of the bargain up and he wrote me some good recommendations that really helped me out when i applied and and i got into plastic surgery and that's how it happened i think a lot of students watching this will probably know plastics from like dr miami yeah and it's just it's bb all day long um you talked about reconstructive surgery first student who doesn't really understand what that entails talk about that for a minute yeah there's a very vast vastly deep side of plastic surgery that most people don't see from pediatric surgery craniofacial craniosynostosis those types of things cleft lips cleft palates to the adult reconstructive world which could extend from breast cancer reconstruction after mastectomies to patients and trauma patients with large defects so free flap microvascular reconstruction most people don't understand that or know about that where we take tissue from one part of the body with an artery and a vein and we move it up to your jaw because half of it got removed for cancer and under the microscope we hook up and we sew artery and veins together to reconstruct the jaw the face the leg bad fractures things like that i think that's the side that most people don't see and i think another neat side of it which i got to be heavily involved with out here being in arizona was most reconstruction so you know where um dermatologists would make a big hole in the face taking off the skin cancer and they'd send them over to me and go get it closed and i would do not world that available out there and the people who really don't do cosmetic surgery that have dedicated their life to reconstructive work and it's it's life-changing stuff yeah they don't they don't have the full context they just see the superficial side of it and and there is some of that obviously uh yeah but there's it's so much more yep what's your recommendation for for students out there who are potentially like yourself who who struggled early on didn't really know where they wanted to go didn't find their way and then now have and and probably are facing very similar feedback now that you face back then getting laughed at by their advisor being told good luck yeah you know i think there's a couple of important things for people to realize is that um number one i think that i try to counsel young kids to look in the mirror and start talking positively to themselves that's the first thing you can't you can't look yourself in the mirror and say i can't i won't i'll never and we all do that by the way we've all been through there i'm trying to help you with my experience of doing that you've got to learn how to turn those voices off number one and tell yourself i i can do this that's the first thing the second man of yet the word yet yes i'm a bad or i'm not a good student yet yes right exactly i agree 100 i think the second thing that's really important is for people to realize that everybody fails there's no one on planet earth that has not failed do you think bill gates succeeded in every single step of the way or jeff bezos all of those guys men and women fail and i think a lot of a lot of the kids i talk to today are i've get in my messages and my dm's i'm scared to fail and i'm like why you need to fail i think failing is important i think what happens after you fail is what's going to define you as a person are you going to let it get you down are you going to get back up and say okay what i do wrong and how can i figure out how to get it better so i would say start talking positively to yourself and be okay with failure and then clearly they have to have a backup plan you know like how many times you willing to apply to get to where you want to be you know some people apply three four five times and they stick it out and some people give up after two or one yeah um i i love all of the rejection stories i think most people know like the michael jordan was was rejected from his high school basketball team the oprah story i was reading a book with my six-year-old daughter last night about influential people in our history and reading about abraham lincoln he failed to to make it to the senate and he he failed the running for president four times before he actually became president and i was just like it's just failures all around and it that that doesn't define you unless you let it it's what you do after and it's it's so cliche to say well it's not how many times you get knocked down how many times you get get back up but it's just it's so true yeah it is they're all life lessons man i mean god we all have them i think that's part of the problem with social media today right we see all the superficial perfect life stuff and you don't see everything that's that we've ever seen that meme that's like the iceberg that's sticking above the water and above it you see money and success and all that stuff and then below the waters like hard work failure all that stuff you know social media is the same way you see the superficial success but you don't really realize that a lot of the people that are on there actually have worked really hard and failed a lot to get to where they are how can a student understand when they should give up oh man that is a great question um i think what happens is in your failure i think some of them probably decide and reflect a little bit that maybe this really isn't my calling um and i think if you feel that inside it's time to quit or if you feel if you feel that it's just not right i think people know inside of themselves when something's just not right for them and i've heard a lot of stories about people that didn't get into med school that were like thank god i didn't get in because they ended up doing this and that was really what i wanted to do so i think that stuff happens for a reason and i do believe there is a point where you have got to get on with your life you know like if you're not getting in three four five even six times there's a point where it's like look it's not your journey you know and maybe you could do something else around medicine and health care that's not being a doctor and still have meaningful impact you know there's so much that you can do so that would be my advice yeah that's a tough question it's it is a hard one because what do you tell them oh man um i i don't know if i tell them anything other than if i'm on a call with them i really try to just dig down deep into their motivations and trying to understand and and if their motivations are true and and are there are there then it's like okay well let's let's figure this out right what a good advisor should do let's figure out how we get you there whether it's to an international school and and then fighting to come back to the states um but i was on a call once with a student who was in tears if and we got to a point where i'm like if you could do anything right now what would it be she goes i would i'd be a vet i'm like then then why are you on this journey to medical school right and a lot of times right it's the parents behind this right pushing them to to medicine and so i think just so much reflection and self-awareness and and really being honest with yourself about what you want is is key yep i agree love that where can people find you on social media uh okay a couple places so on um instagram it's at dr richard j brown dr richard about i just got verified on friday i was like where did that come from it was crazy so weird i tried for like in the app like four or five times and they said no so see people rejection over and over and i gave up and i got it so and then on tick tock which is almost at a million now um it's it's i know it's the real tick tock doc i don't do so much on facebook but i'm on there we're going to be doing more and then i'm not active on twitter but it's the same dr richard j brown yeah tick-tock i i wanted to get into tik-tok and then the pandemic hit and i just i have no extra time for that and i just i want it i miss it i love tick tock it's really fun scroll all night long and stay up until two o'clock in the morning but doom scrolling as they call it i know totally well what grab what made my account take off was i got verified around 350k or something and that got me in touch with someone at tic toc to be in the creative program and i asked him one day i was like listen i've seen a couple of people show some surgery stuff and i thought that was like not okay to do and he was like give it a shot if he gets taken he's like you can't show nudity that's like part of the protocol but like if you want to show kids how to suture up an incision go for it if it gets taken down let's see what happens so i started doing like the behind the scenes grey's anatomy and the or stuff with my gopro and that that's really been successful it's been fun yeah are you wearing a pro on your head or on your chest where are you wearing it it's on my head during surgery yeah yeah it's awesome i love it man it's been really fun just showing kids how how do you change your gloves in the or how do we gown up how do we stuff like that you know and every now and then i'll zoom in close on a suture that's not gory on an incision and show them how to sew and things like that so the favorite one was was teaching teaching students to to clean up after yourself after you you scrub in did you see that scrub sink one yeah pick up your freaking scrub brushes people come on hopefully you didn't stage that and those are filthy surgeons no they were i literally walked out of the or this is this is how tick tock goes right like you walk out you don't plan anything i saw it i recorded it and i posted it and it did really well it's the ones that you plan out that just never do well yeah that's awesome so obviously dr pimple popper set the set the tone for showing the world these fun procedures and now she has her own tv show what's what's the future hold for you oh you know what it actually it's a great question because i have some really cool stuff planned so probably different than any other plastic surgeon i'll ever meet and that i am very much into health and wellness and i'm into holistic health and wellness and i am starting up a wellness and health program in my office that hopefully will be big in this town and eventually you know nationwide where we have a macronutrient coach i have a mental body image specialist psychologist a food prep program and a trainer who's helping my patients get ready to be healthy before surgery and if they don't need surgery when they're done with them then they can just move on so i'm really big into starting this kind of holistic health and wellness thing that actually i feel like will be my exit strategy from plastic surgery one day i i was you know i was saying to a surgeon the other day i don't want to be the guy sitting next to a surgeon that says i don't know what else i would do if i didn't operate i'm like there's nothing else that you would do not one thing you wouldn't do so for me it's going to be kind of parlaying into the health and wellness side of it because i really enjoy helping people be motivated to be more healthy how much of that do you think is is founded on your fitness journey versus potentially more from the cosmetic side of plastic surgery seeing patients come in wanting to change something about themselves potentially not getting that satisfaction after they get the nose that they want and the ears that they want or whatever it is and realizing that there's so much more to health and wanting to figure out other opportunities to serve them yeah it's been both so number one i exited out of plastic surgery training i was close to 200 pounds and i'd always been a high school athlete and pretty in shape so when i got out i lost about 20 or 30 pounds and then i found crossfit and started packing on muscle and so that was my journey so that was part of it the second part of it was realizing that a patient comes in who wants a tummy tuck and they still have all this visceral fat which for those of you who don't know what that is is the fat that surrounds your organs it's underneath your six-pack muscles inside the abdomen and they're bulging and they want a flat stomach and i look them in the face and i go listen i can do a tummy tuck until you're blue in the face and i can tighten up your muscles with sutures but you ain't gonna be flat because you got visceral fat and so you need to lose it you know abdominal liposuction yeah exactly so i'm like they're like well can you target that to lose it i'm like yeah it's called meal plan and move your body so that's really where this whole concept was born from was that i want patients to be able to number one get the lifestyle that they need in place before surgery so number one they can have a good result but number two so they can maintain that result for the rest of their life and not just yo-yo so that's kind of where that came from how much disservice do you think we we do our medical education system does to future patients because we don't teach a lot of nutrition and exercise in medical school it's huge man i mean i think that um as a society everyone's buying into these silly diets and silly plans that are money scheming journeys there's just there's no i don't know what to say it's the worst thing ever like we all know that diets don't work and i think we are doing a huge disservice because if we could educate people to realize that not only can you still eat cookies every now and then and not food shame or food restrict yourself you can also have the body that you want to live in which may not be a bean pool barbie right like i'm not saying that that's healthy they're healthy looks different for everybody but i think we're doing a huge disservice by not showing people that if you just learn how to nutritionally supply your body every day with good and some bad or some things we would call bad um and have that balance and that's where the problem is people yo-yo because they're always wanting the quick fix and they don't realize that it's a journey to keep it yeah you know a journey to get it in to keep it yeah as we wrap up here what are some final words of wisdom do you have for the student out there struggling on their journey wanting to be a future dr ricky yeah you know i tell them all um you gotta look in the mirror and you have to ask yourself this question do i 100 without any doubt want to be a doctor and take care of patients because i tell people if there's anything else that you could see yourself doing do that and the reason is because the journey is so hard that if you are not 100 into it up here when you do come across those tough times and medicines that medicine that's very difficult you will stumble you will fall and you will fail and it will be hard to get back up when it's not in your heart and it's not what you really want to do it's easy to just go i'm done i quit so i think if i could tell anybody one thing it's look in the mirror and do a lot of soul searching before you really decide to do this because it has to be in your gut what you want to do for the rest of your life

Channel: Medical School HQ

Views: 33,773

Keywords: premed, pre-med, pre med, premed success, success story, med school, medical school, med school success, med school low gpa, premed low gpa, low gpa, gpa, premed advice, premed years, medical school headquarters, ryan gray, medicalschoolhq, premeds, applying to med school, low gpa med school, low gpa med school success stories, 2.6 gpa, plastic surgery, become a plastic surgeon, plastic surgeon, how to become a plastic surgeon, dr. richard brown, dr. brown, ricky brown, doctor

Id: LpjdL24Hnj4

Length: 38min 29sec (2309 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 19 2020