When I decided to leave a stable career in IT for the uncertainty of medicine, it wasn’t because acupuncture sounded exotic or because I wanted to play doctor. It was because I was broken—physically, emotionally, spiritually—and I was desperate for something real.
Like a lot of us, I didn’t enter this profession because it was the smart financial choice. I entered it because I was searching for healing. The irony? Those first few years were some of the least “healed” of my life. I was piss broke, hustling patients out of a rented room in New York, convinced half the time that I’d made a colossal mistake.
But the cracks in my life—the pain, the burnout, the mess—turned out to be the very foundation of my practice today.
The Night Everything Shifted
One memory still feels like a turning point. I was living in a tiny apartment with a roommate who partied harder than he worked. One summer night, I woke up to the smoke alarm blaring. The place was full of smoke because he had passed out while cooking ramen. There I was—naked, broke, standing on a coffee table in a cloud of smoke trying to stop the smoke detector—realizing that if I didn’t get my life together, my career (and maybe my health) was going to burn down too.
It wasn’t just about the apartment. That night forced me to admit I was living without direction, waiting for success to fall into my lap. I knew then I had to do the work of figuring out who I actually was as a practitioner.
Finding My North Star
That brought me back to something I had learned years earlier in the “Dungeon Dojo,” a hot, musty basement classroom where one of my teachers first introduced us to the practice vision exercise. The point was simple: close your eyes and imagine, in detail, the practice you want. What it looks like, feels like, smells like. The kind of patients you treat. The pace of your days.
At the time, I thought it was a fluffy visualization exercise. Years later, I realized it was my North Star. The problem was, I had ignored it. I had been chasing “me too cars”—copying what other practitioners were doing, wasting thousands on PR firms, and listening to “coaches coaching coaches” instead of asking myself what I actually wanted.
When I finally went back to that vision, something clicked. My authentic practice wasn’t about chasing every new trend. It was about integrity. It was about pain medicine, orthopedics, and helping people who had been failed by other systems. It was about being real with patients, not selling them hopium.
Building on My Own Healing
Here’s the part that surprised me: my own wounds became my credibility. Patients didn’t just see a clinician. They saw someone who had been through despair, who had doubted himself, who had clawed his way back toward health. That built trust faster than any marketing campaign ever could.
Key Takeaway
If you’re struggling right now—burned out, broke, or doubting yourself—don’t hide that story. Use it. Your healing journey is the blueprint for your practice.
Patients don’t want perfect practitioners. They want authentic ones. And the more you align your practice with your true North Star, the more it stops feeling like work—and starts feeling like purpose.
