114 - Is High-Tech Medicine Fueling Physician Burnout Without Improving Longevity?

Why are small islands with limited medical access ranking alongside high-tech nations in life expectancy? You’ll want to hear this.

As physicians, you’re constantly navigating stress, bureaucracy, and burnout. This episode continues our global longevity series and explores how radically different systems—from South Korea’s dense hospital network to French Polynesia’s traditional healing practices—contribute to long life spans. You’ll learn what really moves the needle when it comes to healthcare outcomes.

• Explore how a drop in infant mortality reshaped South Korea’s longevity statistics—and why that matters to population health.
  
  
• Gain perspective on how traditional medicine still plays a big role in remote areas like French Polynesia.
  
  
• Reflect on how different systems handle physician access, public health, and aging—and what that means for your own practice.

Press play to take a deeper dive into real-world strategies that promote longevity—insights you can use to reduce stress and build a practice that truly supports your well-being.

Discover how medical graduates, junior doctors, and young physicians can navigate residency training programs, surgical residency, and locum tenens to increase income, enjoy independent practice, decrease stress, achieve financial freedom, and retire early, while maintaining patient satisfaction and exploring physician side gigs to tackle medical school loans.

Transcript

Coach JPMD (00:00.46)
By the end of this episode, you should be challenged about the tools that we trust as physicians. Welcome to the Independent Physicians Blueprint with your host, Coach JPMD, that's me, where we help younger physicians decrease stress and increase income by transitioning from corporate to independent practices even without any business experience. In this episode, you'll learn how a drop in infant mortality reshaped South Korea's longevity statistics and why that matters to population health.

You'll also gain perspective on how traditional medicine still plays a big role in remote areas like French Polynesia. And we'll reflect on how different healthcare systems handle physician access, public health and aging and what that means for your own medical practice. Welcome back to another episode of the Independent Physicians Blueprint where we help you decrease your stress as physicians and generate wealth in this crazy world we're living in. And we're continuing our longevity series.

on the countries in the world that live longer than the rest of the global population. And we have covered a lot of countries, the top 10 countries. We started with Reunion, which is a French territory, Spain, Singapore, number eight, Italy, number seven, Australia, number six, Switzerland, number five. And today we're gonna talk about the French Polynesia, which...

I don't know if it's fair to even include them in this top 10, but this is what I'm using. I'm using worldometers that list these countries. So Reunion and French Polynesia are both overseas territories or overseas countries ruled by France. And the French Polynesia Islands is a group of islands. There's over a hundred islands in the South Pacific Ocean, East of Australia, South of Hawaii, West of Bolivia, North of Antarctica. And it is far.

So if you've ever heard of Bora Bora, you know that that's part of the French Polynesian islands as well as Tahiti, which I think is the largest on the French Polynesian island. And I know Bora Bora because a good buddy of mine, Dr. Joseph actually had his honeymoon out in Bora Bora. I know that must've been fun, but that's where French Polynesia is. There's not a lot of information on them online. Their life expectancy is 84.31 when you combine the male and female in that population.

Coach JPMD (02:23.188)
and 86.74 in females and 82.03 in males. Their population is about 278,786 as of 2022. So it is a small, small population. And I think with that, you will find that it's easier to afford or give healthcare to your population when you are a small island or a small country. the religious practices or the predominant religion is Christianity.

at 49%. 33 % are Catholics and 5 % are Mormons. Now in terms of mortality, very difficult to get the mortality data here. Heart disease, I believe, is the top cause of death amongst the people of French Polynesia. And similar to Reunion, the indigenous people of French Polynesia that can't get to healthcare,

there's not a hospital on every single island and the medical doctors are far and few between. So when I looked at some of the numbers, I saw that there were 369 doctors for the population in the French Polynesia islands. And many of the websites that I've researched say that they believe in herbal medicines, massage, cupping, and traditional medicines in the French Polynesia. that's something to...

take note of. There's no mortality data as we talked about and this place is far. So that's French Polynesia. I'm going to go straight to South Korea, number three. South Korea is the third country in our list of countries that have the longest lived populations. Where is South Korea? So South Korea, also known as the Republic of Korea, sits east of China, west of Japan, and of course, of North Korea.

Their population is 52 million people and their life expectancy on average combined is 84.53 versus women who live an average of 87.4 years and men as we've noted in every other country that we've discussed is 81.44. Now hospitals, my goodness, they have a lot of hospitals there. So, you know, we talk about hospitals per thousand.

Coach JPMD (04:49.294)
Korea sits at 12.8 hospitals per thousand as per 2021 data. And that's almost three times the amount of hospitals that Switzerland has for their population. Their religious practices, 51 % have no religion, 31 % are Christian and 17 % are Buddhist. In looking at the data from the World Health Organization, looks like ischemic heart disease ranks number one in terms of causes of death.

There's stroke number two, pneumonia, followed by bronchial or lung cancers, and self-harm came in at number five, I believe. And that's very interesting because that's the first time I've seen that, especially in a long-lived population. And then dementia is number six, and that was as of 2021. so COVID didn't make that list, even in the older data that the World Health Organization has. But what was interesting,

Probably the most interesting fact was the reason why there was an explosion in their life expectancy is because their infant mortality rate dropped significantly over the past several decades. And there were a lot of initiatives that were put in place. So the steep drop in the infant mortality rate caused the total population to actually live longer on average. So that is probably a contributing factor. that's the French Polynesia.

number four and South Korea number three. next week or in the next couple of weeks, we're going to try to round up this series and talk about Japan and Hong Kong. So we'll see you next week. 

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