Blood, Sweat and Smears - A Machaon Diagnostics Podcast
Blood, Sweat and Smears is a podcast focused on thrombosis and hemostasis and is hosted by Benign Hematologist, Dr. Brad Lewis. Dr. Lewis shares some of his knowledge built over decades of experience in hematology and laboratory testing.
Blood, Sweat and Smears - A Machaon Diagnostics Podcast
5 Questions with Dr. Lara Patriquin
5 Questions is a new series of Blood, Sweat and Smears, hosted by our Senior Director, Bjorn Stromsness, who asks 5 questions to physicians in and around the disease areas we work in.
In this episode, we are joined by Dr. Lara Patriquin, a radiologist at the University of Utah and a speaker and coach for Thinking2Point0.
Hello and welcome to Blood, Sweat, and Smears, your Macheon Diagnostics podcast with tag team hosts, including our medical director, Dr. Brad Lewis, senior director, Bjorn Stromsnes, that's me, and other guest hosts. We hope you find these podcasts interesting and informative. Thank you for listening, and away we go. Hi, my name is Bjorn, continuing our series Five Questions, posing five questions to physicians in and around the disease areas we work in. Today, we are going to get a look under the hood, or at least we're going to talk about it, because our guest is Dr. Laura Patrick-Quinn, a radiologist with the University of Utah, but also a speaker and coach with Thinking 2.0. And we at Mechion Diagnostics recently brought in Dr. Patrick-Quinn to talk to our leadership team about dealing with the stresses of everyday life and providing stat terms turnaround times for critically ill patients around the country. It can get stressful. So let's take a deep breath and thanks for joining us today, Dr. Patrick Nguyen.
SPEAKER_01:It's my pleasure. Thank you.
SPEAKER_00:Absolutely. All right. So five questions and let's get into it. Our first question is medicine can be in many situations, a very stressful profession. Is there one thing you'd champion for physicians who need to lower their stress levels? What What might that be?
SPEAKER_01:So yeah, thank you for this great question. I can only really speak to my experience in this regard. I went into medicine thinking it was going to make me happy. So a little bit of background on me. Never voted most likely to succeed in high school. And mostly I think because I had a pretty anxious mind and my mind was always super busy, full of judgments of myself, full of judgments of others, rarely in the present moment. And how I experienced that as a young person was I did everything to get out of my mind And so I started drinking and doing some drugs and high risk behaviors in high school, mostly in retrospect, I think just to get out of this anxious mind that I was carrying around with me. And so then I had a kind of come to Jesus moment when I realized that I couldn't have a successful life based on the grades that I was getting in high school and also noticing the types of people I was hanging out with and just seeing that my life wasn't going in the expected direction. And so I decided that moment It's time to get my life together. And being from a fairly educated family, my mom was also a radiologist, decided to pursue medicine. And so I worked really hard to get my grades up and to do all the prerequisites and all the work that goes into getting into medical school. And I was lucky enough to get myself into medical school at McGill University in Montreal, where I'm from. And I really thought that that was going to be my path to happiness. I really thought, you know, doctors are honorable, focused people. They're certainly not interested in drinking too much and doing crazy things. They were autonomous and they were just good people. And I just thought that that training was going to make me that kind of person. And so I met my husband first day of medical school and we got married at the end of medical school. And we realized about 13 years later, when we finally finished all of this medical training, that we were significantly less happy on at that point, even though we had on the outside, everything anybody would ever want, right? Physicians may We were making good money. We had two beautiful children, a beautiful home, you know, all the trappings. And from the outside, really just looked fantastic. And from the inside, clearly less happy than we were when we first met. And so I realized at that point, what is it? Why can you take two people and give them everything they want and make them less happy? And so it got me into really focusing on how do we become happy in this life? And what can I do mostly just to get out of my own anxiety and my own pretty significant unhappiness at that point. And so at that point, I saw studies demonstrating that meditation could change the structure and the function of our brains in a way that was possible to see by MRI, right? And so here I am, a radiologist, totally stressed out and pretty skeptical. You know, medicine does teach us to be very conservative and skeptical in terms of new modalities and new ideas. And so I never really had a particular particular propensity for meditation. I was seriously agnostic and no interest in sort of the spiritual life. But when I saw these imaging studies, I really had to see that this was certainly fantastic science and if not a real sign that it was time to be different, show up differently in the world and cultivate an inner life, cultivate a mind that could work for me. And these studies really made me start to think, well, maybe I can be happy in this certain situation by changing how I relate to my thoughts and feelings, which is really what meditation is about. Meditation is about developing a mind that keeps you in the present moment, but it also teaches you how to work with your thoughts and your feelings. Before that time, I assumed that everything I thought was true. You know, everybody keeps saying I'm so smart, so everything I think is true. And I also had developed a pretty common aversion to my feelings, right? And what meditation does, not just trains your mind, but it makes you kind of want to understand how this mind is creating both thoughts and feelings. The quality of our life depends on the quality of our thoughts and feelings, but we rarely go, as we were saying, under the hood to look at this operating system that's delivering us these thoughts and feelings. There's a lot of bugs in that program and the meditative life and dedicating myself into sort of developing a model of the mind that made more sense to me, that was more functional in terms of how I could learn to be happy in this world was really the most important thing for me. And so I would recommend that to anybody who's not feeling like they have the happiness that they want, finding a model of how the mind works, really getting under the hood and then practicing in particular meditation is I think the greatest entry pre-level practice and developing, you know, consecrating it just a few moments every day and having a better understanding of the mind and also practicing meditation, which can really really help well-being
SPEAKER_00:great fantastic the second question my wife is actually a physician and a champion at compartmentalization when you have grief at work say if you lose a patient which happens should you feel all the feels or do you need to wear some sort of emotional armor and understand that's a spectrum really so where on that spectrum would you think is the sweet spot for preserving your mental health, but also staying human?
SPEAKER_01:That is such a rich question and something that I've been thinking a lot. And for a long time, I did think it was a spectrum, but I'd like to bring a nuance to this idea. First of all, one of the first most important things I've realized is that not all thoughts are created equal. There's really two systems in our minds that produce the thoughts that we experience on a day-to-day basis. The majority of the thoughts that we have, just sit for 10 minutes, you'll start to notice all of these thoughts that show up in your mind. They're often very repetitive, very mechanical. People say same shit, different day. They're referring to the series of thoughts and feelings that they're having on that day. But many of these thoughts and feelings that we have, I'd say almost most of them, are created by our subconscious mind. Our subconscious mind is a repository of everything that's ever happened to us, in particular, the negative events that we've had, right? So certainly, extreme case, when a kid is traumatized, it'll affect the quality of their thoughts and feelings on a day-to-day basis and often until they die. We have all of these events happening in our life that are trapped in our subconscious mind, and they're trapped because we've repressed the associated emotion. We have not allowed ourself to feel the emotion associated with that event. And instead, what we Westerners tend to do is we go into our heads and try to figure them out. So with a child, right, you notice the child, and I'm not going to say that raising kids is easy. It's really very hard. But when a child is in his or her thrive mind, when they're really themselves within the present moment, the child is dialing because they're so present, they're so connected. Now, when a child then feels a negative emotion, such as their diapers is dirty or they're cold or they're hungry, that emotion comes in and goes out, right? The emotion is allowed to have its normal life and the child might express it very intensely and cry and throw a tantrum, but the child is really feeling his feelings. As we age and as certain things happen to us, we start to feel that our feelings are not acceptable. I like to say that all of our unhappiness comes out of the thoughts we have about our feelings we don't just allow our feelings to come and go in the space of awareness because what are we at the end of the day we are that awareness in which all of these thoughts and feelings are happening and instead we have this judgment about feelings that then puts us into our heads we go into our heads and we think i shouldn't be having this feeling so what's the next thought well that person shouldn't have died and because why did that person die well it's because i did something wrong and then the mind just goes on and on and on and we tell stories and stories and stories And these stories are mostly based on the fact that we're unable to completely connect with our feelings and let them go in that space of awareness. And this is where practice is so important. A great example, I have a friend at the University of Utah who's a chaplain. She's a Buddhist chaplain there. And all day long, she's with patients dying. She's rarely does something go right. She's dealing with patients who are dying, terrible situations, burn victims, cancer victims. I mean, it's just, you name it. And to see how she processes that is such an inspiration for me because she has to have a tremendous understanding of how mine works. And she has to be able to work with her thoughts and her feelings in a way that allows her to show up for work the next day. I mean, there's some real consequences to her not having her mind right. And so when she talks about it, she says, yeah, I feel it. I'm in the room with that patient and I will cry. I will have tears. I will feel the weight of it. She says, but when I leave the room, for the most part, I leave it there because the feeling has had its life and now it's out of me. I don't hold on to it. We hold on to our feelings through our thoughts, right? So it's this interplay between thoughts and feelings that makes the feeling stuck. And then we say, oh, I can't go into that feeling. We're really not plagued by our feelings. We're plagued by the thoughts about our feelings. And that thought can prolong the feeling sometimes for a lifetime. So what I would say to that question in summary is, yes, absolutely. In a perfect mind physiological system, feelings are allowed to come and go in the space of awareness. That doesn't mean that we're sitting there crying or we're yelling at people because we're feeling tremendous anger, but it does mean that we're feeling our anger without judgment. We're feeling our grief without judgment. We're feeling our jealousy without judgment. And I recognize that over my lifetime, my issues haven't been, let's take jealousy, for instance, such an interesting emotion for me, one that I was plagued with for a long time. It wasn't that I was jealous and it wasn't the thoughts behind all that. It was how was I treating my jealousy? Was jealousy allowed to come and go in the space of awareness? Or was I then judging myself for being jealous, being upset with the person that was making me jealous, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, right? So it's not the emotion itself. It's how are we treating that emotion in particular, what are our thoughts about that emotion that allow us, that then stop the process of us being able to have the feelings come and go. And then we just end up repressing these feelings even more. And the subconscious mind becomes busier and busier. Our minds become more and more activated, which makes us say, oh no, I'm going to repress this feeling even more. And then we get in this conundrum where we're just constantly suppressing all of these events in the subconscious mind. And that's why we're stressed. You know, that's why we wake up and we're sometimes in terror or why we can't even just sit at our desk without getting on our phones or why we can't enjoy the present moment is that subconscious mind has become so, so pressurized given our lack of capacity to meet our feelings in an honest way.
SPEAKER_00:So you work as a physician, as a radiologist, and you work as a speaker and a coach on wellness and stress and managing what life throws at you. So on the radiology side, what's the best part of being a radiologist? We don't work with a lot of radiologists. No, no, no. You know,
SPEAKER_01:radiology is great. I know that when I'm out doing this intense work of stress reduction and talking about the mind, it gets real fast, you know, and as you've already seen, I have so many ideas about this and it brings up so much emotion and And coming home and doing some radiology is just lovely because radiology is a beautifully contained space. We have these really lovely reading rooms with people monitoring our phone calls, really created a very quiet, lovely space where we can really focus on these studies. Just that space itself is wonderful to be able to sit, and I teach residents and medical students, and sit and talk about medicine from the perspective of imaging. Imaging is amazing. the diagnoses that we've been able to make and the technology behind it, it's mind boggling, you know, and there's always something new. And our involvement in patient care is real. And we get phone calls saying, you know, hey, doc, should I send him to the OR? And that's it. Yes, you should. Or no, you shouldn't. And we bring so much into diagnosis and therapy and have such a strong role. But at the same time, we've been given such a beautiful environment that's actually kind of lowered your drama than a lot of professions. So it's just a, it's just a lovely intellectual quiet space that exercises a whole different part of my life and which I'm really grateful for.
SPEAKER_00:And I can see that the, the other side, and this is actually question four, that other side that the speaker, the coach, the getting in and poking all the emotions and talking about them and that being a speaker and coaches seems very, very different. So what's the best part of that part of your two-pronged career? Oh,
SPEAKER_01:I've a pretty wrong life. I mean, I'm not going to lie. It excites me so much. I've been so lucky. I go all over US and Canada now 40, 45 times a year. And so it's just fabulous. The people I've met has been tremendous. And so I'm a peer advisory group for CEOs and entrepreneurs. So that's part of my business is talking to them. And so I walk into a room and there's 14 different CEOs and entrepreneurs with tremendous variety of backgrounds. Sometimes they're engineers, some Sometimes they're scientists, sometimes they're HR, sometimes they're HVAC, you know, but they're out there doing tremendous things with tremendous courage. These people all have tremendous courage. And so to talk to them and to bring this notion of how the mind works and have these intimate conversations kind of in short order is amazing. I just, you know, when I walked into Makey Island and met so many, I mean, the brilliance in that room was just something and it's just so inspiring. And so it just feels like such a privilege to be able to, to be open and have really meaningful conversations with really interesting and bright people. It just feels like I've won the lottery in that respect.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, maybe you did. I think I did.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I know I did.
SPEAKER_00:Our fifth question here is, should we be seeking happiness or should we be seeking contentment? And in what ways are those two things the same or different? Just an easy one, a softball for
SPEAKER_01:you. I know a great thing is I feel like given an exam and you're like, yeah, I studied this one. I'm good on this question. And so this question has plagued me for a long time. I used to think the choice was a life of occasional happiness or a life of contentment, right? There was an or there where the first one would be, yeah, you get these happinesses every now and again and they're intense and they're great and they're fun. Or you can choose B where you have like a two out of 10 happiness but more consistent level. Like that's how I was framing it. I love steak. I grew up on a farm. So the first seeking happiness would be like, oh, you get to have steak twice a week or contentment would be, oh yeah, you get tofu at every meal. And that's how I sort of felt it was. And I totally changed my understanding of this from some teachings that just blew this all right up. And that's this one, this notion that there's only one happiness. There's only one happiness. The happiness you get when the outside world lines up for you, such as when you get a new job or someone you've asked out on a date wants to go out with you or your child gets into a good school, whatever it is that makes you happy. That happiness is reflective of the happiness of who you truly are. Peace and happiness is the nature of our being. We are our factory settings. This operating system that we're born with right from day one is one of peace and happiness And that's why we're seeking peace and happiness. If our true nature was jealousy and anger, we'd be seeking jealousy and anger. I have a lot of jealousy and anger, but I'm not seeking it, right? And so when we get what we want, for a moment, the voice in our head that says, this life isn't enough, you're not doing it well enough because you're not feeling joy, all of those thoughts of insufficiency, all of those thoughts of scarcity go away, quiet down, because what you wanted, you got. Now, we know that that never, ever translates to durable, enduring happiness, right? Like every group I ask, have you closed a deal? Have you met a person? Have you bought a car that's given you enduring happiness and nobody's ever been able to find something from the outside that gives them enduring happiness? But the outside happiness is when we get that to line up, it's pointing us to our true happiness. Now, we can get that true happiness nature by working with our minds, by developing the capacity to allow emotions to come and go, by getting out of our heads, and by letting go of all of this accumulated garbage that we have in our subconscious minds, right? This is what spiritual people call, quote, letting go, right? So by learning this capacity of letting go, staying in the present moment, allowing feelings to come and go, not going into our heads, this skill set, we can tap into that innate happiness of who we truly are on a pretty consistent basis. And I have myself and my husband, I've got an N of two in this experiment to really demonstrate that. I lived with near constant anxiety, depression, or just that feeling of like, meh, life isn't anything great for a long time. And once I started working with my mind, I noticed periods of feeling tremendous connection, tremendous joy, tremendous awe, respect, love for life. Even when I was washing the dishes or doing something that otherwise wouldn't have excited me, it is possible to tap into our true nature of who we truly are through practice. And the amazing thing is that right now, it's actually, in a sense, never been easier, right? So I opened my YouTube and all of these teachers who figured this stuff out are there and ready to give you those keys, often for free, on a YouTube video, right? There's people out there who really understand how the mind works and how to work with it to live in a very consistent feeling of joy and peace, even when outward circumstances are difficult. And I understand outward circumstances are difficult. And in medicine, outward circumstances are often difficult. And that's why I would say that the system that would make you happy is your innate factory setting, right? We are joy and happiness on the inside and love and connection on the outside. And so once I started understanding that, then this notion of contentment versus happiness went away, which was great because it's not how it actually works. And so say, absolutely, you're not going to get away from this desire for happiness because this desire for happiness is synonymous with discovering who you truly are. It's synonymous with coming home. right? So, you know, people say, oh, enough happiness. I would say, yes, continue this dogged, dogged desire for happiness, but understand, completely understand that it comes as an inside job. It doesn't come from an external thing. It doesn't come from you becoming better. It doesn't come from you losing weight or you finally getting your act together or you finally being organized and all these other external things we think are going to do it, right? And medicine, it's probably like that in science too. It's really very much like, oh, I'll be happy when I get my life together. And even though our lives are together in so many ways, the mind doesn't get that. The mind will actually never deliver you that happiness. So yes, a convoluted answer. An
SPEAKER_00:answer all the same. I do think I would be happier if I could get rid of 10 pounds though. We'll see. We'll see. You
SPEAKER_01:know what? I'll tell you what, you know, I've had chances in my times in my life where I've been 40 pounds heavier than I am now. And noticing that really the inner level of contentment hasn't changed specifically 10 pounds. I wish let's lose 10 pounds of our subconscious mind is what I would say to that. right? Let's lose the stuff.
SPEAKER_00:Let's lose these faulty
SPEAKER_01:understandings of who we think we are.
SPEAKER_00:The way it would work is if I was a little lighter, my knee would hurt less when I did more activity. And the activity is actually the thing that gives me the happiness. Yeah,
SPEAKER_01:absolutely.
SPEAKER_00:It's a roundabout way. That's right.
SPEAKER_01:That's right. And also just noticing what are those things that also do that for you, right? So maybe your first step into this is, yeah, I feel happier in nature. I'm going to go into nature three times a week. I feel happier when I do yoga. I'm going to do yoga three times a week right for sure absolutely those kinds of external things but they're helping us in the in the way that they're changing how our minds work they're not saying oh gold star bjorn you lost 10 pounds right
SPEAKER_00:right yeah yeah all right so if you are keeping score at home that is five questions and so we get to our bonus question which is what is something you would recommend
SPEAKER_01:I think to me, some of the biggest gifts I've ever gotten were the names of teachers that have helped me. And so I listen to a teacher by the name of Rupert Spira every day. He's amazing. Michael Singer, another treasure, American-based teacher. Byron Katie, the work teachings of Lester Levinson. Nathier Ricard, just different teachers. And I would find one of these teachers and just listen to what they have to say and really take that in, really be open to the possibility that some people have cracked the code on the mind and they have some amazing things to teach us.
SPEAKER_00:Fantastic. So that concludes the podcast. Thank you very much for your time and your insights and your thoughts. And merci bien pour
SPEAKER_01:tout. De rien, de rien. A la prochaine. All right, thank you. Thank you.
SPEAKER_00:That's it for us here at Blood, Sweat& Smears, a podcast produced by Métion Diagnostics. You're a reference to Thank you for listening. And if you have a question or comment or there's a topic you'd like Dr. Lewis to speak to, please send us an email to blood, sweat, and smears at machiondiagnostics.com. That's M-A-C-H-A-O-N diagnostics.com. You can follow Machion at Twitter at MachionDX. Be sure to subscribe to stay in the know, share this podcast with clinicians you think might appreciate it. And we hope you'll join us next time. next time here at Blood Sweat and Smears.