Ep 1 - Let’s Take the “Hey” Road Together as Dr. Daniel Hey Introduces Listeners to his Perspective on “All Things” Related to Medicine, Life, and Whatever Else

On this pilot episode, Dr. Daniel Hey introduces listeners to The Hey Road podcast. The title is a play on words of Dr. Daniel’s last name, pronounced “Hi”.  Medicine, according to Dr. Hey, is one of the great arts of humanity as it has a very noble tradition that a lot of folks don’t really know enough about. Dr. Hey’s goal is to share his 30,000-foot view of life, the universe, and everything else.  

Transcript

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Well, my name is Daniel high and I appreciate my listeners giving me a chance to share my experience and perspectives as a physician. This is my first podcast that I've ever done. So it's quite a exciting and a little scary thing for me. I'll just start off with I went to medical school in my home state, where I grew up of the university of Mississippi in Jackson, Mississippi in the 1990s. And then I did my internship in residency at a community based family practice program in Lynchburg, Virginia, through the university of Virginia. Over the years, I've been privileged to work in a lot of different medical settings, both private and public. I've worked in urgent care settings. I've worked in large hospital systems. I've worked for the state and the federal government. I've also worked in a small private practice, a large private practice group. I've even done solo practice for four years, which was a whole another experience that was deeply educational. I've enjoyed practicing with addiction medicine. I've worked in nursing homes. I've gotten to do hospital medicine. I've served as a sleep specialist and director of a sleep lab, which was really enjoyable. And I've gotten to do a few other things over the years, including helping at free clinics, got to serve as a summer camp doctor for a few years and also have done some medical missions. Certainly looking forward to doing My goal here is not to blow you away with studies or the latest data or the LA latest medical opinions. But really I want to give you what I call my 30,000 foot view of maybe life, the universe and everything, not to put too much of a grand plan on it, but I'm a physician. And so a lot of the things that I look at in life are viewed through a medical lens. I've been practicing medicine for over 20 years in a lot of different settings. And so I feel like that's given me an opportunity to serve other people. It's given me a chance to see a lot of life hear from a lot of different people, in a lot of different areas of life, a lot of different businesses and roles, life situations seen a lot of suffering, seen a lot of joy. And I look forward to sharing some of my perspectives with you, my listeners. And we'll just see where this goes in the future. I feel like that medicine is one of the great arts of humanity. It has a very noble tradition, and I'd like to share some of that with you all and, and let's grow together. So I'll just say that the name of my podcast is the high road. And of course that's a little bit of a play on words because my last name is, is high. And it's spelled H E Y it's pronounced hi, not hay, which is what it looks like. So we're calling it the high road because hopefully we'll take a high road with how we see truth and how we search for helpful things together. But also because I love metaphors. And for those of you who do bless me with more than one podcast listen, you're gonna hear a lot of metaphors from me. I love quotes from wise. People you'll hear me put a lot of those in my show. And so back to the road metaphor my logo mentions about roads that travel onto road and, and cut off and branch into other places. And so to me traveling on a road means that you're seeking some path in the future that maybe you haven't gone to yet, but you're anticipating it. I think another metaphor for my show is gonna be the metaphor of a cup of water coming out of a stream or a river. My particular cup, as I said earlier, is, is my experience as a doctor, as a, a parent and father and husband in a lot of other roles that a lot of you also would have. To me, this, the metaphor is the river of truth. And so I reach my particular cup in the river and hold it out to you to, to take a, a sip from it. And hopefully you'll find something that's nourishing and refreshing and, and and helpful to you. It's just my particular cup that might not be what suits you. Some people need to hear from a different source. So that's not an issue of of my importance or, or not. It's really about whether we're absorbing what we can from what life and the world has to teach us. So that's two of metaphors right off the bat. So let me just tell you a little bit about myself. My most important role is as a husband, as I mentioned earlier to my wife of almost 30 years and raised two kids who are now young adults, and it's fun to watch them grow up and, and challenge me on some things that I needed to to learn about. And I love the outdoors. I love anything is active, anything that's in the woods, anything that involves movement, mostly running at this point in my life. I enjoy my family tremendously. I am interested in humanities and science relationship between fields of study like medicine, the arts culture, sociology I'm planning on going to a lot of places in this podcast. I hope that you all will help me to explore more. I hope that you'll ask me questions. I hope that you'll make comments. I hope that you'll call me out when I'm in a direction that's not supportable. So I'm looking forward to, to hearing what other people have to say. I'm excited about doing some interviews in the near future. I have some guests that I have in mind that can enrich us people that I've worked with over the years thought leaders in different areas of, of life, alternative medicine other colleagues, et cetera. So here's here we go with the first quote as I said, I love quotes and Isaac Newton, who was a great scientist in the 1700s, who was the guy who invented the reflecting telescope. He proposed a new theory of light and color. It said that he discovered calculus, although this other guy found it at the same time, his name was Leibniz. And so that's kind of a debate in science about who discovered calculus, but let's just say he at least discovered it at the same time as another guy, which is incredible developed the three laws of motion law of universal gravitation. This guy was amazing, amazing scientist, maybe one of the greatest ever. And yet this guy, here's a quote from him about humility in finding truth. He said, I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself, I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the and now, and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary. What's the great ocean of truth. They all undiscovered before me. So what I like about this is that he's saying that humility is so important. It's essential. And I think as we consider medicine, there's a lot of different roles that doctors have taken over the years. And I want to talk some more about that in my second podcast, but I would say that when I first went into medicine, I was very, very excited about the science part of medicine, very excited about how we could order a test or we could prescribe a pill or we could give a shot. And and that was pretty cool. But over the years, I've really shifted, maybe not away from that, but towards including a broader understanding of I would say that as I've been at this for a longer period of time, in one sense, I'm less impressed with science. Science does a, a good job as a tool to help us with some things, but it can't give us a sense of meaning or purpose in our work. It's only a tool. It's a way of finding truth. I would say that as we think about what people really need in a modern age, like now, where we have perhaps the wealthiest society that's ever existed in human history, there's something that's missing from our lives. There's a lot of sorrow and grief and depression. There's a lot of struggle with meaning for suffering. There's a lot of struggle with even meaning in joy and pleasure. We have access to technologies, but also just enjoyable things that previous societies would not have even been able to imagine. My wife and I went out to eat this weekend more than once, which is incredible to think that that's even an option. We ate Jamaican food. One night, we ate Chinese food another night. And just the thought of that being a possibility is incredible. And yet we all sort of struggle still with, well, what does all of this mean? And how are we finding meaning and purpose? So to pivot back to the question of medicine, it's true that medicine does a lot of things for people that can help relieve suffering. It can help prolong life, but ultimately it cannot give you purpose in life or meaning in life. And I think it's important to realize that as doctors, we have a, we ultimately have a 100% failure rate with all of our patients. They all die. We have a total loss of our patients eventually. So when you hear a, a medication or a, or a treatment say, oh, we saved this many lives. It's not really true. We delayed the death, which is a great thing. It might be that we changed what the person eventually died from, but ultimately we have a 100% failure rate. So it can't be that the purpose of medicine is just to arbitrarily extend life or reduce suffering. And that's not enough. So I would suggest that as we think about medicine or what, what has, what has changed in my mind is to think of medicine as one more way of caring for other people and loving other people, medicine itself. In my understanding now is a tool. It's a really wonderful tool as anybody who has been cured from cancer can attest as anybody who has had a child survive that would've died even 50 years ago. It's incredible what this means, but I would suggest that there's something more incredible behind that. And I would humbly suggest that that is, is love, is a chance to love people in a different way. I think that as a physician, we get to be a witness to people suffering, and it may be that in a previous era that was even more possible than it is now, back before we had antibiotics, vaccinations, technology, cat scans, all of these things. A lot of times what a doctor did was he would literally sit beside a patient and watch them suffer. And sometimes it would be for hours or days. In fact, even now we have a term called watchful waiting, which is still a management strategy for conditions that we're either not sure what they are or they haven't developed yet, or we're not sure what the future holds for the diagnosis. And I think that that being present with, or being a witness to suffering is something that's very important for physicians to return to. I think that technology can distract us from that purpose. I would say that there's an opportunity to think about the resources that are spent on caring for another person. Certainly we hear a lot nowadays about the cost of healthcare is just devastating to a lot of people's finances and to society at large, we're spending certainly above the double digit number percentage of GDP on healthcare. And we can talk about that some more in the future. I have some thoughts on that in a different podcast is that the implications of how we spend our money as a society on healthcare. But a story that struck me as meaningful that I read years ago was where archeologist found a skeleton of a person who had died however many eons ago. And when they looked at the skeleton, they could see that the person had healed from a broken hip. And there was an article written by the archeologist about what this meant in practical terms for that patient to have healed from a broken hip. When you consider some previous time where people were struggling with having enough food or having enough water, having enough resources to just stay alive through winter, the thought of having a person in your family or community who literally could not walk, who could not work, who could not care for himself or herself could not carry himself. If there was a need to move or could not defend himself, if there was an attack from an enemy or an animal, the implication of this is that somebody, or, or probably more than one person spent a lot of energy and care taking care of this person who was useless in one sense, which is just a phenomenal thing to consider that that is an expression of love. It's an expression of choosing to spend resources on a person who could not return the gift, at least not in the short term. And I think that that's something to remember about medicine, but also in other areas of life that we have roles in, which is that medicine is a way of spending resources sometimes on people who will never be able to repay that debt. And the fact that we have medicine as a, as an art and a science is a expression of, of love, I think at its best. And I think sometimes we forget that or we get pulled away by the, the glitter and glitz of technology. So as we think about this person that was found with the healed, broken hip and the obvious evidence that that person received, what was essentially medical care for his time, and, and that person was able to be healed. It rolls right into the issue of what do we call medicine, medical ethics, and those sorts of things. There's a lot of good lessons from history that, again, I want to talk about in a future podcast, but Hippocrates is considered the father of modern medicine. And he was an ancient Greek physician who really codified and wrote down and organized a lot of the principles that we use. Now, when we think about what does it mean to be a doctor versus a sorcerer versus literally a murderer? Hippocrates was the person who for instance said that it would be wrong to kill your patient. If an enemy of your patient happened to pay you more money than your patient. And we would look at that nowadays and think that's crazy that that would ever be a conversation. And yet, historically it was that happened presumably in the past. And so Hippocrates was one of the people who said, Hey, this needs to change. I want us to do better. Some of you may have heard of the Hippocratic oath, which comes down to us today in different forms. But really when you think about medical ethics, it comes down to pretty basic things. We can certainly get distracted with the role of technology or feeding tubes or ventilators, or certainly distribution of healthcare resources in a way that's equitable or just, but really it comes down to food, shelter, water, and love, which are basic human rights. And medicine is one more way that we contribute those things to people. And of course, we can have a, a huge debate as all societies have about what's the best way that we should get that to people who should that come from, should that come from the government? Should that come from a family? Should that come from a community? We can have that conversation certainly. And again, that's a topic for a future podcast, but it is still a basic birthright. And certainly all of the religious traditions affirm this, my own tradition. Jesus said that the basic tenant of the faith is that you love God and you love your neighbor. And certainly other faiths have similar ideas and we can spend the rest of our lives and the rest of human history, figuring out how to do that better. We can discuss what is loving. We can discuss what is harmful and what is helpful when that conversation goes on. But the underlying principle is the same. So I appreciate that my listeners have stuck it out here with me this far with my first podcast. And I have to confess there's a little bit of, of what I would call imposter syndrome, which isn't also a topic for another discussion on another day, but it's something that not just medicine deals with, but other fields as well. And it's where you feel like maybe we don't know what we're doing here. <Laugh>, but I'm hopeful with the process. And I hope that you all will walk with me through that process and hope that what I have to say will be helpful to you encouraging to you. I hope that it brings unity. I hope that it sheds the light of truth on not just medicine, but the areas that medicine touches on. And I want to end this opening podcast with a return to the conversation about compassion and give you a quote from Henri Nouwen, who's one of my favorite writers, and this is what he said. Joy is hidden and compassion. The word compassion literally means to suffer with. It seems quite unlikely that suffering with another person would bring joy yet. Being with a person in pain, offering simple presence to someone in despair, sharing with a friend times of confusion and uncertainty, such experiences can bring us deep joy, not happiness, not excitement, not great satisfaction, but the quiet joy of being there for someone else and living in deep solidarity with our brothers and sisters and this human family. Often, this is a solidarity in weakness in brokenness, in woundedness, but it leads us to the center of joy, which is sharing our humanity with others. So thank you for your time and attention. I look forward to hearing from you, and I hope that I'll be able to speak to you again in the future with the next podcast.