Over a million intelligent American physicians are walking around in the medical practice environment today, patting themselves on the back while believing they have reached their ultimate success in medical practice. They have absolutely no idea that they have never come close to their optimal potential. It’s a tragedy that has been disregarded yet tolerated by medical school scholars and administrators for at least the last century.

What every physician should be asking themselves today, considering the increasing tsunami of burnout, decreasing net income, increasing government restrictions on medical practice, and medical fee restrictions, increasing attrition of physicians, and male college students that no longer are applying to medical schools, is paramount to discovering the cause of and solutions for their own problems in medical practice.

For diligent and smart physicians, the answer should be obvious but isn’t. The question that all physicians need to answer for themselves is:

“How is it possible that medical practice is only possible and successful if it can only survive within some kind of a business infrastructure?”

We all know that. Then what is missing in the formula for each physician’s success? First, we must recognize that all physicians in clinical medical practice are categorized into two entities—employed or independent. We know that employed physicians have all the financial, management, and marketing done for them. Private practice physicians are left to do it all themselves. And this uncovers what has been missing in the success formula. The second question that must be asked is:

“Why is it that about 50 percent of physicians in private medical practice have never been prepared with business education while in medical school that compensates them for their lack of business education?”

Are you thinking, like me, about the miserable circumstances that private physicians commonly face daily during their medical careers? And employed physicians work without those worries. Logic tells me that half of the independent physicians in our nation are being short-changed on their deserved business education that all medical schools in our nation have been forbidden to offer or provide for medical students.

Does that mean that employed physicians wouldn’t benefit from a business education as well? Certainly, they would. So, what happens to 10 to 15 percent of employed physicians who quit their HMO or other controlling medical entity annually and start a private practice?

Is this where all those physicians in this circumstance show up on the scoreboard of physicians losing their private practices for financial reasons? All of them are essentially business ignorant, like all the other physicians in private practice today.
If so, then about 65 percent of physicians today are business ignorant, trying to make a “go” of their practice.

“How is it that our medical school education system scholars continue to deny any responsibility whatsoever for providing a business education for all medical school students?”

This is certainly not the kind of educational responsibility I experienced back then. The fact is that such a business education is essential to the survival and success of every business that exists today. Worldwide business owners all agree that the principles of any type of business success require business management and marketing knowledge—which physicians in private medical practice today lack.

If you, as a physician, continue to remain “neutral” to such a destructive policy of not providing business education for all medical students, you will directly contribute to the destruction of private medical practice—called socialized medicine.

I envision, under the continuation of the medical school’s policy against business education, that there will be an increasing attrition of American physicians, a continued decrease in the quality of medical care and medical care by physicians, who can’t help but follow the dictated rules for practicing medicine that is now the cause of most all physicians scrambling to leave medicine and find outside medical jobs to increase income.

It is increasingly clear that the lack of business education is the primary cause of most of the serious problems physicians face today.

The lack of backup knowledge of business education ensures the continued destruction of private medical practice because physicians do not know how to make money—other than to see many more patients.

The weakness caused by the lack of business education has already proven how our government uses that to force physicians out of private practice and into employed practice. Our government prefers business-dumb physicians. And most physicians are complying.

Thinking that you have done a great job in medical practice without a business education has become the third myth in the medical profession.

Curtis G. Graham is a physician.