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Surgeon Fateh Entabi discusses his article “A surgeon’s take on God, intelligence, and cosmic responsibility.” Fateh reflects on how the complexity of the human body inspired him to think more broadly about intelligence, consciousness, and the idea of God—not as a distant creator, but as an evolving intelligence embedded in the universe itself. He explains how this perspective shapes his sense of responsibility as both a physician and a person, drawing parallels between healthy cells in the body and ethical individuals in society. Fateh also explores how religious belief systems evolve, why adaptability is a sign of life, and how attunement—like in music or surgery—offers a model for living wisely and compassionately. Listeners will gain a thoughtful, practical framework for considering their place in a larger whole.

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Transcript

Kevin Pho: Hi. Welcome to the show. Subscribe at KevinMD.com/podcast. Today we welcome Fateh Entabi. He’s a surgeon. Today’s KevinMD article is “A surgeon’s take on God, intelligence, and cosmic responsibility.” Fateh, welcome to the show.

Fateh Entabi: Thank you. It’s an honor to be on your show. Thank you very much. My name is Fateh Entabi. I’m a general surgeon. I practice in the Central Valley of California. I have a private practice that I run myself, and most of the time, I have medical students with me. They come from a medical school close by that I’m affiliated with. I also have a few inventions and a medical device company that I run that sells my medical inventions.

Throughout my life, I was always interested in philosophy. As a teenager, I read a lot of books on philosophy and religion, and I was always looking to find the best ways to orient myself in the world. I found that philosophy is the way for me. Recently, my practice has been going through a lot of changes, and that forced me to rethink my principles as to how I respond to the changes that are constantly happening around me.

At the same time, AI is becoming very common. In every conversation, you hear about AI and how we can integrate it into medicine, diagnosis, and imaging. That got me thinking about intelligence in general and how AI is intelligent and we are intelligent, and then the system as a whole that I work with. For me, intelligence is more about how to adapt to the changing environment around us. That was something I had to do for myself as the environment around me was changing, and then I thought that’s what AI also does. Then I started thinking also about how animals or any living beings always adapt to changes, and that’s what allows them to survive.

I think that’s also true for systems: governments, companies, hospitals, and practices. All of those are systems that need to also evolve and adapt. By my definition of intelligence, all these are intelligent systems, and then the cosmos as a whole is intelligent when you think about it. Typically, we always connect intelligence with consciousness because we attribute intelligence to humans, and that’s always associated with the way we speak, how we process data, how smart we are, and how much memory we have. But I see that as a very narrow definition. Taking it more widely as just how we adapt to the environment would be a more inclusive and wider sense of intelligence.

Under that definition, we can include humans and other animals that adapt to the environment. I saw recently in the city of Chernobyl, after it was left for many decades after the nuclear disaster, how the forest is reclaiming the city. It’s repopulated now. It’s all green, and animals just got in. From that perspective, we see the whole cosmos as intelligent. Intelligence may represent the closest thing to what I consider God. We are part of this universe. It is very intelligent, and we are part of it. We’re not separate from it. Our intelligence is part of the overall intelligence.

As a surgeon, I deal with cancers and different cells in the body. I thought of how cancer cells are cells that just go out of the system. They do their own thing; they do not respond to the system around them. They overgrow where they should stop growing, and then they do their own thing. That got me thinking that eventually, the cancer cell leads to the death of its host if it’s not treated. I thought as a person, I’m part of this universe and I’m part of that intelligence, and I could be a good cell or a cancer cell where it just ends up causing more damage to itself and everybody around it. I just thought that it was a poetic way of looking at it, but it helps soothe me when I’m thinking about how I should be participating in the environment around me as it changes.

Kevin Pho: Give us an example of how this philosophical worldview that you just described to us and your perspective has soothed you, and how does that interact with your life as a surgeon?

Fateh Entabi: Recently, for example, the hospital where I do most of my surgeries stopped taking a certain type of insurance, and then I had to switch to a different hospital. When I went there, the people and the instruments were different. They’re not used to exactly how I practice. At the same time, in my private practice, the office I rent from was rented to other people, which forced me to change my schedule. All of a sudden, I found that my schedule was just very different, and it’s very frustrating. It made me start thinking that I want to complain, “This is not right. You’ve got to do something about it.”

Then I thought, “Where does that get me?” That most likely would just make me think more about the frustrating aspects of my life and get me to be more frustrated and angrier. Perhaps a more intelligent way would be to just adapt and go along with it because there’s really not that much else I could do besides getting upset and not being positive about it. That’s how I think that philosophy can help me in day-to-day problems.

Kevin Pho: Whenever medical students and residents rotate with you, do you ever share this philosophy to help them better cope with the sometimes difficult lives that they’re facing in medicine?

Fateh Entabi: I do. I do that. Sometimes they also bring other examples of philosophy. I am interested in Buddhist philosophy, a lot of Eastern philosophies, and psychology. Psychological techniques and meditation help a lot with coping with the stresses around us.

Kevin Pho: Has anything from the operating room or from your life as a surgeon influenced your philosophy?

Fateh Entabi: Yes, absolutely. Just seeing how the body works, how after a surgery or trauma, any insult to the body, how it heals itself. The more you explore into basic science and how all the different mechanisms, the chemical signals, the hormones, and the cells work. As we think in more detail about cells, the atoms are made of cells, and then subatomic particles, and then you can get into quantum physics. We don’t have enough science or evidence to study that, but in reality, it boils down to this: at the end of the day, we are part of the universe, and we’re made from the same substances that everything else is made out of. It all came from stars a long time ago.

Kevin Pho: One of the themes that I’m sensing is adaptability. Tell me about how we in medicine, physicians and medical students, all of us in medicine, how can we be more adaptable? What kind of advice or tips can you share with us?

Fateh Entabi: I would share that throughout my experiences, at the beginning of my career, I was more focused on getting information and techniques and just gathering all the instruments I need as a doctor. But in reality, when you go out to the real world, you are just a part of a larger system, a larger organization. You need to really understand it and understand how it works and how it functions in order for you to participate and not get too frustrated. It’s very easy to fall into thinking about yourself and how something doesn’t make sense and, “Why are they doing that? It makes absolutely no sense.”

But then we start learning why the administration is doing this and doing that and the reasoning behind it. You start understanding how it is an extremely complex system, like a big web that involves everything in the universe, really. Even what administration does in the hospital has to do with policies that have to do with the government of California. It has to do with the president, and why the president is doing that is related to other countries. Everything is really interconnected, and the more we understand that, I think the less frustrated we can be.

Kevin Pho: I think that’s a good point. By realizing that everything is interconnected, you start understanding some of the reasons why administration is doing some of the things that it does. Perhaps it makes it less of an adversarial relationship.

Fateh Entabi: Exactly right. It makes all the workflow a lot better. You’ll be more tolerant of things that you don’t understand immediately. You could be more patient and just try to understand. Always be curious about the environment around us to understand it before we fall into a snap judgment where we blame others or blame ourselves and get more frustrated.

Kevin Pho: In your article, you also write about music and the idea of attunement. How can music teach us about living ethically and intelligently? Talk more about that musical aspect.

Fateh Entabi: I played the bass; I used to play it with a band, and I love music. The thing about music is it’s not like our day-to-day, where we always have a goal like, “You’ve got to do it, you’ve got to finish it, you’ve got to get there.” A lot of times we are monotonous; we do the same thing over and over again. When you think about music, the beauty of it is the variation. If you watch a jazz player, I try to play jazz, but I’m not that good. But when you watch how they adapt, somebody makes a sound and plays a note, then you want to play another note that makes it sound good. The more you attune to that, the better the jazz is.

The best jazz musicians have the best music because of how they attune to the environment around them and what other people are playing. If we can take that mindset and think about it in life in general, where we want the environment to sound like jazz, and we are part of that, how can we play our notes so it sounds good? In a way, it’s about attunement. It’s not about just repeating the same thing. At the same time, there’s really no hurry. The best music doesn’t have to be very fast. It’s not about how fast it is or any particular obvious goal where you just focus so much on the goal, like, “I want to get this done, I’ve got to get it done,” rather than just living the process and really attuning to what’s going on around us. That’s where I find music helps me with that perspective.

Kevin Pho: You clearly have a longstanding interest in philosophy. For those physicians who are listening to you and may not have had a previous interest in philosophy but certainly want to become more in tune with themselves and the world around them, and they may be wrestling with questions about faith, science, and meaning, tell them where they can get started. What are some resources that you recommend?

Fateh Entabi: I would say that Buddhist philosophies, out of all the philosophies, resonate the most. I try to see it as a philosophy. It’s not so much about what many people think, that it’s about Buddha as a person or that we have to worship him. It’s not that. It’s more like what we call secular Buddhism. It has the same principles as Buddhism; they have some great principles for life and it has nothing to do with faith. It’s separate from faith.

Just exploring those ideas, like the source of our pain on a daily basis is really frustration. Why do we have frustration? It’s because we wish for something, and that thing that we wish for doesn’t happen, and that gets us frustrated. If we can be less attached to that idea and just be more open, then we’ll be less frustrated. We’ll be able to enjoy life more.

Kevin Pho: We’re talking to Fateh Entabi. He’s a general surgeon. Today’s KevinMD article is “A surgeon’s take on God, intelligence, and cosmic responsibility.” Fateh, why don’t we end with some take-home messages that you want to leave with the KevinMD audience?

Fateh Entabi: I would say always be curious about the environment you work in, and with that curiosity, try to understand the system that you’re part of and contribute well. Always ask yourself how you can make the system work better, and that serves you, serves the patients, and serves the system that you work in. Sometimes it can be frustrating on a personal level, but that’s the growth that we have to go through as we get older and hopefully more wise.

Kevin Pho: Well, thank you so much for sharing your perspective and insight, and thanks again for coming on the show.

Fateh Entabi: Thank you, sir.