Do you remember that “aha” moment  in medical school when you realized you were meant to start your own medical practice?  Maybe it was while pre-rounding (was that really a thing?!?) at 5 am on pediatric surgery, or perhaps during a riveting grand rounds extolling the virtues of prescribing more opioids to your patients (that one didn’t age well).  Yeah, me neither.  I do remember being told anything from  “It’s impossible to hang a shingle anymore” to “private practice is dead”.  And of course I believed it.  I was also told I’d make an excellent neurologist, but I found out they told everyone that.  During my fellowship I learned that one of the fellows the year before me went out and started an ophthalmology practice from scratch.  My attending and amazing mentor Don Doughman said something to the effect of “It’s not easy to do, but if anyone can it’s Joe!”.  Maybe it was possible but it didn’t seem like the path for a guy who was known as “Not Matt, the other cornea fellow”.  After joining two different private practices and never really feeling like I was practicing exactly the way I wanted the idea started to grow.  Maybe I didn’t dream of starting a practice from day one, but I do think that most doctors think about it from time to time.  And while there are great online communities to help you once you start, there just isn’t much out there to get you over that first hump.  I hope in some way this blog will help give someone the encouragement to consider starting or at least joining a like-minded private practice.  Perhaps be a catalyst…(see what I did there?).  

Think practalyst is a bad name?  It could have been worse.  At one point it was going to be called Practology.  See what I mean?  Maybe I would call it “How I Built this Practice”.  An homage to Guy Raz’s NPR podcast that always leaves me wanting to start a new business and very much inspired this endeavor.  But it’s bad enough to have a terrible name, even worse to get sued for it.  Frontwards, taking inspiration from one of my favorite songs by 90s low-fi heroes Pavement was another idea very early on.  Until I remembered that, like all Pavement songs, I had only a vague (and likely incorrect) idea of what it might be about.  So, Practalyst it is.  But if you haven’t listened to Pavement in a bit, do yourself a favor and take a few minutes.