The Skills Medicine Still Can’t Automate | Dr. John Oberg, DSW

You can do everything “right” in healthcare and still feel like you’re missing the point. That’s the tension we discuss with Dr John Oberg, a clinician, entrepreneur, and behavioral science thinker who has worked across medicine, business, and AI. We talk about the trap of chasing knowledge and productivity without building the skills that matter: clear thinking, real connection, and the ability to meet people where they are.

Dr Oberg shares the story behind Priscina Health and why chronic disease outcomes improve when you redesign care around behavior, access, and agency. We examine AI in healthcare. AI agents can take on repetitive work and information-heavy tasks, but tools still require critical thinking, judgment, and empathy. We connect that to longevity and burnout, including the idea of eustress vs distress and the importance of exercising your brain and emotions the way you exercise muscle. And finally, we wrap with tangible ways to build community through mentorship and LinkedIn, because isolation is not a career strategy.

If you want a career in medicine that’s effective, human, and resilient, hit subscribe, share this with a friend who’s in training, and leave a review with the skill you’re working on most right now.

To connect with our guest John Oberg: Website | Linked In | Instagram | Podcast

Transcript

A Different Path To Success

Ashley Love 0:00

What if the thing you've been told will make you a better clinician is not the thing that will actually sustain you? Dr. John Oberg has worked across medicine, business, behavior, and AI. And what he's learned is this if you keep chasing knowledge without learning how to think, connect, and meet people where they are, you may look successful and still miss what matters most. If you're a pre-health student or early clinician, you've probably been told to focus on grades, research, productivity, and the next step. You've done that. But here's a different, deeper skill set. No one is really teaching you. And in this episode, we will unpack what that actually looks like and how it leads to meaningful success in medicine. Welcome to Shadow Me Next, a podcast where I take you into and behind the scenes of the medical world to provide you with a deeper understanding of the human side of medicine. I'm Ashley, a physician assistant, medical editor, clinical preceptor, and the creator of Shadow Me Next. I invite you to join me as we take a conversational and personal look into the lives and minds of leaders in medicine. Dr. Oberg, thank you so much for joining us on Shadow Me Next today. You have created this absolutely incredible resource specifically for people with chronic disease. And we are going to talk about that, but we are also going to talk about so many other things that are really interesting hot topics. Real interesting hot topics, a little bit that you shared with me so far. So thanks for being here and thank you for joining us.

Dr. John Oberg, DSW 1:29

Yeah, thanks for having me. I can't, I can't I have no idea where we're going, but I'm excited to go.

Ashley Love 1:34

It's a blind drive, but I'm driving. So don't you worry, you're in good hands. Um, let's first talk about your journey into medicine. I would love to hear about what first drew you to the profession, how you decided on your role in medicine. Yeah. Um, maybe start there for us.

Reversing Type 2 Diabetes Fast

Dr. John Oberg, DSW 1:51

So I think I joke though. I started in medicine when I was eight years old. My mom was running a medical practice. My grandfather was a surgeon, and I got sick and had to stay home from school, and I had to go to the office and file charts. And so, like, I was like, oh, getting sick and staying home from school sucks. So I don't want to do that anymore. And like by the time I was like, when I was 12, there was no HIPAA. I was like processing x-rays and like watching the film dry. My hand was in chemicals that probably would like today be so against the law. And I'm like looking at people's x-rays with the doctors, like, like there's no HIPAA at all, right? So that was my start in medicine. I don't think that was probably the best start to medicine. Uh, but I was pre-med in college and I got pretty turned off. Uh I was I was a on the bench biologist at uh I was working in an HIV lab and had a pretty bad experience, the lab director, the where um there's things going in the lab where somebody else was messing with somebody else's experiment, and I called it out and they were like, so what? And I was like, you know, I'm not gonna do that anymore. So I went I went into business and decided like I'll I study biology for a bit. I really wanted to go and I took so I took a detour into the business world and I started running companies and I started starting companies as a serial entrepreneur, and uh and then I got into a place where I was consulting back into the healthcare world on the business side of things. And then all of this was based in like psychology and you know, how do you go through change management and all these types of things? So I was I was pretty deep into like um organizational psychology, and then then my mother-in-law got sick and with type 2 diabetes and had a really bad experience with a really good doctor, frankly. So the doctor wasn't the bad experience, the system was the bad experience. And so the doctor was frustrated. You've probably experienced this. The patient, my mother-in-law, was was pretty unhappy. And so I said, okay, I'm gonna go back and get my doctorate at USC and I'm gonna solve this type 2 diabetes problem. And everyone's like, that's cute. Type 2 diabetes has been a problem for a while. You can come try to get a doctorate that, you know, just so you're aware, we've been working on this for a long time. And then in our first pilot study, we reversed diabetes in 49 out of 50 patients in 12 weeks. And in our second study, that's not yet published. We're in the process of publishing now, we took uh 79 patients with an average A1C of 11, a minimum A1C of nine, and reduced that into the low sevens within less than six months. Took 30% of our patients off of insulin within six months. Like just ridiculous results.

Ashley Love 4:11

That's amazing. I want to I want to tap into those numbers real quick too, because most people, well, first people might say, What's an A1C? Right. And then second, they might say, well, what's a normal A1C? So define those values for us real quick.

Dr. John Oberg, DSW 4:23

Hemoglobin A1C is measuring how much um glycation is happening for your red blood cells in your body. And so in a normal healthy body, it's below 6.5 for most adults. If it's above 6.5, you have diabetes, right? And so it's generally tracking your average blood sugar over the last 90 days close enough, right? And so if you're above 6.5, you have diabetes. If you're you know under 6.5, you might have prediabetes. If you're under six, you're pretty healthy. And so uh, you know, when you've got a seven or an eight, you're in pretty bad shape. And so in our first study, we had an average A1C of 9.6. And then if you can drop that A1PC percentage from like 9.6 to 8.6 or from 6.5 to 5.5, one percentage point in a year, you've got a billion-dollar drug. We generally drop A1C by one and a half points per month.

Ashley Love 5:08

Outrageous. Outrage. And this is not this is not necessarily with drugs. I mean, people are gonna say, yeah, they must be on GLP1s or GIPs or any of that stuff. You're not using necessarily using that. You're using something in totally, totally different, which we'll dive into. I don't want to tease it too much.

Dr. John Oberg, DSW 5:23

Yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah, yeah.

Pivoting Careers Without Closing Doors

Ashley Love 5:24

Yes, and yes, and before we get too far though, um uh filing charts. This is this is gonna be another great segue, right? So once upon a time when we were dipping our hands into you know actual chemicals to process actual film of x-rays, once upon a time we had paper charts and we had to file them. And it's a great conversation I just had recently with one of my medical assistants. And he said, Ash, what did you do before you guys just had electronic health records, EHRs or EMRs, electronic medical records? And I said, Well, we had stacks and stacks and stacks of filing cabinets, and you'd have to go and pull the charts. Um, and it's just so interesting because I think it really highlights your career in medicine from when you started. Now we're we're, you know, we're joking about it. You're you were eight years old. I was a medical assistant myself when I was filing charts, not a practicing clinician, but to something we're gonna talk about, which is AI healthcare solutions. And this is brand new, right? So we have you've traversed this incredible journey really in healthcare to to see some impressive advancements, and I'm sure some um some pretty miserable fails as well along the way, right? Um it'll be a really interesting conversation. Like I said, I do, I do want to tease it just a little bit. But um but I'd like to I'd like to first talk about your transition in college from working in that HIV lab, having a bad experience, and deciding that it would be an appropriate time to pivot. And then you did find huge success as a businessman as well. Let's speak directly to our students right now who are maybe in a similar boat, right? They have this dream of healthcare and they think um something has happened. I'm having to make a big pivot. I'm really scared. Was it hard for you to make that change?

Dr. John Oberg, DSW 7:06

For me, I've always tried to like keep the right doors open. And so it's like, what and I never try to like make decisions that will close lots of doors. So it's like, I think to my and early in my career, I had some mentors who are like, what skills do you need to build to open doors? And so those skills could be, you know, clinical skills, they could be business skills, they could be people skills, which are really underrated in today's world with AI happening. Those people skills I think are gonna be more important as we go forward. So I think, you know, if so, what I try to do is, and I take my kids through an exercise that, like my my children, like in 10 years, what do you think you want to be doing? Okay, I promise you're wrong, no big deal. What are the skills that you generally have to develop to go in that direction? And let's pick one or two, right? And let's just pick one or two skills. And so sometimes it's about, you know, I like to talk to them about learning how to learn. Like, do you know how to be a good learner? And then learning how to connect with people, because those two skills I think are gonna be the most valuable in the next 10 years for people, is learning how to be a good learner and then learning how to be a connector, like how to connect with people at a human level. I think those are gonna be two of the most valuable personal and professional skills going forward. That's my social worker talking.

Ashley Love 8:17

I thank you, social worker talking, because that's exactly what we need to hear right now, especially people going into medicine. You know, we're already having conversations about what elements, and I'm just talking about the medical world here right now. What elements of medicine is AI going to replace? You know, these are real conversations. I'd imagine, as a student right now, going, well, you know, is am I gonna have a job? Am I gonna have a job when I get out of school? You know, is this something that I should even be considering? So these people's skills, you know, I think they they call them soft skills um now, but it's just they're going to become very, very not soft skills here pretty soon. They're gonna be distinguishing skills for certain people.

Dr. John Oberg, DSW 8:53

So funny story about that. Hard skills and soft skills were defined by the military a long time ago. And finance used to be considered a soft skill because you couldn't touch it.

Ashley Love 9:03

Are you serious?

Dr. John Oberg, DSW 9:04

Yeah. I did not know. No, hold on. I read that on the internet. I didn't fact check it with all of my scientific libraries, but it makes sense, right? And so I think I think soft skills, you know, one of my favorite stories to tell people is not a true story. It's a fictional story that I made up, but it's a good story. I tell people that if I wanted to give my wife an iPhone for Christmas because she wants that, and my daughter wants the same iPhone, if it were true, which it's not, that my daughter wanted me to wrap a present and tie the bow myself, and my wife felt like the wrapping paper was bad for the environment, don't use it at all. And I gave them each other's present, bad soft skills, they'd both be angry at me for giving them exactly what they wanted. Right. Right? That's so and so it's like, yeah, so so it's like I've got to be like soft skills are the ability to package a message in a way that someone's able to receive it, right? Like that's so anyway, I can go geek and geek out about that forever.

Ashley Love 9:58

Oh, well, I love that. I think that's fantastic. And we could do a whole TED talk, which you have done before, but we can do a whole TED talk on that exact topic. And you know, maybe we will, maybe we'll have to circle back and do that one day. But um HIV lab in college, you know, there is um, there's a lot of questions right now about research. And if we want to go to med school, a lot of times you need research. If you want to go to PA school, you may not necessarily need research. Did you find in your experience, aside from the bad experience, was research really formative for you? I mean, was it, did you did you feel like it was necessary, necessary step for you to take?

Dr. John Oberg, DSW 10:35

Here's what I think is great about research. And I think the same thing can be true for like engineering. It taught me problem solving. It gave me some early mental models about how to approach a problem objectively and then um how to challenge assumptions and be okay with bad assumptions. I think sometimes today, uh, when people get things wrong, they sometimes is um this sense of shame or blame or guilt along with a bad decision versus, hey, the way we move the scientific world forward is we make a null hypothesis and then we test it to try to disprove it. And so failure is a part of the process. It's like, and so you get this, it's you don't tie up the outcome with your identity psychologically, which is really, really important. So I think that you can get that in the hard sciences. I think you can get that in engineering. I think you can get that in some of the liberal arts too, if it's done and taught very well. I do think that it's probably systemically harder to get in those other disciplines than it is to get in the hard sciences because you can iterate so quickly or in engineering where you iterate so quickly. So I had to take classes in physics and in calculus and then you know, all these classes that everyone who's listening has to take too. And you guys are all taken those same classes and probably liked them as much as I did. But I learned a lot from it. And I think that learning is the important part.

Ashley Love 11:51

You are dropping so many incredible, just gold nuggets here. Failure is a part of the process. You are absolutely right. And, you know, to walk around all day and say, well, I haven't made a single mistake, it probably means, well, you haven't tried a single thing that was new, right? I mean, you haven't tested it.

Dr. John Oberg, DSW 12:06

Well, that is a mistake. Like that's the mistake. Like, like, what have you learned? Like, like, and and and the key, you know, my mom, my mom passed away, but she was so great in so many ways. And she said to me at one point, she said, you know, I tried to make sure as you got older that I kept you away from the cliffs, but I let you take on more and more of the larger potholes. And so I think that's such a great way of letting people learn. And so when I instruct people in the college classroom, what I try to do is keep them away from the cliffs and learn how to identify the cliffs, but let them navigate the potholes through experiences so they can learn experientially.

Research Mindsets And Learning Through Failure

What AI Means For Healthcare Work

Ashley Love 12:37

And that builds resilience, right? I mean, there's no better way to be tested than to experience those potholes, to experience those, those major kind of upheavals where you say, whoa, that didn't feel good. That wasn't right. We need to go ahead and navigate around that next time. Absolutely incredible. Okay, let's talk about AI and healthcare because I'm very, very excited to chat about this with you. Can you give us a snapshot for our for our pre-health students and our clinicians and our clinicians? Can you give us a snapshot of what AI healthcare solutions, what does that even mean? And why do we need to be interested in that?

Dr. John Oberg, DSW 13:13

We're using AI in lots of places. In fact, there's a large company called Salesforce.com that has 135,000 companies using their platform. We were the first company in the entire world to roll out two of their specific AI agents because of the way that we handle AI. And we were really fortunate to be able to work with them as a partner and do that. And so I think, you know, so we use AI a little bit on the patient-facing side, a lot on the clinician-facing side, a lot on the administrator side. AI is really great for taking highly repetitive tasks and um helping them, or tasks that require massive amounts of information and making them happen better, faster, or cheaper. And so I tell CEOs of organizations like, if you're not thinking about AI agents as a part of your organizational chart going forward, that's probably not a good idea. And if you're an executive in a company who doesn't understand how to deploy AI onto your organizational chart, you're probably going to be at a competitive disadvantage. In the same way that people who didn't adopt personal computers were at a disadvantage to people who did. Or people who didn't adopt the internet were a disadvantage to people who did. Or before that, people who didn't adopt calculators were to disadvantage, right? Like, so we go back to that medical practice where I was filing charts. There were people on typewriters taking dictation machines and like transcribing notes from doctors' dictation all day long. That was their entire job. So that job doesn't exist anymore. And so there are changes in how people, what jobs people do and how they do it. And that's just, I mean, if you look at sociology over the last, let's call it 10, 20,000 years, change is a part of what we're meant to do. Like that's just the evolutionary nature of a society. And so we're in a place right now where we're gonna have some inflection points. And so again, what I try to help my family see is like, what does the future look like and how do we get ready for that? And I think embracing AI in the same way that you embrace a calculator or a personal computer, but that means you still have to learn how to critically think. Because if you just take information from a calculator and you don't recognize when you missed a keystroke, your calculator is gonna be wrong because you missed a keystroke, right? Or if you take a computer and just start typing, like so. I think there's like these are tools, not human replacements today.

Ashley Love 15:22

And honestly, I would love for you to kind of reframe that a little bit in your expertise, which is with chronic disease, right? So if we are not using our brain, if we're not using our critical thinking for a long time, chronically, oh what I mean, reframe that for us. What what's what is that gonna look like?

Dr. John Oberg, DSW 15:40

Well, let's just take the the words youth stress and distress. Like those are two words that don't often get used on on two sides of a coin, but youth stress, e-u-s-t-r-e-s-s, youth stress is positive stress that builds you. Distress is something that breaks you down. And so if you use that analog in the muscles, we know that we have hypertrophy and atrophy, muscles that we build because we've lifted weights and atrophy that goes away, or we can have distress in muscles where we tear a muscle because we've overused it. Well, that same thing exists emotionally, that same thing exists cognitively. And I don't know that we have all the same measures we do with muscles in those areas, but we're learning that the analogs are pretty true. And so, you know, if you stop working cognitively, you tend to decline. And that's why people tend to die, give or take, five years after retirement, broad scale generalization. But if you stop working your brain, you tend to pass away, and that's not a good thing. And emotionally, the same thing. Like if you don't engage emotionally with youth stress and distress, you're gonna lose some of your ability to engage with things emotionally. Physically, we know that's true. Like any of the functional medicine, and like you can look at any of those parts of the world, and we're just we're showing that longevity has a really important physical component to it and also emotional and cognitive. So at the end of the day, you should be lifting muscle, lifting weights for your muscles, you should be lifting weights emotionally, figuratively, you should be lifting weights cognitively, like all those things matter.

Ashley Love 17:04

Absolutely. You know, I want to talk about something real quick, and that is somebody listening might be thinking, this guy is just, he's a cool, cool science nerd. He worked in an HIV lab and he was talking about all those crazy A1C numbers, and he's using all of these cool words like eustress and distress. But then you are framing this in a very emotional personal tone as well when you talk. And that brings me to your podcast, which is Tales of Abundance. It was born out of a near-death experience. You were talking about cliffs and potholes earlier, and I had to bite my tongue. But tell us a little bit about this podcast, um, you know, how it how it was created, and then why our pre-health students should be listening to this.

Dr. John Oberg, DSW 17:46

And it's super cool. Like it's a place to go to feel good. Like, I think in this world, there's so many things that are just like I look around and I'm like, man, that's like, ooh, ah, oh. And how do I engage? What do I do? And I know I want to be a part of it. Part of that is I just want to put some good stories into the world. And so we go and we talk about like what's happening in AI, what's happening in finance and cryptocurrency and medicine. And but like, what are the cool, fun, like we we just talk about stories. Like, you know, one of the guys I work with is a former uh Catholic priest, and he talks about like, what is it, what they're talking about, giants in the Bible, what's that all about? Like just fun, cool, uplifting, like feel good. Like, how do you find abundance in your life? And whether that's abundance with your family or abundance with your fitness or abundance with your finance or with your friends or with fun, then we use five Fs, right? So we we just talk about abundance in all those five F areas, right? Because there's good F words too. Fun is a good F word, right? It's a great F word. So it's like we talk about abundance in all those places. We talk about travel and and places we've been and and mistakes that we've made. And so it's just a fun place to come and listen. Uh, there's three different hosts, most of us are there most days, different, really different perspectives on like we don't agree on everything, but you can see that discourse happening like on the air. And it's like we've been friends for a long time. And so we get into it, and sometimes we're like, ooh, that was maybe a little too much for the listeners. So you guys like you guys will be fine, you know.

Priscina Health And Telemedicine Diabetes Care

Ashley Love 19:14

How fun. And you know, I think it is so important. Well, I I number one, I wanted to highlight your podcast because it's an incredible podcast. But number two, to really showcase the fact that you are a person, not just a clinician, right? Not just a CEO business owner, not just an entrepreneur. Um, you want to live abundantly as well. You know, your life is not all those numbers that you rattled off. And it is so important to maintain that because that is how we preserve ourselves after retirement, right? Our life hopefully is not going to be our jobs. And if your life is your job, I am so happy for you if that is what makes you happy. But for the majority of us, we also need some type of a either a creative outlet or a physical outlet to go to. And then of course, the flip side of your coin is Priscina Health. I would love to talk about what you guys are doing there because it is, as you mentioned already, it is really truly changing the face of how we approach healthcare, specifically chronic disease.

Dr. John Oberg, DSW 20:12

Yeah, I think for me that was that going back and getting my doctorate, working with my partner, Dr. Dustin Williams, who's a physician. And um, you know, he's the medical genius behind the medical side. I work on the behavioral health side. And what we found is that if you look at all of the medicine, all of the behavioral health, all the administration, all the social determinants of health, if you look at everything in a new light, you actually can reverse type 2 diabetes with great efficacy. And we do it all the time. And so uh, you know, we have people that are really sick and have been sick for decades that come to us and they're like, yeah, I've tried everything. It's like, well, they haven't tried us. And so, and then 12 weeks later, they're in a really good place. And uh, and so, you know, people ask, like, what are you? What kind of company? We're a medical practice, we're literally a medical practice, and we we are all telemedicine. We help, you know, California, Texas, Florida, like we're in like 10 states and we're growing by state by state as we go. And um our thinking was like, how do you help the people that have a hard time getting help? So it was designed with like low-income, rural, you know, hard to access communities, was how we designed our entire program. And um, and you mentioned earlier like GLP ones, like we'll use GLP ones, we'll use GIPs, we'll use any of that stuff. But our first study that really impressed us 49 out of 50, all we used was insulin and metformin. Wow. So just you know, drugs that were only generic, right? And that's how we got that result. And so, like and and we talked to doctors, like I, you know, you we can geek out after the show, and I'll tell you like whatever the clinical, like we can get into this. And and doctors and PAs were like, whoa. Like, you know, I have medical officers of major payers who are we explain the whole process for like finally somebody who gets it. And it's like, yeah, because I took years breaking down everything that doesn't work. I said, What if it had to be true that it worked for the patient, it worked for the provider, it was financially sustainable for the society. What if all of that had to be true? How would we do it? And that's how we built it. And it's been so much fun to hear the patients. Like, I mean, I was somebody, I was working with a marketing firm about Sumber Messaging, and they said, send us some success stories. And my um my COO sent over a list of like 92. They're like, this is our last 90 case studies where patients have said things about us. Let us know if you want more.

Ashley Love 22:29

It's incredible. And you mentioned at the beginning that your mother-in-law really was not failed by the clinician. It was a really good, a really, really good physician, but failed by the system. And it sounds like that's really what at Pristina Health, it's really what you're trying to fix here. Can you tell us what that means?

Dr. John Oberg, DSW 22:47

Yeah, I mean, look, I think a lot of people would say that our healthcare system is broken, and I'm not going to disagree. But as a social worker, we can look at things like at the macro level and say, yeah, the system's not good. But we also look at the micro level. And so my answer is like there's things you can do individually, even inside of a broken system, to help you help yourself and grab that agency back to your own health. And it's okay to do that. It's it can both be true that the system's not built for you, and you can succeed in a broken system. And so we teach our patients how to take agency back for their health care so they can succeed in a broken system. I am working on fixing the broken system. I get that it's a problem. I'm working on it. It's going to take a long time. It's going to take a long time. And so we have a 50-year plan for that. And we hope to get it fixed. But for right now, we are fixing patients at the micro level every single day by helping them help themselves and in the things they can control. Right. And so we do that by like saying, okay, with all the medicine, with all the mental health issues, with all the food. And like, what's the one thing you're willing to commit to today? And for like for one patient, it was like, I'll change my coffee creamer. It's like, great, let's do that. Super. And we changed their coffee creamer and their blood sugar was measurably lower, their fasting blood glucose, like four days later, because we changed their cream coffee creamer. Another patient with they had early stages of dementia. They were only consuming ice cream and chocolate milk. That was their only caloric intake. Their spouse was like, I can't get in to eat or drink anything else. We're like, no problem. Can we just change which ice cream they're eating? They're like, sure. We changed the ice cream. Fasting blood glucose was down a hundred points week over week. Wow. So it's little tiny things.

Ashley Love 24:24

That's incredible. It really is. And you know, I what I love so much about that story is that you really have been trying to meet people where they are.

Dr. John Oberg, DSW 24:32

Those are our words. You found it. Yes. That's what we teach our team. You found yes, that's it. That's it. Which is really I'm gonna drop my microphone. I was gonna, I'm gonna drop it.

Ashley Love 24:41

That's it's I could actually drop my mic today. I am actually holding it. Um it's just, you know, and and and we're laughing because it is really fun to reach that recognize to reach that realization. But I'll tell you, as a clinician, that is a lot harder to do than it than it than we just than we say it is, right? I mean, we say meet people where they are, but we walk into a room and we're just so frustrated by the patient situation. I mean, who wouldn't be frustrated by a patient who is only their whole diet only consisted of those two things, right? But they we've got to start there. And uh it it requires a lot of creativity on your end, I would imagine.

Dr. John Oberg, DSW 25:20

If I were gonna say, like there's one message across all of people, whether they're students in medicine or whatever, that meet people where they are. It's so intuitive and obvious, but it's so hard to do. Our society does not naturally help people learn to empathize. And so, like, if that like our our clinicians, every member of our team goes through an hour or so of continuing education weekly with us. So they get back and they get reminded over and over again like, hey, I know you talked to so and so last month, but you didn't talk to them this month, and something may have changed. Something may have changed. And so it's this constant empathy training, constant, and so anyway, you know, as you build community, like there are people that didn't have great community in the last 10 years, and and 60 years ago, we had great community. So build your community for your listeners, build your community. If you don't know how to do it, reach out to me, like call me, find me on LinkedIn, find me at the website, like we will get you connected somewhere. Like, we believe in that. So, like, let's go.

Build Community Through Mentorship

Ashley Love 26:20

Build your community. I think that's great. And you know, let's give these students a couple tangible tips for how to do that. You mentioned LinkedIn. I think LinkedIn is a absolutely phenomenal place for pre-health. This is high school or college age or young clinicians to really dive in and start being poured into by people. I mean, people, people on LinkedIn, it's it's it's incredible how they are they're discussing problems, but they're discussing it in a solution mindset, right? Um, they're they're highlighting and celebrating wins. I think LinkedIn is a great place to start. What else? What do you think?

Dr. John Oberg, DSW 26:54

Here's what I would do. I would say wherever you are in your life, go find three people to mentor who are 10 years younger than you. So if you're graduating from college, go mentor three middle school students. If you're graduating from medical school, go graduate, go, go mentor three undergrads or high school students. Like, but find three people to mentor, and you're gonna quickly learn what it means to be a good mentee from their perspective, and then start looking for mentors. Don't start looking for mentors first. Go be a mentor first. And a mentor means you don't have your agenda. All you do is meet them where they are, ask them where they want to go, and help them get where they want to go without any bias about where that is, as long as it's not illegal or harmful or whatever the case may be. Um, sorry, I have to say those things these days, I guess. But but help them go where they want to help them go to some healthy place they want to go, right? And without bias. And so, and then go find some mentors. When I when I started doing this, like it took me a while to find my mentors, but I really I dove in to find mentees very quickly. And I always try to keep two or three people that I'm mentoring uh at all times. And it it's you know, I the gift is really for me. I I gotta say, mentoring people, I'm the really the one who gets the gift. I I still remember I went uh to try to mentor some middle schoolers in when I was a master's student. Uh, and um I thought I was being this really pragmatic, helpful MBA kind of guy. And this school principal in this middle school scheduled 30 minutes with me, spent four and a half hours with me, and changed my view of the world in this inner city, very low-income school. And I am forever grateful for the time he spent with me to get to really wring the misconceptions out of my brain that I had. Um, so I went to mentor people and I got mentored, and it was a one-time deal. And it was like, I remember the walk through his school to this day. And that was more than 20 years ago.

Ashley Love 28:48

Amazing. And you know, we're speaking directly to pre-health students there, but clinicians, that is for you two. Get with some mentees, get with some mentors. We have to build community, like you said. It is it is so important. Guys, to learn more about a better approach to complex chronic disease, improving quality and length of life for everyone, please, please, please visit droberg at prissina.com. That's P-R-E-C-I-N-A. And he mentioned his LinkedIn, and that's John Oberg. You can find him there. Dr. Oberg, it has been incredible. Thank you so much for what you're doing. And thank you so much for the amazing little gems that you have scattered throughout that entire conversation for our students. Really appreciate it.

Dr. John Oberg, DSW 29:33

Thanks, Ashley.

Ashley Love 29:35

Thank you so very much for listening to this episode of Shadow Me Next. If you liked this episode or if you think it could be useful for a friend, please subscribe and invite them to join us next Monday. As always, if you have any questions, let me know on Facebook or Instagram. Access you want, stories you need, you're always invited to Shadow Me Next. Please keep in mind that the content of this podcast is intended for informational and entertainment purposes only, and should not be considered as professional medical advice. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the host and guests, and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any other agency, organization, employer, or company.