Sumant Inamdar

Today, on #NationalWomenPhysiciansDay, let’s go back in history to remember why we celebrate this special day on February 3 in honor of #WomenInMedicine. A brief 🧵 on #DrElizabethBlackwell. 1/5

Thirty Years of Ortho: What I’d Tell the Next Generation I’ve been an orthopedic surgeon for three decades. Long enough to see techniques come and go, implants rise and fall, and the pendulum of “standard practice” swing back and forth more times than I can count. What hasn’t changed are the pressures that come with the job… and the quiet lessons you don’t fully understand until you’ve liv,ed them. If I were talking to the next generation—residents, fellows, the young attendings just getting their legs under them… this is what I’d tell them. You can’t build a meaningful career on RVUs. You can meet every target and still feel empty. A career that lasts is built on trust, judgment, and relationships. You don’t measure that in productivity metrics. A good surgeon listens more than they talk. People think surgery is a technical field, but the real work is in understanding what someone is actually asking of you. Most patients are just scared. They don’t need your scalpel, no matter what the MRI shows. Half the mistakes in this profession start with bad listening. Master the anatomy. Master the craft. But learn the limits too. Early in your career, you’re focused on what you can do. With experience, you start to appreciate what you shouldn’t do. Judgment is a superpower. Protect your time, or the system will take every minute you allow it to. Learn to say no!!! There’s no shortage of demands. Notes. Inboxes. Meetings. Every one of them feels urgent. Some of you might actually feel important when you go to meetings... But... None of them is worth sacrificing your sanity or the people waiting for you at home. Seek colleagues, not titles. Promotions and committee seats feel important for a season, but it’s just fluff, and nothing gets accomplished in those meetings anyway. Your strength matters more than you realize. Not your technical strength—your physical and emotional strength. You can’t take care of people if your own health fades. Move, lift, sleep, and protect your energy. A worn-out surgeon becomes brittle. Be the doctor you’d want for your family. You need a life outside the operating room if you want a long life inside it. The surgeons who last aren’t the ones who work the most—they’re the ones who stay grounded. They have people they care about, interests that pull them away from medicine, and enough perspective to know that identity and work are not the same thing. Thirty years in, the operations are only part of the story. What keeps you going is the purpose behind the work—helping people move, reassuring them when they’re scared, giving them back pieces of their life. That’s the part that never gets old.

15 Hard Truths about Psychology and Life: 1.

The most enduring marker of success isn't wealth, fame, or power. It’s what we create and contribute to others. In the short run, status symbols capture attention. In the long run, achievement is judged by impact. The highest accomplishment is improving the lives of others.

Too many people recognize their opinions as feelings, but mistake their beliefs for facts. Closed minds hold truths to be self-evident. Open minds are willing to question even strongly held views. Lifelong learning requires the courage to challenge our own convictions.

I find the story of AI and radiology fascinating. Of course, Hinton's prediction was wrong* and tech advances don't automatically and straightforwardly cause job replacement — that's not the interesting part. Radiology has embraced AI enthusiastically, and the labor force is growing nevertheless. The augmentation-not-automation effect of AI is despite the fact that AFAICT there is no identified "task" at which human radiologists beat AI. So maybe the "jobs are bundles of tasks" model in labor economics is incomplete. Paraphrasing something @MelMitchell1 pointed out to me, if you define jobs in terms of tasks maybe you're actually defining away the most nuanced and hardest-to-automate aspects of jobs, which are at the boundaries between tasks. Can you break up your own job into a set of well-defined tasks such that if each of them is automated, your job as a whole can be automated? I suspect most people will say no. But when we think about *other people's jobs* that we don't understand as well as our own, the task model seems plausible because we don't appreciate all the nuances. If this is correct, it is irrelevant how good AI gets at task-based capability benchmarks. If you need to specify things precisely enough to be amenable to benchmarking, you will necessarily miss the fact that the lack of precise specification is often what makes jobs messy and complex in the first place. So benchmarks can tell us very little about automation vs augmentation. * Hinton insists that he was directionally correct but merely wrong in terms of timing. This is a classic motte-and-bailey retreat of forecasters who get it wrong. It has the benefit of being unfalsifiable! It's always possible to claim that we simply haven't waited long enough for the claimed prediction to come true.

Burnout is rarely a personal problem to manage. It's usually an organizational problem to solve. If multiple people are drained, it’s not in their heads—it’s in your culture and structure. Widespread exhaustion is a sign that people are being overworked and undersupported.

The best way to gain recognition is not to build a personal brand. It’s to create a portfolio of work. Branding emphasizes how you want to be seen. Creating highlights what you can contribute. Image shouldn't be the goal. It should be a byproduct of pursuing worthwhile goals. link.chtbl.com/RTAdam

What holds many people back from taking initiative is not laziness. It's fear. Inaction breeds rumination and feeds anxiety. Action builds momentum and fuels confidence. Some ideas won't work. Some people will say no. But in the long run, it's better to fail than to fail to try.

Wonderful experience presenting at ACG 2024 , thank you @uams_GIHep @UAMSintmedicine @MaugarMD @KeyurVyasMD @SumantInamdar @AmCollegeGastro

Thank you to Dr. V. Raman Muthusamy for giving an excellent presentation on the latest in management of Barrett’s Esophagus. #GutClub @uamshealth

Please join us for Gut Club October 17, 2024 from 6-8pm for our discussion on "Updates in Barrett's Esophagus" led by Dr. V. Raman Muthuswamy, MD. To RSVP: Go.UAMS.edu/GutClub

Enjoyed a final and fantastic lecture from Dr. Dehmel on Disorders of Gut-Brain Interaction. We will miss these fun and educational sessions. #UAMS #GI

“That’s the way we’ve always done it” is not a justification. It’s a lazy excuse for failing to evolve. Blind faith in traditions makes us prisoners of the past. Routines should be based on present value and future potential. A key to new growth is questioning old habits.

Narcissistic leaders are sore losers. They deny their failures and blame others for their foibles. Humble leaders are good sports. They accept defeat graciously and admit their mistakes. Great leaders are great learners. They strive to turn their shortcomings into strengths.

Here are some thoughts of mine on how to achieve BIG things during your career in medicine. Please retweet! #medicine #surgery #medschool #medtwitter #gitwitter #medicalschool #medicalstudent #MedicalStudents

What it’s like to be in healthcare right now: “We will pay you $2 for that pie” “But it costs me $4 in pie ingredients and $2 in human labor to make a pie. We need $6 to break even” “Sorry, we’ll only pay you $2 for that pie. We suggest you make many more pies that you also sell for $2/pie. New requirement is 6 pies/day” “But then we are still losing $4 per pie. How does making more pies help us?” “We just found out flour is on shortage so you’ll have to buy more expensive imported flour and will lose $5 per pie. Or you can consider making pies without flour.” “But I can’t make pies if we keep losing money on pies. And I can’t make pies without flour” “We suggest you ditch rolling pins and remove any fruit filling as a cost saving measure. And consider limiting how much time you bake the pie for to use less oven time” “But then how can I even make a pie that resembles a pie?” “We appreciate the question and have no response. We empower YOU to solve this problem. We have scheduled 4 meetings to discuss how you can make more pies with less ingredients and less oven time and less labor” “But it seems the root of the problem here is actually that we don’t get reimbursed fairly for our pies…” “Don’t say that out loud. Please get back to making pies with no filling and no flour and no rolling pins and be sure to attend the meetings.” #medtwitter #Pediatrics #insurance

Don’t mistake burnout for laziness. When people show a steady decline in effort and output, it’s often a sign of exhaustion. They don't need carrots and sticks to motivate them. They need people to demand less of them and provide more support to them.

Congratulations to Dr. Tellez-Avila and team on an amazing DDW presentation, “Effect of trimonthly meeting and email report of ADR, cecal intubation rate, and withdrawal time on personal and group quality measures in colonoscopy”. #DDW2024 #UAMS

Burnout is not a badge of honor. "I'm so stressed!" doesn't signal status. When people brag about being overwhelmed, they're seen as less capable and caring. They get less help—and drain their colleagues. The appropriate response to stress isn't to boast. It's to seek support.