Have you seen this video?
I was an MIT Educated Neurosurgeon Now I’m Unemployed and Alone in the Mountains
It’s worth watching in its entirety before reading my commentary.
Welcome back to Dissonance. I hope everyone is staying cool in this heat! 🥵🔥Don’t forget to enjoy it—it will be the coldest summer of our lifetime! 🥲
I’m writing today because I was inspired by the message in Dr. Gooby’s video. He articulated something that I’ve always struggled to put into words all my life.
In his video, Dr. Gooby explains that he decided to pursue a career in neurosurgery because he was curious about the brain—consciousness, how it works, and how we can help people heal with neuroscience.
After his time at MIT, Dr. Gooby decided to enter medical school to become a neurosurgeon and spent nearly a decade of his life training to be one of the top practitioners in spine and brain surgery.
After completing his training Dr. Gooby worked in a hospital, treating mostly patients with chronic back pain and other spine injuries. He quickly noticed that many patients would relapse or get worse despite his surgeries. He also noticed that sometimes patients would heal on their own without surgical interventions. This led Gooby to develop an analogy for his work: the leaky roof problem.
Dr. Gooby theorized that his work in spinal surgery was akin to only repairing drywall and repainting the ceiling in response to a roof leak, rather than going to the source of the leak itself and fixing the roof. He noticed that patients could often fix their own roofs (backs) by doing a few (non-surgical or pharmaceutical) things:
eating a low-inflammatory and mostly vegetarian diet
spending time outside
prioritizing rest
eliminating stress
reducing inflammation
This protocol would almost always result in less back pain, sometimes even a full recovery.
As Gooby later describes, this discovery was a gift and a curse. The problem being that hospitals run on a capitalist, profit driven model, that requires constant revenue growth. Surgeries and medications bring in revenue. Tons. Dietary and exercise advice, not so much. Especially when the advice is given out by a neurosurgeon who is paid a six-figure yearly minimum.
Gooby realized that he couldn’t change the system from inside. He was stuck performing unnecessary surgeries on patients every week, in addition to the rigorous schedule and late-night hours that neurosurgery requires.
So he quit.
Dr. Gooby quit his job and has dedicated the better part of a year walking around in nature, meditating, and taking videos of his dog (appropriately named Dooby) on their adventures together.
And he posts videos like this now:
To say I identify with Dr. Gooby is an understatement. Training intensely 24/7/365 to be an orchestral flutist in a corrupt, racist, sexist, and white supremacist industry was killing me.
I spent years of my life having daily panic attacks. I pulled my hair out constantly. I was hard to be around—irritable, always jealous, and bitter.
It’s no surprise that after quitting, I had a similar experience to Dr. Gooby. I felt better.
We both now eat well, exercise, enjoy hobbies, and most importantly spend (or spent in my case 😭) our time in the moment with our precious canine companions.
The problem at hand is that not everyone can quit—especially doctors. We cannot all escape the systems that perpetuate violence and injustice on ourselves and each other.
So, what do we do? We must change this system.
I don’t have all the answers. But I think one key point is that we can all take some part of our lives back like Dr. Gooby did. Even if it’s just 5-10 minutes of sunshine a day. Adding vegetables to a quick dinner. A 30-minute jog after work. The more time we take our time back to prioritize ourselves instead of someone else’s profit, the better.
Thank you, Dr. Gooby, for sharing your story. I hope your channel continues to inspire others to fight against the system.