During my residency, I trained in a clinic where, because I was still learning, my attending gave me something most physicians never get enough of. Time.
One of my patients was a musician. He toured the country to perform, and still, over two years, he never missed a single visit. His goal was to lose weight, made harder by IBS. We worked at it together, appointment after appointment, until he reached it, and maintained it.
I remember my attending saying, "Mira, you had a real impact on him. You helped him make a meaningful change." I said, "Oh, thanks," and left it there. If anything, I thought he was being too generous. Wasn't this the expectation anyway?
Years later, when I became the attending myself, I finally understood what he had seen. What helped that musician was not anything extraordinary I had done. It was the time. I had been given room to truly know my patients, and that relationship, more than any single instruction, was what made change possible.
It is also the one thing the current system rarely lets a physician give.
So I built a practice around it.