We talk with Dr. John Neely this week, a pediatric oncologist, and teacher. Dr. John shares with us about his successful career in pediatric oncology and how he has transitioned into teaching others. Dr. John talks with us about teaching people preventative aspects to benefit their whole body. He talks about preventing illness rather than just treating symptoms. He also shares the importance of listening to patients and allowing them to tell their own medical story. You don't want to miss this episode!
Transcription:
00:02
Welcome to changing the rules, a weekly podcast about people who are living their best lives, and advice on how you can achieve that too. Join us with your lively host, Ray Lowe, better known as the luckiest guy in the world.
Ray Loewe00:17
Hello, everybody, and welcome to our podcast, changing the rules. We're here at our brand new studios in Willow Street. We're here with our engineer, Luke Cagn0, who makes everything work for us. And thank you, Luke, for being here. And we're here with a great guest today. But I want to give you a little background before we start on changing the rules. You know, throughout our lives we're given rule after rule after rule. It started with our parents, it went to the church and went to the schools and went to our jobs. And everybody's got rules that they throw at us. And some of them are pretty good rules, and we want to keep them and some of them become irrelevant over time. But we have this body of rules that we have to get through. And I think it was Steve Jobs that said, when you're living your life by other people's rules, you're not living your own life. So we encourage you to go through the rules and pick the ones that are really pertinent to you. And we have today one of the luckiest people in the world that we're interviewing, and we define the luckiest people in the world as those people who take control of their own lives, design them to their own specs, and then live them under their own terms. And Dr. John Neely is with us today. And John is a medical doctor. He started his career as a pediatric oncologist. And you're gonna have to define that for us John and welcome to the world of podcasting.
Dr. John Neely01:45
Great, thanks so much glad to be here. So you want to know about pediatric oncologist? Well, when I went to medical school, actually, which was up in Hershey, you know, when you go to medical school, you're exposed to so many different things. And I for a while thought about surgery, I liked orthopedic surgery quite a bit. But what really caught my eye was taking care of children. And when I realized that I wanted to become a pediatrician. And I was influenced by some of the patients that I saw who were seriously ill at the time. And when I did my residency out in Minnesota, it was one of the bastions of teaching for pediatric oncology. And some of the very first patients that I saw there were patients that had serious oncologic issues. But it just touched my heart when I saw these patients, and I realized, for me, I could do general pediatrics, it's enjoyable enough, but I wanted to do something really challenging. And back in the day, I was encouraged because we were curing about 50% of children with cancer, which meant, of course, 50% were dying. So it was still a somewhat challenging and can be very depressing. But now we're up to about 85 to 90% cure rate. Oh, wow. So we now can tell most families, your child has something serious, we have a game plan for how to take care of it. And the odds are really high that they're going to be cured.
Ray Loewe03:15
All right. Now you told me while we're prepping for this, about an experience that you had walking down the street one of these days, why don't you tell us about that? Because that puts it all in perspective, I think?
Dr. John Neely03:27
Well, you know, I think one of the advantages for me of staying in Hershey to throughout most of my oncology career was I took care of a lot of patients and, and I didn't move away. So the odds of my running into them, and some of them I've are close friends with were pretty high. So here I was two years. Well, just before COVID I was at the Fulton Theatre. And they were doing the one of my favorite Christmas plays about the Red Ryder BB gun. And you know, and all of that.
Ray Loewe03:57
Cleveland, Ohio, right, yeah.
Dr. John Neely03:59
And it was intermission. And suddenly this guy comes up to me, who has I think two or three children in tow young kids. And he was probably about 40 at the time. And he comes in introduces himself. And of course, I didn't recognize him because I hadn't seen him since he was about 12. And, but I knew right away who he was. And I had taken care of him with leukemia. And not only was he cured of this, but he you know, we think about can you ever have children after therapy and all that? Well, he's living a normal, productive life has at least three kids of his own. And he just came up and said, You know, I saw you over there. You haven't changed as much as I've changed, and he wanted to say hi and thank me.
Ray Loewe04:45
Wow, what a rewarding career. So so it was all worthwhile. But you haven't stayed there have you
Dr. John Neely04:51
No, and to get to kind of your thoughts about what do you do with rules? I remember because I was the chief of the division of pediatric oncology and a colleague in surgery came up to me at a meeting and he said, What what's your plan for, for advancing and I said, you know, I want to develop this program to the point that it has grown beyond my capabilities. Because I'm very good at patient care and, and some community things. But an area that needed to be spiffed up was research. And I said I want to work the division to the point where it needs somebody beyond what I can do. And that's exactly what happened, I became, I knew that somebody else needed to take over and I was getting very interested in other parts of medicine and leadership. And I made a decision to step down from the Division Chiefship, I still saw some patients, but I started to focus on other areas of medicine.
Ray Loewe05:51
Okay, so what are they? How did you ever divert your career? And then one of the things that is important as you go through this is that again, I mean, you exude luckiness. You're our definition of the luckiest people in the world over here. Because you, you follow what's fascinating and motivating to you and you make things happen. So what are these areas? How did you find them? And where are you?
Dr. John Neely06:17
Well, you know, it's an it's kind of like a pioneering spirit. Because I think one of the rules that I've had to struggle with is, because I was always told as a child, you can't fail, you have to get, you have to get straight A's, you have to do this and that. And I've set myself up in careers where there was a high likelihood of failing, because either it was something so innovative, that it wasn't the time wasn't quite ripe for it, or I grew something beyond my capability. So I wanted to move on. So it's been very difficult to say, Hey, I failed, that was a success. You know, that's an interesting thing to look at.
Ray Loewe06:55
Yes, it is, you know, and that's one of the things that I've learned over life, too, is that if you don't push yourself enough to fail, you're not learning. And I have two different kinds of days. I either have a great day, or I have a learning day, John. Okay.
Dr. John Neely07:10
That's the way I'm with golf to by the way. That's an impossible task. Yes. So I've kind of done two things since then I, you know, the way people advance in my career is typically they move to a new institution, and then they do the same thing again, you know, they may advance in their academic standing. But, you know, my opportunity would have been to say, I've done pediatric oncology here, now, I'm going to go do it at a different institution, or perhaps become a department chair, which is a different skill set. What I did differently was I decided to stay in the same institution, but to switch a career within that. So I got very interested in some of the things in medicine that I found to be short-sighted because we are trained incredibly well to take care of acute illness. So if you have a heart attack, or if you are in an auto accident, our health care system is the place to be it's the best in the world. But if you are struggling with a family history of heart disease, or diabetes, or there's a tendency to autoimmune diseases, we don't do a lot about the preventative aspects or looking at the whole body as to how they're going to respond. Instead, we throw pills at it. And that's just the nature of how we're trained. It's the nature of how we're reimbursed. So I've spent a lot of time trying to understand holistically how people can bring their life back into balance by having their different systems in their body optimized for function. And then, because my goal is people should, and we always talk about life expectancy as well, I am looking for what's called a health expectancy, I want somebody to live in a healthy, active, meaningful way to the very end of their life. And then they have a relatively short period of time where they may fail. But issues such as cognitive decline, or chronic heart disease, or chronic lung disease, are things that we need to spend more time trying to prevent.
Ray Loewe09:16
Okay, so where are we with this? What are we doing as a country? And what are you doing specifically?
Dr. John Neely09:23
Well, I've joined several different groups I've learned. I've done some certifications in what's called integrative medicine, some of which is very helpful, and some of which is not so well proven. And one of my goals is to help guide patients to these are things you can do that might really help and these are some things that you should steer clear of. So I've done that and then I've focused on a specific area of integrative medicine that's got a stupid name, but I can't figure in another name. It's called functional medicine. And, but the gist of it is instead of looking at systems like we look at in medicine, we you know, if you go to the doctor, they always do this review of systems. How are your eyes? Our your lymph glands? How's your heart? You know, and all of that the systems and functional medicine are? How do you take in the most nutritious food and digest and absorb it? What are the rules for what you should be eating and how you should absorb it and how you should protect your gut is an important part for nowadays is how do you feed and nourish your immune system so that when you are hit with something like COVID, you have the best possible chance of fighting that off. And then another area that is important is the environment. What are we doing with environmental chemicals and toxins and all that, that we have to detoxify?
Ray Loewe10:51
So where are we with that? And what kind of support do you have to do this kind of stuff?
Dr. John Neely10:56
Well, this is the uphill fight in a way because many of these things are looked at in medicine as Yeah, we know that's important. But we don't have time for that we don't have we're not trained for that. And so I've spent a lot of time and I still do teaching fellow faculty members, fellow doctors about some of the principles of holistic care as it fits into standard western medicine. Now I have some interest in things like traditional Chinese medicine, or Indian or Vedic medicine, I have work some working knowledge of it, but I am not a practitioner of those. But I can help people understand when they're approached with, with some questions about that. I deal a lot with the Amish, for example, who are wonderful people, they are very common sense. And they but they also are interested in natural approaches to things. So a lot of my work with them is saying, we have some things in standard western medicine that would help you but I want to help you with natural medicines that could help things go better for you and help you boost your immune system so we can work together and integrate care, you're going to be my new doctor here John. Well, that you know, that's why we were talking that a goal. Yeah, it's been, wouldn't it be interesting to do some podcasting on these types of topics or even lectures, so, and I'm a teacher at heart, okay, I you know, I'm in an academic medical center, I still love to teach. I'm doing some coursework here at Willow Valley. And that's,
Ray Loewe12:31
well, let's make a commitment to do that. But I want to probe into something else because you also talked a little bit about communication, and how to improve things. And I know you're doing some stuff here in terms of teaching people how to communicate better. So talk to me about where you're going there.
Dr. John Neely12:47
Well, that went back. And two ways with my medical career. One was, there's research out there that shows that the time between you go into a doctor's office, and they interrupt you, and don't listen is around seven seconds. So nobody ever has a chance to tell their story, their own medical story. And teaching doctors how to just sit back and listen and have the time to listen is so important. And the number of times in my holistic practice where I have somebody come in and start and I'm sitting there and starting to tell their story. And about five minutes into it, they cry. And they say you're the first person that has ever listened to me. So a lot of this is how do you practice listening? Now from the difficult conversation standpoint, that grew out of some of my teaching of leadership, what is the what are the principles of a sound conversation? What's the difference between a discussion, which by the way, rhymes with the same root word is percussion and concussion. So you can see that a discussion tends to be a back and forth, kind of a fight going on, like percussion or concussion, as opposed to dialogue, which in Greece means to flow through. So teaching how to listen and how to balance a conversation so that new ideas can flow through the group rather than just having a battle back and forth are the principles that I'm trying to teach.
Ray Loewe14:20
Okay, so here you are, you're in, I'm gonna say, a new phase of your career. I mean, you're phasing out of the oncology you'll never phase out of it. But you'll do less and less. And you've got the interest in preventative medicine, general health care, how do we take better care of ourselves, and this concept of dialogue, so where are we going with all this?
Dr. John Neely14:47
Well, you mean me personally.
Ray Loewe14:48
Yeah, we're you gonna take this?
Dr. John Neely14:50
Well, I do see that at some point, I will fade out I would say, I call it a glide path out of my career, although I still enjoy seeing my colleagues and seeing some patients. But that's becoming less and less of an issue for me, and I just see myself working with some of these other principles. Now, again, I am not so inclined at this point in time to spend day after day seeing patients, because I think might be, I would be better, my talents would be better served in some kind of a lecture type series, we're going to be perfect for broadcasting in some way or another. And then doing some small teaching, the idea of having good conversations, I'm currently doing it with a group of about 21 people here. I would love to see this applied to virtually anybody on the campus, including team members and administration so that we can all learn to converse together and learn together.
Ray Loewe15:52
So I'm going to change your name from Dr. John to Professor John over here. Okay
Dr. John Neely15:56
You can call me the professor like Gilligan's Island.
Ray Loewe15:59
Yeah, you know, unfortunately, we're at the end of our time, and we're going to have to do a repeat on this because I think any one of these topics we could spend a whole session on. And I really am kind of interested in this. How do you take better care of yourself? Overall, as opposed to just fighting the battle of here's a symptom, let's get rid of the symptoms. And so let's make a commitment to do that somewhere along the line. And, you know, I want to thank you so much for being here. I think your career is a model for people. And I think it's an important model. You know, here you are you had your career, and most people stay in that kind of a career forever. I mean, after all, you're a pediatric. I'm going to stumble over my pediatric oncologist over here. But you're not satisfied with that. And you're moving on to new things. And you're still a young man. And as we I bet in another 20 years, you're still going to be working on this stuff. To the degree I can, I will be cool. So thanks. Excuse me here. Thanks, everybody, for listening. We've been with John Neely and Luke why don't you sign us off and we'll see you all here next week. Great.
17:11
Thank you for listening to changing the rules. Join us next week for more conversation, our special guest and to hear more from the luckiest guy in the world.