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My father was a vascular surgeon, so medicine was part of my life long before I understood what it meant to be a doctor. I grew up watching him take care of people. But one experience in particular has stayed with me throughout my life.
When I was a child, my family witnessed a head-on collision on a two-lane highway. My father immediately pulled over and went to help. There was no hospital, no operating room and no medical team around him. There were simply people who were badly hurt and someone who had the knowledge and ability to help them.
I watched my father step into that situation and provide care when it was desperately needed. His actions likely helped save a life.
As a child, that was incredibly powerful to witness. I understood something very simple: being a doctor gave my father the ability to help another human being at a moment when that person needed him most.
I wanted to have that ability too.
That experience helped set me on a path through an undergraduate degree in human physiology, medical school, and eventually plastic surgery. Along the way, I learned an enormous amount about how the human body is supposed to function—and what happens when it doesn't.
Medicine teaches us to understand disease, diagnose it and treat it. Surgery takes that responsibility even further. Someone places their trust in you and allows you to intervene directly in their body in the hope that you can restore function, improve their health or help them feel more like themselves.
That privilege has never become routine for me.
But as the years went on, I also began to question some aspects of the way we traditionally practise medicine.
Modern medicine is extraordinarily good at treating many diseases and injuries. I have spent much of my career doing exactly that, in both Canada and the United States. But our healthcare system is often reactive. We frequently meet patients after something has already gone wrong. We diagnose a disease and then manage its symptoms or consequences.
We also tend to divide people into separate organ systems. A patient may see one doctor for their heart, another for their skin, another for their hormones and another for their joints. Each specialist may provide excellent care, but the human being sitting in front of us is not a collection of independent parts.
That realization gradually changed the way I thought about being a doctor.
I became increasingly interested not only in treating what had gone wrong, but in asking a different question: Why did it go wrong in the first place, and what can we do earlier?
That led me to study functional medicine and ultimately become certified in it. Functional medicine gave me another framework for looking at the patient as a whole person—considering physiology, nutrition, movement, sleep, stress, relationships, environment and behavior alongside conventional medical diagnosis and treatment.
It didn't replace what I had learned as a physician or surgeon. It expanded the lens through which I looked at my patients.
Over time, I came to believe that healthcare needs both perspectives.
We need the extraordinary capabilities of modern medicine when something goes wrong. But we should also be doing far more to understand health before disease develops—to identify risk, preserve function and help people participate actively in their own health over the course of their lives.
Appearance, health and self-image are often treated as completely separate subjects. I don't believe they are. How we feel about ourselves can influence how we behave, how we interact with others and how we take care of ourselves. At the same time, our underlying health affects how we look, heal, recover and age.
This is part of what led me to develop the concept I call BeautySpan™: the idea that health, appearance and self-image interact throughout our lives and should be considered together rather than in isolation.
When we began imagining FORM, I saw an opportunity to help create the kind of healthcare environment I increasingly believed should exist: one in which wellness, medical care and surgical care could work together rather than occupying separate worlds.
For me, that represents an evolution of the same motivation that made me want to become a doctor in the first place.
As a child, I saw my father help one person in an extraordinary moment of need. It showed me the power of having knowledge that could be used in service of another human being.
As a young doctor, I wanted to develop the skills to help the person sitting in front of me.
Today, I still feel exactly that responsibility toward every individual patient. But I also feel a broader responsibility to help improve the systems in which we care for people.
I believe medicine is entering an important period of evolution. We are becoming better at predicting disease, understanding individual biology and measuring health long before someone becomes sick. Patients have greater access to information and a greater opportunity to participate in their own care. At the same time, we are beginning to recognize something medicine has sometimes lost sight of: the person matters just as much as the disease.
So when I think about why I became a doctor, my answer has changed somewhat over the years.
I remain a doctor because I have come to understand the responsibility that comes with that ability.
And at this stage of my career, I want to contribute not only to caring for the patient in front of me, but also to building a better way of caring for the people who come next.
