Most doctors have brilliant ideas, but why do 98% of them fail before they ever reach a patient? The brutal truth is that a clinical mindset is not an entrepreneurial mindset, and the skills that make a great doctor are not the same ones that build a successful company. In this episode, we sit down with the ultimate physician entrepreneur, Dr. Arlen Meyers, to uncover the harsh realities of medical innovation and why your great idea is probably destined to fail without a fundamental shift in thinking.
Dr. Meyers, an academic surgeon turned serial entrepreneur, shares his own frustrating journey as an "accidental med-tech entrepreneur" trying to commercialize a cancer-detecting gadget. This experience revealed a massive gap in medical education: the complete lack of training in the business of medicine. This gap inspired him to create the Society of Physician Entrepreneurs (SoPE), a global network dedicated to helping clinicians navigate the treacherous path from idea to impact. We explore the critical need for doctors to develop an entrepreneurial mindset, whether they are launching a startup, pioneering medical innovation within a hospital (as an "intrapreneur"), or considering a physician career change. Dr. Meyers provides a clear definition of what it truly means to be a physician entrepreneur, arguing that it's a mindset that can be developed, not just an innate trait. He introduces the concept of the "innerpreneur"—the hidden innovator DNA that many clinicians possess but don't know how to activate. We also discuss why he believes most MD-MBA programs are a "bad idea" and why teaching the business of medicine must be integrated directly into medical school. Finally, Dr. Meyers explains the mission of the Society of Physician Entrepreneurs and offers his most important piece of advice for any doctor pursuing an entrepreneurial role: "make it personal, but don't take it personally."
About Our Guest:
Dr. Arlen Meyers is an academic surgeon, professor, MD, and MBA who became frustrated by the lack of entrepreneurial support for clinicians. He is the founder of the Society of Physician Entrepreneurs (SoPE), a global non-profit organization that provides education, resources, and networking to help physician innovators get their ideas to patients. After a long career in academic medicine, he now dedicates his time to teaching, writing, and consulting to bridge the gap between medicine and entrepreneurship.
Episode Resources:
Introduction
Dr. Trevor Royce: Welcome back to Health Tech Remedy, our Physician Innovator Series spotlighting doctors who've redefined their roles beyond the bedside to shape health tech, policy, and the future of care. I'm Trevor Royce, joined by my esteemed co-hosts, Tim Showalter and Paul Gerrard.
Dr. Tim Showalter: I'm Tim Showalter. Our goal today is to explore how physicians transition into roles as entrepreneurs and ecosystem builders, bringing change through innovation and leadership.
Dr. Paul Gerrard: And I'm Paul Gerrard. We'll hear stories of clinicians stepping into arenas from startups to networks, from devices to digital health.
Dr. Trevor Royce: Today's episode features Dr. Arlen Meyers, an academic surgeon who turned his frustration with the lack of entrepreneurial training in medicine into a global support network for physicians, the Society of Physician Entrepreneurs.
Dr. Tim Showalter: Dr. Meyers holds professorships across otolaryngology, engineering, and dentistry at the University of Colorado, and holds both an MBA and an MD. He's a former Fulbright Scholar and Harvard Macy Fellow. He's an educator at heart and an entrepreneur in action.
Dr. Paul Gerrard: Frustrated by the gap between ideas and commercialization, he launched the Society of Physician Entrepreneurs in 2011, a global virtual network built to empower physician innovators with mentorship, peer support, training, and ecosystem access.
Dr. Trevor Royce: Welcome, Dr. Meyers. So glad to have you here on Health Tech Remedy.
Dr. Arlen Meyers: Thanks for having me.
Dr. Trevor Royce: So usually we like to start these at the very beginning. Love to hear your journey into innovation. We'll certainly get to the great impact you've done in formalizing this for physicians. But again, starting from the beginning, would love to hear how your journey into medicine and innovation started. For example, why did you pursue both an MD and an MBA?
Dr. Arlen Meyers' Journey: From Accidental Med-Tech Entrepreneur to Innovator
Dr. Arlen Meyers: So I grew up in inner city Philly. I went to school back east. I did my residency at Penn. I'm an ear, nose and throat facial plastic surgeon. I got recruited to Colorado. And fast forward, I spent 40 years there as an academic surgeon. So I went up the food chain and did all the stuff academics do. During that tenure, and my intent was to be an academic surgeon. And that was that for many, many reasons we can go into. But the point is, that was the idea. And then, so I did. And I did it for a very long time.
As most academic surgeons do, you publish or perish. So I did a lot of stuff, did research, got grants, et cetera, published a lot of stuff. And in the course of that, myself and a bunch of other folk invented a gadget that optimally detects cancer in the mouth. So I'm a head and neck surgeon. So my sub, sub, sub, sub specialty was oral cancer. That led to a bunch of stuff, research about oral cancer that led to a gadget. The bottom line is that we never got the gadget over the goal line.
And so what that taught me, so at this stage of the game, I'm an accidental, med tech entrepreneur. I have no clue what to do next other than publish it. So we went through tech transfer, we got a patent, we did all the stuff. We did all the stuff you're supposed to do. We never got it over the goal line. So what that taught me was, one, every white coat thinks they have a great idea. Two, most of them don't, including me. I'm not disparaging basic science or basic research. What I'm saying is that if your goal is to get an idea to a patient and commercialize something, most white coats have no clue how to do that, including me.
The third was, when I looked around at the ecosystem, I didn't like what I saw. In other words, to the ecosystem that is medical education, training, and development toward medical school residency and fellowship and clinicians. What about money? What about IP? What about reg affairs? What about et cetera, et cetera, et cetera? And I didn't like what I saw. And I didn't like what people were telling me, which was, it's up to you. And finally, I thought that that was a pretty large unmet need. So we created something to meet it. And that resulted in the Society of Physician Entrepreneurs.
So bottom line, I retired from practice in 2015 after a very long career in academic science. And what I do now is I educate and teach and write and do stuff, talk about it. I consult to a bunch of companies and I run the Society of Physician Entrepreneurs.
Dr. Trevor Royce: Amazing. It's so funny the way you said that about having this idea and trying to bring it over the finish line and not really knowing how to do it or if it was even worth doing. And I think back towards training and in the clinic and you're on different rotations and these ideas are always being exchanged. Oh, this would be a great business idea. And now I think back at that, I'm like, actually, would it really have been a good business idea? Probably not.
Dr. Arlen Meyers: And you're not doing anybody a favor thinking it is. I have this thing where I think we have too many accelerators. I think we should have more euthanators. In other words, you need to convince me that this idea should never see the light of day until you provide me with evidence that it has potential. And that's basically how I approach people that ask me, what do you think of this idea? Well, that's a whole nother story. My advice is don't take my advice, but that's a whole nother conversation we can get into.
Dr. Tim Showalter: That's so fascinating. Arlen, I have a very similar story where I became an accidental entrepreneur for a company that I founded called Advaray. My observations were very similar in that the advice that I was getting as a physician entrepreneur wasn't that helpful. And it was a very inefficient and frustrating process. I have a couple of follow-up questions I'd like to ask. First, I'm curious, going back to when you started medical school, you said you completed your education at Jefferson, which is where I did residency. It's a great, great place. I'm curious at that time, if we had asked you, if you had entrepreneurial ambitions, did you have any inklings of heading into more of the entrepreneurial type activities or were you a pure physician at that point?
Defining the Physician Entrepreneur and the "Innerpreneur" Mindset
Dr. Arlen Meyers: So this gets to the question of are physician entrepreneurs or entrepreneurs at all made or born and nature, nurture, health conversation. First of all, when we talk about entrepreneurship, everybody's got a different definition. So my definition and in relevance to this conversation about physician entrepreneurs. Sick care or health care, wherever you want to create it, entrepreneurship. I believe entrepreneurship is the pursuit of opportunity under volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous conditions with the goal of creating user-defined value at multiples with a valid business model to achieve the sextuple aim.
So there's lots and lots of different ways to do it. The conventional myth is it's only about creating companies and scale them to be a unicorn. That is not what I'm talking about. It's a way to do it, but there's a bunch of other ways that people listening to this can satisfy the definition of entrepreneurship, healthcare entrepreneurship, or sick care entrepreneurship. And generally those categories are medical practice, entrepreneurship, i.e. private practice. I was in private practice for many years. We can have that conversation. Educational entrepreneurship, what I call edupreneurs, certainly tech entrepreneurs.
Intrapreneurs, the increasing number of employed physicians who are trying to add value to their organization as an employee, you can have that conversation. So what I'm saying is when you look at the landscape of people who think they are entrepreneurs or say to themselves, what do I know? I went to medical school. I'm just here to take care of patients. I don't want to deal with the business of medicine, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. That actually isn't true. In my view, all this is just my thought. It's just back of the envelope stuff.
So my view is that, and to specifically answer your question, I believe that I was at a very young age in what I call an inner, I-N-N-E-R, an innerpreneur. In other words, you have it in you, you just don't know you do. And it takes life to cause what I call that DNA innovator gene expression. In other words, you have innovator DNA. You just don't have the epitopes or whatever you need to translate and transcribe the entrepreneurial protein into end user action.
So I think I was and am now or was an entrepreneur. Where did I get that from? My upbringing and my dad ran a corner drugstore that I worked in when I was eight years old. And actually, if you ask, and lots of people have, what defines the entrepreneurial personality. One general question that seems to pop up over and over again is, how old were you when you first got a job that made money? Now, my first job was selling newspapers on the beach in Atlantic City and working for my father's drug score, packing gelatin capsules, because back in the day, they didn't make gelatin capsules. You had to pack the stuff into the capsule and put it in a brown jar. That was my job.
So, I talk to a lot of medical students and one of the first questions I ask is, how many of you have actually worked for a living? How many of you have actually got a job where you earned money? You had to actually earn the money. It wasn't like you worked in a research lab to got a box checked off for your application or any of this stuff. and I'm shocked, few hands go up. So I think, and that gets to another point, which is, there's about a million practicing clinicians in the United States. I think about 1% of them, and this includes engineers, scientists, data scientists, grad students, anybody in a white coat. I think about one to 2% of them have an entrepreneurial mindset.
Dr. Tim Showalter: Interesting how packing gelatin capsules may have also been your first entry into medicine too.
Dr. Arlen Meyers: Well, you had this olfactory memory. I could still smell my father's drugstore. And he was a professor of pharmacy at Temple. So I got it, the apple doesn't fall far from the tree. So I got into this academic student classroom, whatever. The interesting thing was, his specialty was pharmacognosy. And most folks don't understand what that is. We all know what pharmacology is in pharmacy, but Pharmacognosy is the study of the medicinal value of plants. And of course, it goes back thousands of years. But back in the day when you went to pharmacy school, that was a required course. It's interesting because now fast forward a gazillion years, everybody's interested in the value of plants, medicine, foxglove, marijuana, and all that other stuff. So, it's a cycle.
Dr. Paul Gerrard: That reminds me of my days in practice. I practice physical medicine rehabilitation, so a lot of symptom-based management. And I worked at a hospital and one of the pharmacists at the hospital called me her nuts and berries doctor because we'd have lots of patients where we'd kind of exhaust the conventional pharmacopoeia. And I'd be going, well, what out there is not in the conventional pharmacopoeia. And even if the evidence is weak, if we're talking about symptom management, it's not opioids. And if it works for the patient, it works.
You've made this comment to the effect that there's a difference between teaching someone to be a surgeon versus teaching surgery. And the same applies to entrepreneurs. And I'll say that having been in consulting and consulted to a lot of early stage companies, that really resonates with me. But let me ask, what did you mean by that?
The Critical Gap in Medical Education: The Business of Medicine
Dr. Arlen Meyers: So when you go to med school, the question comes up, well, how'd you decide to be blank? How'd you decide to be a radiation oncologist, an ENT surgeon, M&R, whatever? So again, my view is that the determinants are, was it a good fit? Because to me, it's like dating. In other words, we all know that each specialty has a certain culture and a certain personality. And if your personality, that assumes that you've been exposed to the specialty. Because nowadays, a lot of med students don't get to rotate on things they may actually want to do.
We all on this panel know that that's the luck of the draw. If you want to get a dermatology residence and you want to rotate through derm, there's only a certain number of spots for med students. So you either get it or you don't. If you rotate through something and it's a good fit and you feel comfortable with it, ENT surgeons have a certain personality, you guys do. So is there a fit between your personality and the specialty? And usually that is determined by number two, which is, did you have a good time with the residents? Because when you rotate through, 98% of the time you're spending with the residents, not with the attending. And so are these folks friendly? Are they having a good time? Are they grumpy? Or are they just constantly bitching and moaning? And you get this culture translation is, did you like it? And third, the specialty itself.
What do you do when you're a radiation oncologist or a surgeon or whatever? What time of day do you get up? I think that's the first note on the decision tree in terms of specialty choice. Do you want to get up before six o'clock in the morning and start working at 5 a.m. Or do you want to start working at nine o'clock? That's OK. You have your own gig. I happen to get up at O Dark Hundred and I still do. It's just something I did. So there's a lot of factors that go into it.
Now, med students essentially self-select into the specialty. And I think when you show up in our residency or with me as an attending, I'm assuming that you have a surgical mindset and that that mindset is such that everything that goes with being a surgeon, the obvious one is your technical ability and your ability to do stuff and build things or think on the spot or do all that other stuff. But if you don't have that, it's really hard for me to teach you how to be a surgeon. I can teach you till the cows come home how to take out a larynx, but I can't teach you how to be a surgeon.
Again, reflecting on a large amount of time as an attending, generally about 10 to 11% of residents drop out of the residency program because it's a bad fit. Now, some of them are just bad actors, drug, alcohol, God knows what. But most of them knock on the door, and I can remember this all the time. They knock on the door, and I know exactly what they're going to say. Dr. Meyers, I'm not sure I want to be an ENT doctor. Now, if that happens in the first year of the residency, great. If it happens in the first two weeks, even better. But if it happens in the third year of a fourth year residency, that is a lot of brain damage.
So I'm trying to encourage people to get exit ramps without being a pariah. And this then backs into the story of the medical students need an exit ramp because many of them, so I said I asked two questions. Number one, how many of you ever heard of living? And number two, how many of you want to go into private practice? Zero, literally zero. It used to be maybe 15, 20%. Now it's zero. For all the reasons. Well, what are you going to do with these folks? What are they going to do? A lot of them don't even want to do a residency. So the last majority of medical students in this generation, and now residents, they want to do something other than see patients. The bad news is the exit ramps to do that are difficult. And if you decide to do that, you're going to get a lot of backlog. You're a pariah, basically. We kick you out of the club. And you've just trashed eight years of education and someone who could add a lot of value to the system, but we just throw them away. So I just don't think that's right. So that's part of the message that I'm trying to get across in what we're doing with the Society of Physician Entrepreneurs.
And the bottom line is, ask 100 doctors, if you knew then what you know now, what would you wish you had been taught in medical school? The business of medicine, because that's what contributes to career satisfaction and success. It's not which of 53 drugs do you prescribe for depression. That's important, but it's not going to get you there. So I'm trying to instill that into the medical education and eliminate most MD-MBA programs, having created one myself at Colorado. It's just a bad idea. We should be teaching the business of medicine in medical school, not in business schools.
Dr. Trevor Royce: A lot of this is avoiding decision regret. And part of that is making sure your expectations are matched with reality. And I think a great way to do that, to your point, is these exposure to things like the business of medicine in medical school, different specialties so you can find your people. Or maybe it's even doing some sort of work before you go down to medicine, either packing pills or in my case, in North Carolina, I worked at a Christmas tree farm lot and I knew I never wanted to do that for a profession. So I went to medical school instead and never looked back. So you need these experiences to make sure you're grounded in what you're about to walk into.
This dovetails nicely into the Society of Physician Entrepreneurs that you started, as I understand, in 2011 to formalize some of this for physicians in the community. Can you tell a little bit about how it's structured and what you offer as part of this?
The Creation of the Society of Physician Entrepreneurs (SoPE)
Dr. Arlen Meyers: It's always good to hear the creation story. So I'll give you the very brief creation story. Because of what I've just been describing, myself and several other people thought we had identified an unmet need. That is, how do we help the average grunt in the trenches get an idea to a patient? That was the idea. At the, I think, 2008 annual meeting of the American Academy of Otolaryngology, myself and another guy showed up. And we thought this might be a good idea to incubate or pilot through the academy. The basic idea being ENT docs are gadgeteers. So we like med tech and gadgets and tools, instruments and all that, like ophthalmologists and orthopods.
It's another one of these personalities of the specialty. So we like gadgets. I said, why don't we create something to allow our members to create gadgets and maybe help them create a company? And then the Academy would take maybe an interest in the company and generate non-dues revenue. So that was the idea. So sure enough, show up in Chicago, McCormick Place, huge convention center. And nobody knew anything about this. So we called this the ENTpreneurs Club, the Entrepreneurs Club, because we thought that was cute. Sure enough, we get a room, no food, 5:30 in the morning before the pharma breakfast, handed out a bunch of flyers and 65 people showed up. And we said to them, here's the idea. What do you think? And they said, great idea. I have no idea what you're thinking. I don't know any details, but it sounds like a really good idea. Why don't you go for it as long as you do all the work? I said, okay. That was the beginning of the Society of Physician Entrepreneurs, which we eventually led and spun out of the academy after piloting it in 2011.
Now we are all over the world. And essentially, we're a global not-for-profit open. It's an open network. Anybody can join. Sick care cannot be fixed from inside. Has to be outside in. And the mission is to help our members, help other members get their ideas to patients. So it's a very large dating service. And I tell people it's a cross between Rotary and Match.com. If you have an idea and you're clueless, you have no idea who to contact, you have three people you're connected to on LinkedIn and two of them are in your specialty, we just have very narrow networks, let alone outside networks. So we provide you with a platform to meet people who can help you kill your idea orally and do you a favor or help you take the next step. And it's a subscription model. So it's pretty cheap. It's like 80 bucks a year, but we have all kinds of stuff that we offer for that. So I think it's pretty good value.
Dr. Tim Showalter: Arlen, I know that you also have a newsletter as part of that and that you write regularly with a goal to administering some educational content for physicians and members of the community. Can you comment a little bit about how you approach your writing? I'm even interested in how often do you do it? Is this a daily practice that you have? I think it'd be interesting for listeners to hear a little more context on that.
The Forgotten Skill: Why Physician Entrepreneurs Must Learn to Sell
Dr. Arlen Meyers: So it gets down to the purpose of it. So what is the purpose? So the short answer is, I write every day. Why? So let's start with the why. Because the idea is, what I'm trying to do is to not only inform, but inspire. I'm trying to get people. I can't teach anybody anything. This goes back to Socrates. All I can do is make you think. And if I can make you think about options as far as career progression and strategy, great. That's my objective.
So what I do is I write every day, but I essentially use all kinds of distribution channels, LinkedIn, Substack, LinkedIn newsletter. And SoPE provides members with education in these forms and online video, YouTube, podcasts like this one, and access to resources, networks, mentors, experience, peer support, and non-clinical career guides. People say, well, how do you do this? I don't want to be presumptuous, but I've written 3,000 LinkedIn articles. And I have a pretty active Substack. So people say, how do you do that?
Are you using just ChatGPT to write all this stuff and you're just ghosting it? I can honestly say that no. In fact, I just wrote another article on how to write articles without using ChatGPT and the reasons why you should do that. The bottom line is at one point in my career, I thought a really good idea would for me to be a jazz pianist. And I had this vision of sitting behind a piano at a really nice hotel with a tip jar in a tuxedo. And all my friends would come in and put money in the jar. Well, the problem is, if you want to be a jazz pianist, you got to play the piano. Because you can't think you want to do it. I was not very good at it. So I said, well, maybe that's not such a good idea. But I still have the piano in my living room. And every now and then I fool around with it. But I am not a pianist. But it sounded like a good idea at the time.
But it's really important. And that's another skill that I think we have neglected. If you are in this entrepreneurial gig and the entrepreneurial mindset, like I described it, I think the biggest gap in medical education is we don't teach medical students, A, the business of medicine, and B, how to sell. So when someone, a medical student says, I want to do a sabbatical or a side gig or something, what do I do? I said, get a job selling something. Most of them don't do it. They go to Europe, but they should go with a startup or somebody and learn to sell something. Because I think that's a pretty core entrepreneurial skill that people don't understand. And in my writing, I'm trying to sell the vision of what we're trying to do with the Society of Physician Entrepreneurs.
Dr. Paul Gerrard: So that important to sell something, that was a hard lesson I personally had to learn when I entered practice that we didn't get taught in medical school, especially when you're downstream. You have to figure out what am I offering to even the primary care physicians? Why should they send me a patient? You've talked a lot about what medical school does and doesn't provide and what residency does and doesn't provide in terms of education and what the Society of Physician Entrepreneurs, where you fill in that gap. Do you see the role of, or do you see the entrepreneur clinician ecosystem evolving over the next five years, either through the work that you are doing or maybe through the evolution of the education we're providing in medical school and residency?
The Future of the Physician Entrepreneur Ecosystem
Dr. Arlen Meyers: Yes. So there's several aspects to the ecosystem. Of course, one of them, and the main one is the medical education business. It's all a business. So the medical education business, whether it's pre-med, and I would include pre-med as part of that. Now, actually, I include P through 20 as part of this. In other words, developing the entrepreneurial mindset. And I don't know how many of you have kids that are in elementary school or middle school, but they're learning ChatGPT, they're learning value, they're learning entrepreneurship in some things. Some have noticed that STEM has run out of steam. I think part of that has to do with a certain political environment that we're in, in the war on science. And that's unfortunate. And we're seeing that further up the pipeline. But the point is, you have to start beginning this mindset early on in life. And I always say, don't let school get in the way of your education. You could get all the degrees you want after your name, but that's not going to teach you how to do this. So you have to have the experience.
70% of what you learn is experience. 20% is who the people you meet. 10% is what you learned in class. And now 25 to 30% of medical students don't go to class. So what they're learning is through large language models or stuff that you download. I don't even know why we even do that. What's the point? You can learn all this stuff on YouTube, like Khan Academy. So to your point, to your question, one part of the ecosystem obviously is medical education, training, and development.
Second part is clinical practice, the environment of clinical practice and what that teaches you or doesn't teach you in the hidden curriculum. And the third piece of it has to do with the extra medical ecosystem. That is the innovation ecosystem where you live or work. And this gets to the point of this cannot be fixed from inside. If you think you're going to learn medical innovation at a medical meeting, you are sorely mistaken. You're just going to see this. There's that old joke. I have a friend who was a plastic surgeon and we used to trade jokes. He said, you know, I can tell when I'm getting old, when I go to a meeting, when I see the same slides, but a different life. So you just don't learn really that much. It's not that innovative. In your field, I don't know how many things made a difference, but I can tell you in my field, there's a lot of me too's and copycats and 510ks, all that other stuff. There's really not a lot of really major change.
So my suggestion then is that you've got to get out and the next ideas are going to come from aerospace. They're going to come from space medicine. They're going to come from obviously data. They're going to come from material science. They're going to come from quantum, whatever. ChatGPT didn't come from a genius doctor. GPS didn't come from some genius doctor. Telemedicine didn't come from some genius doctor. All of these things that we're using are outside-in inventions and vice versa. So the point I make to people is you absolutely positively have to build your external robust network. And if you don't, you're just sitting around. It's not going to help you.
Dr. Trevor Royce: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Was there anything that you wanted to cover that we missed? Or are there any final words of advice for the next generation of physician entrepreneurs?
Final Advice: Making It Personal, But Not Taking It Personally
Dr. Arlen Meyers: There's a lot of advice, but one of them is don't take my advice because my story is just very, everybody's story is personal. Just because I did it doesn't mean you should do it that way or whatever. It's your own, it's your own pathway. But I will say that if you are interested in what we have been talking about, that is pursuing some sort of entrepreneurial role, you have to make it personal, but not take it personally.
And what I mean by that is, particularly if you're doing a startup, or actually if you're creating anything internally, this is really hard stuff with a lot of resistance. And therefore, you need the mindset, means, motivation, metrics, and monitoring to be successful. It starts with your mindset. If you don't have an entrepreneurial mindset and you think that a clinical mindset is going to get you there, you're wrong. So you have to develop it. And you can do this. It's doable. It's not like your personality looks fixed when you're 10. The mindset can be changed and there are ways of doing that. And that's a whole nother conversation. But that's what you should do.
But if you decide to try to get a gadget over the goal line or institute a new program in your hospital or create a new med tech thing or whatever, you have to be persistent and you have to be really intrinsically motivated. There has to be a little voice in your head that keeps telling you, I'm not done yet. I know I can do this. I can do this. It's just something that is psychological, I believe. And actually, when you peel away the onion, I think we could get into the weeds in this, but I think it reveals an unmet psychic need. And whatever that is, keeps the clock ticking. It's like an ever ready bunny. So that's the make it personal part.
But 98% of the time you will fail. So when you fail, you don't take it personally. It's part of the drill. If you're not having complications, you're not treating enough patients. Same deal. If you don't lose a patient, you're not doing enough surgery. It's the same sort of thing. So that's my advice. And if you don't tap into that, do yourself a favor because we're all going to need doctors. So just be a doctor and take care of patients. Do that well. But don't get involved in something where you're just not wired to do it.
Dr. Tim Showalter: That's great advice. And I think that's a great place for us to wrap up. Arlen, thank you so much for your time today. I think it's clear that you've got a lot of wisdom to share with us all. So I really appreciate it.
Dr. Arlen Meyers: Thanks for having me.
Dr. Trevor Royce: Well, that wraps up this episode of Health Tech Remedy. This is our special series on physician innovators. Thanks for joining us Dr. Arlen Meyers. And don't forget for our audience to subscribe and drop us a review. If you know a physician innovator we should feature, let us know. We'd love to tell their story.
