We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Seema Patel a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Seema, so great to have you on the platform. There’s so much we want to ask you, but let’s start with the topic of self-care. Do you do anything for self-care and if so, do you think it’s had a meaningful impact on your effectiveness?
As many physicians, I was demoralized and burned out working for a large health care facility. There were too many patients, too many messages, increasing departmental projects and other work that left my inbox in a perpetual state of being full. I was going home frustrated, disgruntled and angry which affected my sons and my husband. I was becoming everything I never wanted to be. When my department told me that I had to see more patients because I had a long waiting list, I lost it. I turned in my resignation letter with a 90-day notice. Seeing more patients I felt would be the end of me. I knew I had to open my own practice but first I had to heal.
As a functional and integrative physician, the healing journey is combination of lifestyle, nutrition, spiritual healing, trauma work centered around creating love, peace and joy. These are the emotions that allow us to vibrate at the highest level and promote natural healing and detoxification. I clearly was not starting at this place!
To help overcome burn out, I did many things. While working at the hospital, I started neurofeedback. This is a non-medication intervention for many mental health conditions such as depression, anxiety, ADHD, trauma, stress, etc. This is a computer-based program that assesses brain waves from the small sensors placed on the scalp. While listening to gentle music and watching a screen with mesmerizing shapes and images, the music will pause when the brain enters a negative or stress pattern. My small pauses occurred every 2 seconds. My nervous system was extremely dysregulated from years of stress. Regular neurofeedback, started to calm my emotions allowing me to respond more appropriately and more authentically. basically, I was not grumpy!
Once I left the hospital, I relaxed for four months. My family and I traveled, I spent time in nature hiking and riding my bike. The more time we spend in nature, the calmer our nervous system becomes. I focused on creative work which I never did as a doctor. I read fun fiction books. I painted, colored, learned how to play the piano (I am still very bad at this). I spent time meditating and journaling. This was not easy for me because I am always on the go. I had to give myself permission to relax and not feel guilty about sitting. From childhood to residency, it was ingrained in me that if you were not doing something, you were lazy. Sitting and doing these right brain activities was difficult and fun all at the same time! Clearly, I had to unravel many bad habits I accumulated over the years.
I knew from my practice, that some of these habits can be from past experiences as well as past trauma. I never thought I had trauma but time in meditation illustrated the trauma I had experienced in my life (not like abuse) but from life. I grew up as an immigrant kid who moved every 1-2 years which was traumatic. In medicine watching patients die and not knowing how to deal with this was traumatic. Listening to my patients trauma was a secondary trauma and lastly, my youngest son had two near death anaphylactic reactions which caused much maternal guilt and worry. Learning to release trauma required therapy like EMDR: eye movement desensitization and reprocessing as well as energy work. I used energy medicine to work on the areas that my trauma work seemed to be less effective. This energy work deepened my meditations and allowed me greater access to my intuition.
Now that I am working regularly, I have less time, but I try to stay very consistent with my self-care. My energy work is done every fe months. I have a neurofeedback session every month. My weekly exercise routine now includes two days of hiking and yoga with 3 days of weights and cardio. I meditate daily but I admit my journaling has stopped. I am not always able to read as much, but I play many puzzles with my son online which I really enjoy!
Self-care is not perfect but a constant management of time. Spending 1-1.5 hours daily on yourself is critical. This usually does not happen all at once, but it is something that needs to be built into your life and with your family. I try to incorporate my family into my self-care, so it is a family event full of love, laughter and a memory for them in the future.
Thanks, so before we move on maybe you can share a bit more about yourself?
I am a functional medicine physician with a private practice serving families and individuals who wish to have a healthier life. I look for the root cause of their dis-ease or disease and use a nutrition, lifestyle, and key supplements to address this. What I love most is watching people improve their health. As a physician, I speak with many very sick patients who have not improved with conventional medicine. Working with them, their trauma, their multiple causes is fulfulling to me.
Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?
I would recommend that all young people assess what in their private lives fulfills them. I think young people are too busy and have limited spiritual, emotional and mental practices to improve their well-being. I recommend learning about heart rate variability and what improves this. Remember, heart rate and heart rate variability are different. Heart rate is just the rate that your hear is pumping at. The heart rate variability (HRV) is the beat to beat measurement of your nervous system between heart beats. This helps illustrate what your nervous system is doing. A high heart rate variability by age indicates a well regulated nervous system. A low one indicates chronic stress and the ability to endure but with very little resilience. We need the ability to endure (manage what is happening) and the resilience (the ability to pick ourselves up if some event happens to us). Make self-care a priority, especially for parents who tend to neglect this due to time constraints. Create a village around you to help so you can participate in self-care without guilt. And lastly, do not operate from guilt, embarrassment, shame or anger. These are very low vibrating energies. Try to always come from a place of love and gratitude which are the highest vibrations humans can experience.
How can folks who want to work with you connect?
My dream is to make functional medicine care more accessible to Americans rather than the top 10%. I envision both an online and in person whole health community that would provide mostly group visits to decrease cost of care. The focus would be on providing nutrition from local farmers, CSAs, etc., movement by connecting community to nature, providers who wish to service a discounted price, functional medicine care, alternative medicine providers for stress management, mental health care, integrative dentistry, and lastly a community that works with one another and helps clean their environment and homes.
This is a big project and will require many types of people ranging from functional medicine providers interested in giving back, food providers, community businesses and organizers, technology companies as well as educational institutions to help spread the word.
There are small examples such as the VA whole health project, small communities that have come together for a specific goal. The blue zone project has the lifestyle and nutrition component, but it cost millions of dollars just to do the research which most communities will not have. I believe there are enough people who would like to be involved in such a project. I am in the brainstorming process and would love to hear your thoughts!
Contact Info:
- Website: healingfamilyfunctionalmedicine.com
- Instagram: @seemampatelmdmph
- Facebook: @HealingFamilyFunctionalMedicine
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/seemampatelmdmph/
