Dr. Chet Donnally on Personal Branding and Spine Surgery

Patients think it helps them, then it helps them and there is a placebo effect to that. I think just having someone that listens to them is important.

Hi everybody and welcome to the podcast. This is Generations md. My name is Stephanie and I'm joined here by my colleague Dr. Sarah Davis, who is also my mother. We just finished talking to Dr. Chet Donnelly. It was an awesome conversation. He is so well spoken, has a great story story and some great insights. So we're so excited for you guys to listen. So, yeah, I don't think we have any updates or anything to say. Do you have anything, mom?

No, I don't think so. But I really, I'm just really enjoying this series. I think it's super fun getting to talk to all these different specialists and it's also fun getting to talk to some people who have some positive things to say about medicine and the specialty that they chose.

Yes. So we are so excited to welcome Dr. Donnelly. He is a practicing spine surgeon here in Dallas, Texas. He's a third generation Texan, grew up here in Dallas, then came back here after his training to practice. He has over 71 peer reviewed publications and has performed over a thousand surgeries. He also has some social media following on Tick Tock and Instagram and YouTube. So yeah, we are really excited to.

Chat with you today. Welcome, welcome.

Well, appreciate it guys.

Just tell us like, you know, just a little bit of your story, how you, how you got into medicine, where you did your training and you know, a little background.

Go back to the very beginning. And then I went to Highland Park High School for high school. After that I went to SMU here in Dallas. And then after that the next 10 years left, did my training. So that included four years of undergraduate. I did that at Texas Tech University. After that med school training at Texas Tech, I went to residency at an orthopedic surgery residency at University of Miami. I was forced in Miami, Florida. And then after residency, which for orthopedics is five years, I did a one year fellowship. That's pretty typical. Most, I don't know the exact number, I'd say 95% probably of orthopedic residents do a one year fellowship after. And almost all of them are one year. Every now and then maybe there's a two year fellowship, but most people do a one year fellowship and mine was in spine surgery. And so usually those are at academic centers of excellence, very, very high volume with some of the more famous people in that field. And mine was in Philadelphia at the Rothman Institute. I completed that And I've been back here in Dallas for a couple years now and practicing the same area I grew up.

Nice.

Nice. That's awesome.

What?

So, like, just kind of going way back, growing up, what made you decide to pursue medicine? Like, what were your parents in the field? Did you realize in college or kind of. When was that pivot made?

So my background in terms of why I went into medicine, what drove me there really started in high school. I had a. I'd say most people going to orthopedics either had a high school sports injury, maybe they played a sport, or they had parent that were ortho. There's usually some pull in terms of going into orthopedics. Mine was the classic high school sports injury. And so that's what drove me into medicine in general and orthopedics specifically, because I was surrounded by those type of doctors and that type of field. You know, I wasn't sure I want to do orthopedics necessarily, but the sports injury was what led me to kind of be surrounded by doctors. I had the guy who did my surgery. I knew he was kind of famous then. It wasn't until now, even, I don't know, 15 years later, I realized he's super famous as a guy named Butch Krishnan. So I always thank him to this day for helping me go into medicine. And the only time he was ever mad at me is when I told him I was going into spine, not shoulder surgery. So otherwise he's extremely supportive.

Okay, nice. Yeah, that's. I feel like that's kind of typical now. Like, go. I feel like you kind of have to know somewhat you want to go into medicine when you start college because you have to take all of those prereqs. And if you realize your sophomore year of college, then it's like you kind of have to go back and backtrack a little bit.

So, yeah, that's advice I give people who don't get into med school or first year out or that are in college and hoping to go. It's. It's not that common. I think it's maybe 30% of people that go straight from college into medical school. And some of that is, you know, you're competing with people that are a couple years out of college and maybe they're more experienced in terms of the other courses that we've taken. Life experience, and that's a little more desirable at times. Or maybe your grades weren't stellar, or that one free med school test you take, the mcat, you didn't do Fantastic. And so that also cost you a year. So it's pretty unusual to go straight from college to med school. But most people going to med school have probably been outstanding students their whole life and they just think, oh, this is just the next step of checking the boxes off. And it's when you don't get into med school that first year that it's a pretty humbling experience. Kind of opens your eyes.

So was yours pretty linear though? You applied your senior year, got in and then continued.

Nope, I'm on that. Applied my first year out of college and didn't get in my first year. And I was kind of shocked. I was like, oh, man, my grades are so good. My MCAT wasn't. Mcat, right? Yeah, my MCAT wasn't. It was fine. It was average and below average the first year I applied. So that was probably one of. Sure. Other factors that didn't allow me to get in my first year. Then you also kind of realize, you know, you can be like a fraternity president. That's not that cool compared to other people who started a pharmacy or an orphanage in Africa. These other things like, oh, solve world peace. Yeah. Too much about this privileged kid coming out of smu and there's other people with much different backgrounds or experiences that you're competing against. So you know, you're only as good as your competition sometimes. You maybe don't know who your competition is until you start kind of get out into the real world. Not just your, not just your undergrad years.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, sometimes there's people that had a whole lot more to overcome and so there's a lot more that they can talk about in those applications and all of that. So just.

I was gonna. So you get to medical school. Like, how did. So did you go into medical school your first year? You're like, I want to do orthopedics. I want to be an ortho bro. Like, that's going to be what I go for just because of that injury. Or were you a little more open minded and exploratory once you actually got into Open minded?

Definitely open minded. I wasn't dead set on ortho. In fact, I still. There was this one guy who was in my med school class that he just wasn't that well liked. He was maybe like 5 or 10 years old than us. Just a very tough, tough personality. I think him friends, but like maybe just on the surface. And he was so gung ho ortho and everything. He wanted to do ortho, ortho, ortho it actually, like, made us, like, not want to go into ortho, because I was really between put Christian on and this guy that was, like, my only experience with it. And I was like, oh, I don't want. If this guy's doing ortho, I don't want to do ortho, which is a ridiculous thing to think, right? Like, I haven't seen that guy since med school. So, like, it's not like we're linked forever, but it's kind of turned away from it because of that aspect of it. And it wasn't until doing some of my rotations in the orthopedics department and kind of actually getting to see what it's like is what turned on to it more. But I think most people have to decide, do you want to do a medicine background or a surgery background or radiology? You can kind of argue that's different than either of those two. And the good news is, the way med school stuff, you don't really need to make that choice in your first one or two years. You really don't need to make that until maybe going into your third year.

I think that's interesting that you say that. You know, one person can kind of steer you, and I think that happens a lot. It points you in one direction or another. Sometimes you do a rotation and you just really, you know, bond with somebody who's one of your mentors on that rotation, and then you decide you want to do that specialty. And sometimes it is more based on that type of personality rather than actually your skills, skill set, or that. So that's interesting, especially that yours was, like, a med student that was steering you away from ortho.

Interesting. The same thing with picking spine. Like, I didn't know I wanted to do spine, but we had this conference where the famous spine doctor from New York come in town named Dr. Qureshi, and we went to dinner with him. Like, people that were somewhat interested in spine, we all went to dinner with him. And just hearing him talk about spine surgery and, you know, how efficient he is with his cases compared to maybe what I was seeing. And I was like, man, spine surgery sounds pretty good compared to what he's doing. And, you know, he probably has no idea, but he was a big influence. I was like, man, if this guy's doing it, like, this guy's awesome. I respect him. I love the way he's talking about it. It sounds like a good way to do it. So that's kind of one of my first of many steps that Led me to spine surgery.

Yeah.

And when was that?

Probably my second or third year of residency.

Okay, okay, okay.

So you didn't. So during. When you're going through your orthopedic residency, you didn't really know what direction you were going to go as far as what type of orthopedics you were going.

To practice for a lot of people. Similar to the med school. You kind of know a general idea, like maybe in med school, you maybe know if you want to do a surgical field or medicine field. And then in orthopedics, maybe, you know, you have it narrowed down to two or three of the fields. And then there's a lot. You have spine surgery, orthopediatrics, and that's usually pediatric trauma. Could be pediatric scoliosis. A little different argument. You have musculoskeletal oncology. So tumors of muscles, of bone. It's a big, big field. There's hip and knee replacements, there's shoulder, upper extremity. So shoulder and elbow, hand, butt and ankle trauma. So there's a bunch of different sports medicine. So there's a bunch of different fields within ortho. Some of those overlap a lot, but some of those kind of like spine is just fine.

You just talk about you went to Highland park and then went to smu. And I don't know if you always wanted to come back to Dallas, but one, did you know that you wanted to come back here? And then two, I feel like.

Would.

Be tough to come back here and do something like orthopedic surgery in any sort of realm, spine, you know, hip knee. Just because we have some of the best surgeons in the country that practice here. So, like, how were you able to kind of get a foot in the door in a place like Dallas and then did. Was that the plan all along?

My wife is from Dallas also, so we were very much dead set on Dallas. We still think we would have made. I would have residency in Miami. So we kind of thought about Miami. We liked Miami. Miami has a tough reputation in terms of, you know, bachelor bachelor parties and South beach and LeBron James and all that stuff. But it's really, once you get out of that small area, family friendly city, a good place to live, good place to grow a family. We started seeing that the longer we were there, kind of meeting other people with young families. So we did entertain Miami for a little bit. But once we started getting closer to that finish line, we realized it's nice to have your parents around. And both of our parents are from Dallas. So going Back to your parents is always a good answer. So I started interviewing for jobs kind of early on and looking around for different spine surgery jobs. So in terms of the other competition in Dallas, it's like any other major city where there's, you know, every city I'm sure says they're oversaturated with sub specialists and specialized doctors and just one of those things you got to deal with, but find ways to separate yourself and you know, at the end of the day, I'm probably more advantageous from a marketing standpoint because it is my neighborhood. I'm not some doctor from, not this neck of the woods or some, some New York doctor coming down here, California doctor. I'm kind of, I'm not only a Texan, I'm a Dallas Texan. Multiple generation Dallas. Like this is kind of my community. I don't ever plan on leaving it necessarily. And there is more of a marketing aspect that I'm a homegrown local guy just trying to take care of my local community.

Yeah, for sure.

Yeah. So do you have kids?

I have two kids and a bun in the oven, as we say, so.

Oh my goodness, how exciting.

Exactly. So I have a six year old, a two and a half year old, and then my wife's due in July.

Wow, that's amazing.

Thank God. A girl. We have two boys and thankfully now a girl.

Oh, yeah.

That's a busy, busy, busy time. And so along those lines, you know, surgery specialties and you know, orthopedics and spine, certainly no exception to that. How do you feel about the lifestyle? I mean, are you able to get home to have dinner with your family or do you have call a lot or how do you feel your lifestyle is?

It's great. It's one of those things where a lot based on kind of what setting you're in, academic versus private practice. And at the end of the day, maybe how you're compensated for your time with the group. Having the private practice setting more so than the other settings. It's one of those things where time is money and like you get reimbursed based on the patients you see and sometimes the surgeries you do. So you, if you stop working, fine, but you're just not making an income. You're not really on a salary. So with that said, it's kind of like you can turn on the faucet as much as you want or turn off the faucet as much. You just have to find a nice, happy balance. Academic medicine, which still has some of those same incentives, maybe Has a somewhat different lifestyle balance because there's a little more network of incentives to where maybe it's not as volume based, maybe a certain productions or bonus based. But my argument with academic medicine, not a reason not to take it or to pick it, but my wife would sometimes say, man, it seems like that would be easier. I'm like, well, not really because you have a lot more incentive to travel for go to conferences and you're not being paid a dime for any of those conferences. You have a lot more. You're getting there probably every day 6am to do rounding with the residents or a journal club or some continuing medical education with the residents. And that sounds all cool. When you're in residency or med school, you know, you think it'd be great to be in academic medicine, but man, that's another several hours a day where you're not there. Any morning breakfast with the family that you're not getting compensated for. So you can argue it either way.

Yeah, I think that's true.

Yeah. I think just talking about how you get paid based on the amount of patients that you see and how you kind of have control of that dial, do you feel like just being in such a competitive field, like spine surgery, you have like the pressure of the people around you to kind of turn up that dial? Um, we've talked to a couple people who just feel like if they were to kind of slow down a little bit, they feel like there's like some sort of shame around that or some. There's just a pressure to work as hard as you can and make the most money you can. Like, do you feel like that? And if so, how are you able to kind of like balance?

I think it's just based on. It's probably not a broad statement for all private practice. It's kind of how your group is structured. In our group, at least we're four now. We just added, we just hired my best friend January 1st. Now a five person spine group. And it's kind of a lot of the way this private practice works from a financial standpoint is you have your overhead and each month you have to pay your overhead. And then after that that's your take home pay in a way. So if you want to slow down, great. You kind of just have to make sure you're still covering the benefits and salary for the staff. And therefore when you know you're working, you have a realize you kind of run a small business at the end of the day. We have about 25 employees, 20 employees in our group. And, you know, they're. We're only making money from when the doctors do stuff. So it's. Don't necessarily realize that you are running a small business and you're the hog in that wheel. And so if I want to take off a month or two, that's fine, but we still have to pay our staff. There's not like someone overshadowing the whole thing that says you can or can't do that. In terms of scheduling, it's very much up to the individual doctor. That might not be applicable in every single group, but that is one of the nice parts about maybe the private practice aspect. And that's what I think you hear about a lot of doctors saying that they're losing private practice world is that autonomy. And that's what autonomy is, that you kind of can do what you need for your schedule that still benefits your life.

Yeah, yeah, that's. That really echoes our. We talked to a cardiologist last week that just really echoed like almost that exact same thing. And just talking about how, I mean, it's. It's just nice to have that decision be yours, whether or not you. If you want to take that time off and you, you know, you know, if patients are going to be dissatisfied or, you know, you know, you're going to make less money or all that, but you get to do your own calculation. And nobody is telling you what that calculation is. And it just, I don't know, it does feel better.

Stephanie. It's the same on the reverse side. Even today, it's supposed to be a full operative day for me, but through one patient got Covid, the other guy didn't get clearance. So I said one little case in the morning, and I knew that a couple of days ahead of time, maybe on Thursday or Wednesday of next week. And I was like, hey, let's open clinic. So it's not like, you know, I talk about so much close, but I open a clinic all the time. When I see we didn't fill an operative day, I open clinic. And that's also great. I don't have to. It's the same argument. I don't have to go through all these barriers or request permission. I just have to talk to my practice manager, make sure we have like X ray tech here or, you know, you need some people here helping you. But that's also a nice advantage. And I'm much, much, much more often opening clinics when I don't feel an OR day and I have a couple hours in the afternoon, I'd rather see my community and see my patients. So then that goes back to the whole thing. It's the work life balance. I could be out on the golf course or hanging out with my family or things like that. But you're using that extra time to work. Well, now I'm being a little hypocritical saying I have a good work life balance. So you just have to find a good balance. But so in the career building years where I want to be here, I enjoy being here. It's fun for the most part. Almost every patient's super happy with you. They're complimentary. You have just a great work environment. So I've had my mother in law come up to work here every now and then to either get X rays or something like that with my father in law. They're like, well, no wonder you like it here. Everyone worships you. You have patients that bring you gifts, you have reps that bring you a coffee. You have. Everyone's just so nice to you. The patients are just crying that they love you. It's like, no wonder you like going to work. It's like, yeah, it's pretty great.

Yeah, sometimes that's a little different from what it's like at home when your kids are trying to boss you around and complaining about that. Like, hey man, I'm going to work where they like me.

Yeah, exactly. So I like. Yeah, you lose hair at a fast rate in your early 30s. Yes. But it's also like super rewarding and you enjoy it. But you also have to remind yourself of that. I know it sounds silly and very cliche and something that's on a coffee mug, but I do have to remind myself that at times that the rewarding parts of it.

Yeah, yeah, that's awesome. Kind of shifting gears a little bit. I just want to bring up the fact that there's so much, I feel like pseudoscience around back pain and back issues. Like there's all these back pain specialists and chiropractors. How do you feel about sort of that industry just being a trained spine surgeon?

It's one of those things, if I can't beat them, I have to join them. Is kind of my first disclosure. And my other disclosure is I think I need. We can't just shun them away. We as spine surgeons can't say, oh, all chiropractors are bad, all stem cells and injections don't work. You should only come to us. That's just not accurate and it's not helpful for me. And I think a lot of my Spine surgeon colleagues agree is two thumbs up. 100% support chiropractic doctors for most things. I don't want them doing those widespread tractions. I have videos on my YouTube channel talking about it where they're holding your neck and they put the jerking motion on your neck. There's just no role for that and it's frankly very dangerous. But in terms of deep tissue massage, gentle traction with their hands on your lower lumbar, spine, cupping, acupuncture, deep tissue massages, there's great roles for that. And if patients think it helps them, then it helps them. And there is a placebo effect to that. I think just having someone that's a trained medical professional, whatever that term officially means, listen to them, kind of hear them out when they say their body hurts everywhere and getting this massage of their arm helps their entire body pain. Well that doesn't 100% make any sense. But I think patients just having someone that listens to them is important. And I think patients paying money to get someone to listen to them is actually a. There's been studies show that that's helpful. They think they're act, they're getting care. And I'm not disagreeing with that necessarily. But I think there is a role for some of this more holistic medicine. Even though I don't understand it because I went to medical school and I didn't learn about it, doesn't mean it's not false. There is definitely a role for the non operative providers that aren't MD or didn't go to medical school to be helping our patients.

Yeah, I like that perspective a lot. I think maybe some issues come up. Like my boyfriend went to go see one of these back specialists that he thought was an MD and a, they X rayed him and kind of essentially said that he had a lot wrong with his back. And then we're trying to kind of push him into doing some operation that might not necess, he might not need. So I think there's issues definitely on that side of things. But I would say that there is.

A big issue in the spine field right now with pain management doctors doing spine surgery. Yeah, that's a little of a tricky thing because there's a lot of things that the pain doctors can do like injections, ablations, those things are great. They should be doing those all day. But there are certain devices out there that they might be offering patients that don't exactly have a formal training on. Maybe that's a weekend course or maybe they say they've done Hundreds. And so now they get it. But the issue with spine surgeons is that those pain doctors don't know how to manage the complications. If something goes south, they don't know how to reverse it that well. And they also don't really understand the biomechanics of where your hips are in relations of your spine. So maybe they're doing these procedures on these patients and they're making things pretty tough to fix later on. Usually say, if you're going to get spine surgery, you should have a spine surgeon doing your spine surgery. But then I also don't want that to be a blanket statement. There could be small rural areas in Oklahoma or Nevada that they don't have spine surgeons there. Maybe there is a really good ethical pain doctor there, and he or she's really trying to help the patients. And, you know, maybe the patient's a little more debilitated and they wouldn't handle a big surgery. So maybe there is a role for them doing these small procedures. So it's not a blanket statement, and it shouldn't apply everywhere. But I would like to think in big major cities, or if you're not too far from big major cities, the spine surgeon should be doing the spine surgery.

Yeah, I like that. I know you do. Minimally invasive spine surgery is like, what exactly does that mean? And then also when, because spine surgery is a big deal. So when would you actually recommend somebody to be operated on?

It's significantly impacting their quality of life, is the best answer. And what that means is patients are like, what does that mean? I usually say, if your condition is preventing you from going on family vacations or booking those, like, you don't want to go on it because you're in too much pain. You can't play with your kids if you can't coach their games, if you can't wrestle with them, if you can't cook dinner for the family, if you can't help with taking the trash out, doing laundry, Just basic things because they're like, oh, well, just hurts my back or it shoots down my leg. Too bad. So I just don't do that stuff. And it doesn't hurt. Well, that's a little ridiculous. I mean, you got to be able to do those things. That's part of life. It's an important part of life. So those are the patients where I say, now, that doesn't necessarily mean you need surgery, but you definitely need an evaluation with a spine surgeon. That doesn't mean you're getting surgery. I think patients are afraid that if you go see a spine surgeon, it's going to be like seeing a used car salesman where they're just going to push you into surgery and they're just going to manipulate what you're thinking. And that's definitely could be true. And I would hate that if that's your experience. But speaking for me at least, and I think this represents most spine surgeons, we only, we are good ethical people. We wouldn't have gotten this far if we weren't. But again, there's outliers, of course, in every field. Accounting, personal finance, wealth management, all that stuff. But my thought is, if you can't do the things you want to do in life, that's when you should see the spine surgeon. Let the spine surgeon be the quarterback. Let the spine surgeon tell you to go to chiropractic care. Let the spine surgeon send you to pain management, send you to physical therapy. Let the spine surgeon be the quarterback. Not pain management doctor, not the family medicine doctor. Who are great. We need family medicine doctors in primary. But sometimes I like being the quarterback so that I can kind of keep monitoring it.

I'm happy for you to be the quarterback. That's, you know, if somebody's having that. Well, because they do. Sometimes they come back to me with, with certain questions and I don't know the answers to those questions because I'm not a spine surgeon. And so I really want that to be directed by somebody who has that level of training that just, that just makes sense. That's a good, good use of everybody's time along those lines. I mean, out of all the patients you see in clinic, like, what percentage do you end up operating on?

Maybe 20. And that might be higher than normal. And that's not necessarily me personally, but again, kind of going back to my practice, it's, you know, we're an independent practice, so people aren't coming to me just off the street like, oh, I've heard about Texas spying consultants. I just wanted to see what you meant. Where usually most of the patients I get. I'm a tad different because of my social media stuff, so I get a lot from that. But outside of that, most of the patients we get are referrals. And so it's someone who's tried other things and they need spine surgery. So we get. I'm not seeing too many people that just woke up with one day of neck pain and they want to see a spine surgeon. It's usually they've been worked up, they've tried everything, and we're somewhat of their last Resort.

You mentioned your like your social media branding and following. How did you build that and how do you have time? Aren't you just so busy?

It started in residency. I, during residency have to take an exam during that. That's called an in training exam. It's just yet another standardized test. And so with those questions, I decided to make a Instagram account just to put up a case and then have questions. ABC trying to make Instagram a little educational. And I figured maybe if I made a question I'd like forever would remember this and I could put up educational things to build like a following and later I can change this into something. When I saw you could change your name on Instagram, I was like, that's interesting. Maybe I'll build a following of orthopedic doctors and then only later I'll change it if I need to. So that was kind of my plan from early on. And you know, Maybe I made 20 questions initially and then didn't do anything for like a year or two. So it wasn't that much focus on my life. It wasn't really until I got to fellowship where I had some really complex spine things and I start putting up really interesting cases of here's what our pathology is, here's the what happened? What would y' all do? And I'd already done the case, so I wanted to make sure it wasn't like, I'm confused, what should I do? It's hey. And there's a lot of people that do that. And I think that's actually a great role for social media. But that's not what this was at the time. But that really put it on steroids and got wildly out of control in a good way because some of the things I was seeing were things no one in the country or in the world were seeing. And so that got shared. I was engaging, I was tagging other big leaders in spine surgery that were. And they still didn't know who I was. I was still under an alias in a way, like people, you know, there'd be 50 comments about here's what I would do and why. And people would talk to each other. And then two days later I'd post the results, like the three month follow up or the six month follow up from that case. And then, you know, you get a lot of kudos. And to be fair, fellowship wasn't necessarily my case. It was kind of my attending's case in a way. And it was de identified stuff, but it was just a really good way to help educate other Spine surgeons. And then the next phase of that became TikTok became a little more popular. I guess TikTok is always around, but, like, I would never in my wildest dream think I would even download TikTok because I'm not a high school girl. It's kind of what I would jokingly say. But then I came to realize that is not at all the market for it, and that's just a very dumb way to think about it. And once I. I had one of my other buddies. I've probably mentioned him in multiple other podcasts. Matthew Harb. Matthew Harb. He's a joint replacement doctor in dc. I've actually never met him to this day, but we're like best friends. But he was telling me, hey, you should do all your stuff on TikTok. It's a much better audience than Instagram. And I was like, dude, no way. People don't need, like, young people don't need spine surgery. What are you talking about? He's like, trust me. So I started doing that, and that's where it exploded, and it got pretty easy from there. So once I put on TikTok, then I started becoming much more aware of the social media aspect of it. And then I realized if I do this education, I could do a YouTube channel. And now we're talking as YouTube is really the king of social media. My next transition of, okay, TikTok's cool, but YouTube's where it's at. So that's the very long answer in terms of how did I grow it all. It all started with just posting Case on Instagram and I started doing educational, just me talking on TikTok. And then I put those on YouTube. And now whatever I do on one of them, I just do on all three of them.

That's awesome.

That is awesome. I love that. And I just love that, like, you built this whole community of doctors and for people to have a way to communicate with each other and to bat around ideas and talk about cases. I think because once you get out of the hospital setting, are out of training, and you're in private practice, you can get kind of isolated. So I love, like, people really being connected over that. I think that's fantastic. Knowing everything you know now, would you still choose to go into orthopedics? Would you still choose to be a spine surgeon? Do you have any regrets when you see other friends of yours doing other specialties? Or would you do it all over again?

So knowing what I know now, what, I still go into spine surgery and medicine and Asking me now, several years in practice, the answer is definitely yes. But there are definitely times in medical school and in residency where you don't see that light. You're not super well compensated for your time. You don't have any freedom or flexibility. And it was tough. You know, again, this, My wife would say, this is the world's smallest violin when I complain about these things. But there'd be a stage of our life where all of our friends were getting ski trips or golf trips or things like that, and you just couldn't do any of those things. They didn't have the time. Like, there'd be. I can't remember how many bachelor parties be like, hey, we're all gonna fly out on Thursday. We'll do Friday, Saturday, Sunday. And I'm like, they're like, it's in six months from now, so book your time. I'm like, cool. I'm on a rotation with an attending I've never met and I'm supposed to go ask him if I can take Friday off. I don't even know if I'm on call. It's just not even like your friends wouldn't understand that. They're like, why can't you just request it? It's like, it doesn't work like that. You have to have one of your residents cover for you and they don't know their schedule. And it's just you have no control of your schedule that long ahead of time. But the other thing you're missing, it's usually about 10 years of training, is if you're not doing it in your hometown, which I do encourage people to get out of their hometown, is you're missing 10 years of some of the great active years of your parents life. That stinks.

It's a huge, huge chunk of your life to devote.

But as of now, kind of being several years in private practice, definitely no regrets on that standpoint. And it's a very good time and fun time to be doing medicine.

Yeah. Well, so that's great. And that is great to hear because, you know, sometimes you read these things of people who finally, they expected the pearly gates to open and everything was going to be just perfect once they were in practice and then they found that's not the case, and then they're really, really bummed. So it's great to talk to people who say, oh, yeah, now, now. Seeing what it is, I do think that the whole journey was worth it. So that's good for Stephanie to hear.

Yeah, yeah. Just like. And one more thing Just going off that like somebody in my shoes about to start med school, about to start this journey. Any advice, words of wisdom that you would give?

As you've already learned, it's a super competitive field and whatever you're going into is competitive. So when you're study, when none of your other friends or peers are studying or getting ready for the next practical or the usmle, I think you have to sadly remember that there's someone else in the city right next to you that's studying. So it's. You can't ever lose that competitive edge in medical school because unfortunately the objective findings such as the grades, aoa being a high class rank are important things. So I just try to stress that to people. Sounds like an obvious thing. That's a tough thing. And then also you still have to while doing that, make time to make friends in med school. Enjoy your med school class. That's an important thing. You want to be able to go out with your med school and these are some of the people that are going to be your lifelong friends, people that are going to be trusting you to take care of their family members. So you have to have a nice balance of still enjoying the social aspects of medical school, but also kind of have that cutthroat mentality where you need to be in the top of your class no matter what. That's important. You gotta really focus on studying all the time. I know it sounds silly and depressing and you think you've already done that now, but it's just a little longer of kind of brought the grind and then it gets a little easier in residency, believe it or not.

I appreciate it. Do you want to plug all your things and kind of we can wrap it up?

So my again, my name is Chet Donnelly. My spine surgeon here in Dallas, Texas. I've been here for several years. It's the same area that was born, raised and grew up. Left for about 10 years to go do all my training, but now I'm back. My social media, both on YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, tick Tock is all the same. It's Donnelly spine consult and promise in none of my videos. I'm not dancing or doing anything like that. It's just pure education for patients or your parents or your parents friends that might be having issues with their neck and back and just kind of try to understand what's going on with their spine.

Awesome. Well, and you guys know where to find us. You can follow us on Tick Tock at Generations MD and follow us on Instagram at Park Cities personal physicians, and we will talk to you guys next week.