Can entrepreneurship be the path to a physician's balanced life?
Wednesday, January 21, 2009 at 04:00PM 
Dr. Jennifer Lin thinks so.
As a practicing family physician in Tucson AZ, she was close to burnout trying to cope with new mommydom AND maintain her "quota" of patients in practice.
Her plaintive cry:
This way of life went on day after day until my body did something it never would have done a decade before. It literally crashed. The stress manifested itself as frequent colds, neck and low back pain, headaches, insomnia, and chronic fatigue. I was destroying and taking light of the one thing that was more valuable than all the world's riches: MY HEALTH. I realized that I needed to make some difficult choices--either continue to let my job slowly kill me or cut down my hours and take a pay cut. Needless to say, neither option seemed like a fair one to me. Why should having to regain a better quality of life mean that I had to compromise my income?
Being both resourceful and desperate, she embarked on a quest to find another way to produce income to supplement her physician salary and free to up to enjoy medical practice once again. She also needed to create the time and energy to devote to two small kids - a frequent physician/mother challenge!
Listen to Jennifer Lin's story (just under 20 minutes) about how she found her perfect solution -- a home-based online business (CarbonCopyPro) with minimal start-up costs, affording her the opportunity to practice medicine part-time without feeling pressure to produce (she can even give away acupuncture sessions on occasion, as her gift back to her patients), and the luxury of a balanced personal and professional life.
Are you jealous yet?
Reader Comments (2)
Like all businesses, they need to be built with the same thoughtfulness, planning, diligence and hard work that any other business requires.