Her Story
About Maria
I graduated from medical school in 2014, which means I've been in medicine for 12 years, and I'm two years out from completing my fellowship. I always say that I had the blessing to be a patient before I became a physician because I had a major back surgery and very bad scoliosis when I was a teenager. So I knew what it was like when sometimes you didn't find the answers that you wanted, and you go from doctor to doctor trying to find what is best for you. This gave me a very good idea of how I wanted to practice medicine. But with the current system, where you're so constrained in time by your employers, like you only have 20 minutes for patients or 30 minutes for new appointments and 20 for follow-ups, I knew that I wasn't able to practice medicine how I wanted to. So I decided that I was going to open my own practice. I came across Facebook groups and connected with other physicians who were doing the same, and it was amazing. It was a very supportive community with people that I never knew before, who were in multiple states, most of them doing primary care. My practice is self-pay, I don't work with insurance, which means I decide how much time I dedicate to each patient. Right now I have other sets of challenges, like I do everything by myself, working with marketing, getting new patients, etc., but I'm definitely very happy with the choices that I have made. My recovery from back surgery was very intense and very heavy in physical therapy. My surgeon was a bodybuilder when he was younger, and he introduced me to the importance of exercising and doing physical therapy. That was honestly what changed my life, and I was finally able to live without back pain when I started exercising. That's why for me it was always important to practice something that my personal knowledge and lifestyle could have value and bring valuable information to my patients. I'm a very logic person, and endocrinology is a lot about numbers. I do like math and numbers and tendencies.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Maria
01What do you attribute your success to?
I attribute my success to knowing how I want to practice medicine. Being a patient myself, I knew how I wanted to be treated. So when I became a physician, I knew exactly how I wanted to treat my patients, how I wanted to relate to them. I felt that I could understand their needs. And that also allows me to be more assertive when making these decisions, like how is my career path, how do I want to practice this. I feel that sometimes people go into their professions without necessarily knowing in the long term what life is going to look like for them while practicing that profession. And for me, having this clarity has been very helpful in making these life and professional decisions.
02What advice would you give to young women entering your industry?
I would say that I'm here to help. I love women in every field, but I think that in medicine, we have that nurturing ability in a very natural way to be empathetic and nurturing. I would suggest that she tries to meet people who are already practicing medicine. One of the things that I encountered myself was that I had no clue what my life was going to look like when working. Like, I knew I wanted to study medicine, and then it was like, okay, I want to know which type of physician I want to be. But I didn't necessarily have the skills and the tools to know what that looks like when negotiating a contract, when knowing your worth and your price, and I think that that's also more common in women, like our ability to negotiate, to ask for more, things like that. So I would suggest that they have an idea beyond studying medicine, so what it is like to be a physician when you're done with training. Because training is so long in medicine, and you spend so much of your energy going through tests, getting there, that not all of us have a clear idea of what we want after that phase is over. I would say it's the most amazing career. You sacrifice a lot if you want to be good at it. And I think that every patient deserves a good physician, so if someone is not willing to make a sacrifice, I don't think that they should go into it. Because at the end, you're serving people.
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