The Mystery Of A Career Path

Sometimes we choose a career path, and sometimes it chooses us. In my case, it chose me not once, but twice.

Career Path Number One: Hospital Administration

The first was my path into hospital administration. After I was trained as a medical corpsman in the Army Reserve, I returned to school (Ohio State) and worked at a local hospital to pay my way through my junior and senior years. It was obvious to me that I’m not a “hands-on” healer, but the thought that I would still be able to be a part of a system to help people awakened me to the sense that I could actually make a difference in this world.

Hospital administration was an area I could apply my management expertise and do something meaningful. In the late 60s and early 70s, Medicare and Medicaid were quite new, and it wasn’t uncommon to see people running hospitals who were like my first boss out of grad school; promoted into the position from a spot as the night switchboard supervisor!

Career Path Number Two: Wellness Centers

But it was my second encounter with career karma that really gave me purpose. As I was working in a traditional hospital management position, I came across an opportunity to help develop a proposed university research center in biomechanics (the study of human motion).

You might wonder, “What does that have to do with healthcare?”

So did I at first, but I quickly learned that there were applications in orthopedic medicine that ranged from greater accuracy in correcting gait problems in children with Cerebral Palsy to injury recovery and sports medicine.

It got me thinking about how hospitals, while necessary, are like “catcher’s mitts” in baseball. They are there just to handle whatever is thrown at them. They accept the patient after s/he is in need; sick or injured, but they don’t do anything about trying to avoid the problems.

Wellness and Prevention: My Career Path

By the early 1990s, a few people in healthcare were starting to realize that we needed to tie “wellness” and “prevention” into the system if we are really to have an impact. The idea to do something innovative in orthopedics grew into how we could keep people healthy to prevent cardiac issues, diabetes, and a host of other conditions.  We melded a traditional fitness center with pathways for people who were either at risk of health problems or recovering from them.

Over the years we have learned so much, and there are so many examples that I’ll need to capture some stories in later blogs but one that I remember from the early days was this:

An elderly woman approached me one day and said that I had turned her life around. I had no idea what she was talking about, and although I had seen her as one of our patients, I really did not know her. She went on to tell me that she had severe osteoporosis. The medication she took helped a little but she was still fragile. She came to us for help in developing an exercise routine that could rebuild her bones. At first, she was so weak that she could hardly lift even the lightest weights. After six months of training, she was feeling great, and her physician was amazed at the reversal of her bone loss.

More than twenty-five years later, I’m now the head of a national company that operates centers like the first one in eight different states and thirteen different locations with 500 employees. Healthplex Associates touches thousands of lives each year, helping people to be healthier and happier every day.

Karma, it works.

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“The Healer’s Miraculous Discovery is highly recommended for libraries looking for crossovers between sci-fi and fictional representations of personal and social change. Its plausible possibilities create many insights and reflections that readers won’t see coming.”

~ Diane Donovan, Midwest Book Review