Would you leave a highly respected job that paid over $600,000 a year if you felt like a fraud? This was the question that Goobie, a neurosurgeon with 20 years of experience, had to wrestle with when he found out his practice could fix his patients' problems but never fully heal them.
The MIT graduate quit last year after a 9-year struggle with ethical concerns he describes were “killing” him.
Highlights
- The doctor discovered that patient healing was more linked to lifestyle changes than surgeries or medication.
- He believes the healthcare industry keeps patients ill to ensure continuous revenue from treatments and prescriptions.
- The neurosurgeon now runs a YouTube channel documenting his wildlife adventures with his dog for personal fulfillment.
“The way healthcare is set up in the country is to make hospitals money so they can grow,” he confessed in a YouTube video uploaded on July 9, 2024. “If you figure out a way to help patients heal and in [a] way [that] doesn't include a pill or a surgery, then the hospital and doctors are in big trouble because then [they] can't charge them.”
A neurosurgeon goes viral after quitting his job over ethical concerns. He affirms the healthcare industry and his practice are not healing people but keeping them ill
Image credits: Goobie and Doobie
For the 40-year-old spinal neurosurgeon, the life-changing realization came after he found out that some of his patients were able to heal so fast that he couldn't even get to operate on them, while others got worse even after he performed the procedure.
Faced with the possibility of his treatments being ineffective, he embarked on a 9-year-long journey where he started collecting empirical data from each of his patients to find out what was actually curing them. He started asking them about their lifestyle, their eating habits, and how close they were with their loved ones, and he even took into account the weather conditions of the places they lived.
What he found out broke him. Turns out his surgeries had no long-term effect on the healing process of his cases, and it was actually a combination of a low-sodium diet, plenty of sleep, low-stress living conditions, loving relationships, and plenty of sweat-inducing activities that made people heal.
“They were healing so fast I wasn’t needed anymore. Some called me asking if they even needed the surgery anymore because they were feeling so good,” he told his viewers.
Conversely, he observed that people who smoked regularly, drank alcohol, led stressful lives, and had bad or no relationships with loved ones did not heal, even when treated.
“The surgeries we were doing are like having a house with a leaky roof, with the rain coming down into the house and ruining the drywall. What we did was like going into that house, tearing down the drywall, ripping out the moldy insulation, putting in brand new insulation, and rebuilding the wall but never fixing the leak in the roof,” the ex-surgeon explained.
The doctor became disillusioned after realizing hospitals were putting their economic growth over the patient’s well-being. “If you’re healing them, you can’t charge them,” he stated
Image credits: goobieanddoobie
The second realization that drove him to quit his lucrative career was that he came to believe that the healthcare industry was built not to heal people but only to treat them and perpetuate their suffering for as long as possible. Controlling the pain but never truly getting rid of it.
“When I swore the Hippocratic Oath at my graduation, the older faculty doctors told us, ‘Your job is to relieve suffering. Not to just do a surgery or give your patients pills but to end their pain.’ Those words stood with me throughout my career,” he shared.
Image credits: Goobie and Doobie
Having been at hospitals his entire adult life, the neurosurgeon got a first look at the institution’s finances and the ways they generate money. He realized that the constant need of each establishment to grow had turned them into a business that had to reach certain economic goals in order to remain operational. This meant, in turn, that the best-case scenario for any given patient is to remain sick for as long as possible, scheduling appointments and buying medication along the way.
“If you help patients heal on their own, then you can't charge them for treatment, which means you've just worked yourself out of a job,” he explained.
Having quit his entire life’s work, the ex-doctor now finds solace and fulfillment in a brand new project, a YouTube channel where he documents the wildlife trips he takes alongside his dog
Image credits: Goobie and Doobie
Feeling frustrated, angry, and broken, he turned to his wife for support. “She told me, ‘I know what you’re going through. I’ve seen you deal with it. We have some money saved. Why don’t you just quit?’”
After getting her approval, the MIT graduate embarked on a brand-new adventure. He opened the YouTube channel Goobie and Doobie, named after his own nickname and his dog’s, to document his trips to the wilderness alongside his canine companion.
The channel has more than 200 videos at the time of writing, with the one where he talks about his epiphany surpassing 9 million views.
“A man has two lives. The first one starts when he is born, the second life starts when he realizes he has only one,” reads one of the more than 50,000 comments on the video, where he is seen talking alone surrounded by forests and snow-covered mountains.
The popular testimony attracted a variety of comments from people sharing their own experiences dealing with soul-crushing jobs, while others spoke about how they healed from illnesses by changing their lifestyles after traditional methods proved ineffective
Image credits: Goobie and Doobie
“I’m a registered nurse and for a couple of months, have told my fiancée that I have 3-5 years left in me at most. I just turned 27. The reality of healthcare feels so lonely and disappointing,” shared one commenter, adding that she intends to do the same as the surgeon one day.
“I had a knee injury at 18 years old, and led a healthy life supporting a torn ACL for another 18 years. 20 years later, I gained 50 pounds and my knee was weak and painful. I went back to my doctor, and he said to take shots of cortisone and when you can’t take it anymore, get a knee replacement. I left, lost the weight and now I live a more active life,” recounts another. "My knee has done so much better, no surgery! The doctor never told me to live a better lifestyle. It’s a business!”
A fellow MIT graduate chimed in: “I have a PhD from MIT, 1998 geophysics. I was working at Hopkins in a big data group. I started feeling like this about science, like it isn't healing the world, it's just chasing government grants. I got chronic fatigue syndrome. Doctors said I was ‘just depressed.’ So I quit my job and figured out how to heal myself,” she shared.
Goobie and his dog Doobie continue their adventures to this day with regular uploads, and you can watch them on his YouTube channel, Goobie and Doobie.
"I've been saying for years that there is no money in curing people," said one viewer as others agreed with the decision made by the surgeon
