Dr. Deepa Verma is double board-certified in family medicine and integrative holistic medicine. She graduated magna cum laude from The College of NJ and is a graduate of Rutgers Medical School in New Jersey (formerly known as Robert Wood Johnson Medical School). Dr. Verma completed her family medicine residency at Somerset Medical Center and was elected chief resident. She founded Synergistiq Integrative Health, her private practice, in 2013, during a very challenging time in her life.
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Physicians are taught how to heal and help others. The Hippocratic Oath that they take emphasizes helping the sick and abstaining from doing harm. They go into the medical field with a desire to cure and provide remedies. Many times, it can be a life or death situation, in an acute and chronic sense, and that takes a toll minute by minute, year by year. The stress perpetually adds up and many physicians cannot break the cycle because they have sunk so far deep into it, as if the profession has stolen their life and their mental well-being. Here Haute Beauty expert Dr. Deepa Verma speaks from her perspective and shares the ways she eases the stressors of life as a physician.
Dr. Deepa Verma's perspective
The irony is that as physicians we spend our lives taking care of others and promoting patients' well-being, we often neglect our own. Medical school was no walk in the park. It felt like college all over again, except amplified a million more times. After the pre-clinical years, it was time to break into the real medical world, by doing rotations in medical centers and hospitals.
As if sitting in endless hours of lectures wasn't torture enough, working insanely around the clock in sleep-deprived states can rapidly turn you into a completely different person, almost zombie-like. Everything from delivering a baby and witnessing new life, to coding a patient and watching them die, the emotional repercussions of the countless interactions with patients and family members, in the good and the bad and the ugly, often makes or breaks the physician.
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Handling the stress
In the end, whether you survived medical school or residency, the stress has long since persisted and it can only get worse if one doesn't know how to take care of it. I always told myself to be highly self-aware. To never let my profession interfere with my sanity. To never bring work home with me. But it is not that easy. There is no switch you can just turn on and off. And so I looked into my figurative bag of tools and decided I needed an outlet.
I always have lived a quite healthy life since I was a little girl and even after I had my three boys after residency. I follow the four pillars of health that I preach to all my patients which are a clean diet, exercise, restorative sleep, and stress reduction. It became an integral part of my life to self-nurture and self-care, because after all if I could do it for others, whether they be patients or family, I knew I needed to do it for myself.
As a mother, and a physician, I recognized that if I didn't find an outlet for my stress, it could reap disastrous consequences for all those around me. I have an obligation to care for others, and more so because I really want to. Caring for myself became mandatory. Meditation and yoga are ancient practices in Ayurveda that center around balancing the mind-body-spirit. They are great tools to destress and as a person of Eastern Indian origin, I am lucky enough to embrace them and teach others. To learn more about myself and my practice go to www.synergistiqwellness.com.
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