Complex Benign Gyn/Minimally Invasive Gyn Surgeon | @MayoClinic Trained | Board-certified @UAZMedPhx Faculty. Resilience | Burnout | Stoicism. Opinions=my own.
Phoenix, AZ
Joined March 2018
- Tweets3.6K
- Following1.1K
- Followers2.1K
- Likes9.6K
Mohammad R. Islam, MD | Surgeon retweeted
Pick any medical specialty other than your own. Who’s the most famous physician in it? You probably can’t name one.
Almost none of us will be known outside our field, and even those who achieve real professional fame are mostly forgotten within a few decades.
Fame is a poor reason to devote your life to medicine. The work itself matters more: caring for patients, discovering new knowledge, and teaching the next generation.
Mohammad R. Islam, MD | Surgeon retweeted
“If the core of a letter is personal and relational, then the core of authorship must remain human.” doi.org/10.1001/jamasurg.202…
This month I wrote ten letters of recommendation without using AI. As much as I am a fan of LLMs, I decided I could not delegate the relational nuances.
Congrats to the next class of Complex Benign Gynecology (Minimally Invasive Gynecologic Surgery) fellows!
Today, we celebrate the talented physicians who have matched into AAGL’s prestigious Complex Benign Gynecology Fellowship programs. We applaud you. Congratulations and welcome to the AAGL community. #AAGL #CBGF #MIGS #GynInfluencers
Mohammad R. Islam, MD | Surgeon retweeted
Some thoughts on burnout: 🧵
A part of burnout in medicine, especially in academia, is that people are carrying around with them an enormous number of thoughts and frustrations that just sit there and fester in their minds, and they see no safe outlet for expressing them.
(1/)
Mohammad R. Islam, MD | Surgeon retweeted
The disability insurance checklist no resident or fellow wants to read, but every resident or fellow should care about. 😂
I believe disability insurance is the most important insurance you can own, and something worth buying as early in your career as possible.
The problem is buying a policy can get confusing fast.
How much coverage do you need?
What riders matter?
90-day waiting period?
Age 65 or 67?
Level or graded premiums?
It’s a lot if you’ve never looked at this before.
But the process doesn’t need to be that complicated.
You don’t need to become a disability insurance expert. You just need to understand what matters and what to do next.
One thing that doesn’t get talked about enough is Guaranteed Standard Issue (GSI) coverage.
If GSI is available where you train, you may be able to get an individual disability insurance policy without medical underwriting, health questions, or an exam.
That can be especially valuable if you have health concerns that could otherwise affect your coverage or eligibility.
I’ll drop a list of GSI programs in the comments. 👇
Mohammad R. Islam, MD | Surgeon retweeted
The older I get, the more I realize that anxiety comes from trying to live in two places at once. Replaying yesterday. Rehearsing tomorrow. All while trying to live right now. It's exhausting. Come back to the present. Handle the two feet right in front of you. You don't need to fix your whole life today. You need to take the next right step. Then another. That's the recipe.
Mohammad R. Islam, MD | Surgeon retweeted
Dopamine from information gathering is a dangerous drug.
It’s the dopamine you get from reading. From planning. From learning. But never doing.
Information gathering as sport. Jammed into neat little dopamine feedback loops that convince you that you're doing something productive and valuable.
You're just one piece of information away from the big breakthrough. You'll start when your business plan is perfected. You'll meet your partner when you've scrolled through another round of profiles. You'll get that dream job when you have one more degree in hand.
Your entire life will change when you realize the world isn't run by a bunch of geniuses. The world is being run by a bunch of normal people with abnormal bias for action.
The answer you seek is hidden in the action you avoid.
Dopamine from information gathering is a dangerous drug.
Get your dopamine from action.
Mohammad R. Islam, MD | Surgeon retweeted
We tell young people in our society that end of the rainbow is retirement at 65.
We ought to tell them that "there is going to be this short but beautiful golden window from roughly age 3 to roughly age 12 where your kids are not only easy (comparatively to bottles & diapers), but are going to be these beautiful little creatures and it will pain your heart to be away from them for too long. So, prepare in your 20's, financially and career wise, to build that flexibility into that chapter of your life".
You don't get another shot at living the "golden window". And, for me, leaning hard into that golden window has made everything else in my life feel fairly insignificant in comparison. I have made plenty of mistakes as a father, but what I won't have is the regret of having been distracted and absent from these formative years. In some cases, that has required financial sacrifices (declining a particular career opportunity that would have required relocation), but I personally have zero regrets.
I also hear from some ambitious & successful people with a 4 year old that say "I've lost my ambition, I am so immersed in fatherhood". At least for me, and a number of my friends, it comes back. You can't keep an ambitious person down and if you have the fire, hanging at a playground on too many Tuesday afternoons is going to feel like torture after too long.
My three boys are approaching 13, 11 & 9, and it's much different than 7, 5 & 3. This summer, for example, they slept until 11am and I hard an unencumbered 6am-12pm to work (being on PT helps), then got another great window 7-11pm, but was able to be present in the heart of the day, then weeks when they were at basketball camp, etc. It gets easier, your time frees up again (there's a sadness to that too), but I'm back to working as intensely as I did pre-kids just because my day to day presence requires fewer hours than it did before (also, my wife is just superbly wonderful). And that is the beautiful gift of entrepreneurship (or at least my sort of business), the ability to deliver still a high level of output but work that around your life rather than the opposite.
TLDR, grind before, and grind after. Prepare for the golden window.
Mohammad R. Islam, MD | Surgeon retweeted
After 13 years in finance & helping 3,000+ families gain millions in net worth, here are the best money tips I wish I knew when I started:
1. Stop saving money. Start investing it
2. You only need 25x your annual expenses to never work again
3. 90% of investors can't beat a simple ETF, so don't try to beat them
4. You only need 1-5 ETFs for your entire portfolio. I like $VTI, $VWO, and $VXUS
5. Auto-invest on payday. Willpower isn't a financial strategy
6. Keep investment fees under 0.2%
7. IULs are a scam. Stay far away
8. Whole life insurance is a scam. Stay far away
9. Buy term life insurance and invest the difference
10. Add umbrella insurance once you're worth $500k+
11. The tax code is 6,871 pages of loopholes
12. Hire a CPA before you think you need one
13. Adjust your W-4 to break even. Stop giving the IRS a 0% loan
14. Tax loss harvest when your stocks are down. Losses carry forward forever
15. Set "maximums" for monthly discretionary spending
16. Set "minimums" for monthly investing & debt payoff
17. Use Vanguard, Fidelity, or Schwab to invest
18. Audit your subscriptions every quarter. The average family finds $2k/mo of leaks
19. Max your HSA
20. Max your 401k
21. Max your Roth IRA
22. Use a Backdoor Roth IRA if you earn too much
23. Use a Mega Backdoor Roth if you want to invest more
24. $300/mo in the right accounts can make your kid a millionaire
25. Open a 529, Parent Taxable Brokerage, & Roth IRA as soon as they're born
26. Add them as an "authorized user" on your credit to boost their score & history
27. Don't pay more than 5x gross income for a home
28. Don't pay more than 25% of take-home on housing
29. Don't buy unless you're staying 5+ years
30. One extra "principal only" payment per month can save $150k & 7 years on a 30-year mortgage
31. Never carry a credit card balance
32. Never finance furniture
33. Never finance a wedding
34. Never lease a car
35. You will never out earn bad habits
36. It doesn't matter what you make. It matters what you keep
37. Choosing a great spouse is the highest-ROI decision you'll ever make
38. Boring investments pay for exciting lives
Apply these 38 and you won't recognize your finances 12 months from now.
Send it to someone who could use it...
And follow me @budgetdog for more family finance content 🤝🏻
Mohammad R. Islam, MD | Surgeon retweeted
I wrote this in a moment I never would have chosen. A sudden pause that made me see my life clearly.
The meaning of our work is profound. This experience simply helped me see more clearly what matters most.
“Time is Finite” JAMA
jamanetwork.com/journals/jam…
It’s not easy to just train more surgeons. Great breakdown of why 👇🏾
“volume, diverse case exposure, and participation of core qualified faculty are critical, if you want to graduate safe, competent and broadly-trained neurosurgeons”
Mohammad R. Islam, MD | Surgeon retweeted
We have overprotected our children in the real world and underprotected them online. This is not just about phones and iPads; it's about childhood.
Let them have adventurous play, with small risks. It's safer and healthier in the long run.
Mohammad R. Islam, MD | Surgeon retweeted
If you remember one thing about the Backdoor Roth, make it this:
The IRS looks at all your IRAs as one big bucket.
Not by account.
Not by custodian.
One combined total.
What should you DO about this?
👇🏻
Any time I meet a physician who practiced since the 1980’s/1990’s I ask if they preferred paper charts or EMR. It’s surprisingly been mixed answers. How can we objectively demonstrate paper charts/orders may have been better despite its flaws?
@realdocspeaks @DrDiGiorgio
Unpopular opinion: Paper records are much superior to EHRs.
I used a handheld recorder and in-clinic transcription. The records were legible, and the dictation was done within 12 hours.
The advantages of this system are:
• Minimal physician time spent on creating the record
• The ability to look at the patient and listen to them!
• The system was very inexpensive
• The system can't be hacked, and no one's PHI ends up
on the dark web
• The records are private; they are never seen by
numerous healthcare workers across the system
For #MedTwitter, aside from ambient dictation what are all the ways you’re using AI at work? #AIinHealthcare
I’m updating a talk for trainees on desktop medicine/inbox management & looking for tips and tricks.
For those that disagree w/ @DrDiGiorgio 👇🏾, are there studies that have looked at time saved/burnout after longer time horizons? 30 days is not enough time. I want to be hopeful but AI workslop is a concern in other fields:
hbr.org/2025/09/ai-generated…
#AI #MedTwitter #burnout
AI scribes aren’t a time saver.
They’re another example of hospital administration taking a useful tool and corrupting it.
AI scribe notes still put in a review of systems! This hasn’t been a note requirement for 5 years, yet the AI scribe is filling the chart with this bloat.
Can doctors create their own note templates? Can they decide what information gets emphasized and recorded and what gets ignored?
Haha, no, of course not! Administration knows better so they will do that for the doctor.
The only reason to use an AI scribe is so that the doctor can record accurate and thorough information while having an actual face to face conversation with the patient.
However, that doctor will then need to spend just as long as they would writing a note just to edit down the AI generated slop into something useful as a clinical note.
