The True Mark of Success with Dr. Toni Choueiri
Toni Choueiri, M.D., is the Director of the Lank Center for Genitourinary (GU) Oncology at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (DFCI). He is the Co-leader of the Kidney Cancer Program and the Jerome and Nancy Kohlberg Chair and Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. He has received the George Canellos Award for Excellence in Clinical Investigation and Patient Care, the Eugene Schonfeld Award from the Kidney Cancer Association, and last year he was inducted into the prestigious Giants of Cancer Care. He has over 675 PubMed indexed publications and is the lead investigator of multiple, national, and international phase I-III trials in GU cancers. “A great physician is not measured by the number of publications or how fast you become a professor or the awards you have received. A great physician is measured by people saying (not in your presence) - ‘I want to send my mom to this person.’ That to me is a great physician.” Tune into another conversation on The Medicine Mentors as we talk about rediscovering ourselves, building trust, and aiming for peak performance in medicine with Dr. Toni Choueiri. Pearls of Wisdom: 1. There is no one path to success; the path differs for everyone, and so rather than having a tunnel vision, we should be honest with ourselves and keep our mind open to all possibilities so that we can really find what makes our heart palpate. 2. We are all going to face scenarios where a patient needs our help and at the same time we have a call from our family or a meeting for our research project, or an issue in the lab. The question is what comes first, and categorically the patient should always come first and should be the priority. 3. We should ask ourselves: ‘Am I a doctor that my physician friends would send their mom or a loved one to?’ And its really when we start to continually raise the bar for our personal performance that we move to the next level.