Power of Quitting: Getting off the wrong train sooner not later.

One of the reasons I was ready to leave family medicine was the culture of abuse in residency. Not the kind where someone yells at you—but a more systemic, normalized abuse: denying residents rest, sleep, basic recovery. If a physician showed up drunk or intoxicated, it would be a scandal. But if a resident showed up dangerously sleep-deprived, that was just... expected.

Back then, we had what was called every other day call. That meant Monday, you were on call—awake and working all night. Tuesday, you were post-call—exhausted, zombified, but still expected to see patients in the clinic all day. Then Wednesday, you were on call again. Repeat and repeat for 30 days.

It was miserable.

I kept wondering, why don’t we use a night float system? Residents could rotate night shifts, and others could work normal days. But the system wasn’t built for optimizing our rest. It was built on the idea that “this is how we’ve always done it,” so “this is how it should be done.” There was a kind of generational trauma baked into the culture: In my time, it was worse. You’re lucky.

It was a cycle of abuse. And I hated it.

My father worked in the field of Mr. Edward Deming’s Total Quality Control. In short, if there’s a problem, you don’t just patch it up—you do a root cause analysis and solve it at the source, so the same problem never happens again.

That thinking stuck with me.

So when I realized that residency was heading in the wrong direction for me, I walked into my program director’s office and said, “I quit.”

He laughed. I understood—who quits in the third year of residency with only six months left? No one. So he sent me to a psychologist to make sure I wasn’t losing my mind.

When I met with the psychologist, I explained: If I already know this is the wrong path for me, then six more months is six months too many. I should have quit yesterday. Staying would only tempt me into a future I didn’t want—one where I might be drawn into practicing conventional medicine, chasing numbers and incentives. I had seen it happen to my seniors—bright, idealistic doctors who wanted to practice holistically, but eventually got tamed by the most addictive drug known to man: money.

I told the psychologist I had a plan. I would go into preventive medicine, then integrative medicine. I would learn acupuncture along the way.

After hearing me out, he said I was of sound mind and wrote that in his report. That cleared the way for me to leave.

It was the first time in my life I had ever quit anything.

And what I learned was this: The power of quitting is real. If you’re heading the wrong way, you should have quit yesterday. From that perspective, quitting becomes easy. But what came after quitting? That wasn’t easy at all.

My father was deeply disappointed. But for once in his life, he was also supportive.

Only much later did I begin to understand why. His life had been hard. He lost his father when he was just ten years old—murdered by communist partisans. He grew up almost like an orphan. Somehow, he made it to college, but had to give up on dental school because he couldn’t afford it. That loss haunted him.

It also drove him. Education became his obsession. He worked tirelessly to fund my education in the U.S.—college, then medical school—as well as my sister’s undergraduate and law school education.

Looking back now, I see it more clearly. My father was an amazing person—but a very hurt one. Flawed, broken in places, but still a man who tried to give us everything he never had.