As the Thanksgiving holiday is upon, this is a very special time to spend with family and friends but this also a good time to examine what you are truly grateful for. For us, I am grateful and thankful for our wonderful patients and our team at our practice.
NPR recently published a wonderful article by Patti Neighmond about how gratitude is good for the soul and how it helps cardiac patients. Studies show that a positive mental attitude is good for your heart as it helps fend off depression, stress and anxiety. The Providence Journal recently featured a similar article citing the links between gratitude and health contributes to wellbeing.
In the Sunday Review in The New York Times, Arthur C. Brooks, wrote an article, Choose to Be Grateful. It Will Make You Happier. In it, he discussed the simple fact of choosing to focus on the good things makes you feel better than focusing the bad things.
Finally, Loretta Graziano Breuning, PHD, author of Meet-Your-Happy-Chemicals discussed how to Train Your Brain for Gratitude: 3 Minutes a Day for 45 days. By doing this, you have to wire yourself to see good in the world – focus on the good three minutes a day or three times a day at one minute intervals. She discussed that you cannot just give gratitude a try, you have to work at it.
Interestingly, all of these articles relate to our practice. Gratitude is a huge part of our practice. I am particularly very grateful for the patients that have entrusted their care to us. Our patients, who are full of gratitude, tend to do better, heal faster, and have better results. We have some of the most spectacular patients that you could ever imagine meeting. They are such wonderful people and we are so honored that they came to us.
We are also grateful for the team that we have here in the office as each one of them brings such a wonderful dimension to our patients / practice. We hire our team based on their true love of people and desire to care for people. We see them in action every day being amazing team members and we are so grateful for this.
The operating room is another place where the people make the biggest difference. It is true we have spectacular instrumentation and have highly sophisticated techniques that we use. It is, however, the people that are truly the magic of surgery. The way that our patients are greeted and cared for especially when they can be so nervous. Our patients are taken care of while they are in the operating room under IV sedation and the amazing care given to them both in the recovery area and when they stay with our nurses in the recovery center. We have truly caring people who have been with us for years and we are amazingly grateful for that.
During this time of Thanksgiving, there is no one more thankful and grateful than we are.
       