Being Honest with Our Struggles with Dr. Todd Barton

Todd Barton, MD, is a Professor of Clinical Medicine and the Program Director of the Internal Medicine Residency Program at the University of Pennsylvania. He is an attending physician at the Hospital of University of Pennsylvania and Penn Presbyterian Medical Center where his clinical practice focuses on transplant-related infectious diseases and clinical infectious diseases. Dr. Barton completed his medical school from the University of Rochester School of Medicine and his residency from the University of Pennsylvania where he also completed a fellowship in infectious diseases. He's passionate about medical education, and is an active member of a number of local and national organizations influencing resident education. Give yourself permission not to be the best. Today, Dr. Todd Barton shares how being open and honest with our own struggles will ultimately lead us to the right path. He explains that we can take the pressure off trying to be outstanding in everything in our lives. But at the same time, it will serve us well to do the best we can—and try to get as much as possible out of each experience. In his own career, Dr. Todd Barton is forthcoming about what he struggled with, what he decided was not right for him, and figuring out what his true passions were. He assures us that the environments we are in, the people we meet, and the experiences we have will be our greatest guides toward our own passions in medicine. Pearls of Wisdom: 1. Embrace kindness: something you observed in your parents who were a symbol for kindness for you early in your life in the early parts of the AIDS epidemic. 2. We have to give ourselves permission not to be the best. 3. Key trait of a mentee is flexibility - the flexibility to adapt to different challenges, opportunities, rotations, experiences that we go through in order to find the one we will really focus on. 4. We have to be intentional, only only about our work in the hospital, but our life outside of the hospital.