Dr. Perez joined Becker’s Spine & Orthopedic podcast May 25 to discuss trends in physical medicine, practice growth and advice for aspiring leaders.
This is an excerpt. Listen to the full podcast here.
Question: What are three pieces of advice for emerging women physician leaders today?
Dr. Michelle Perez: The three things that come to mind for me as a woman in medicine going through medical school and a lot of male-dominated areas in medicine, is that just being yourself is important. We always kind of joke about, “don’t try to be one of the guys” or “the guys don’t necessarily want you to be one of the guys.” They want you to be one of the girls, and we bring something different to the table and different to the conversation. Just to be yourself is what people really want.
I think that also as females we have different traits than males when it comes to approaching patients. We definitely have a lot of empathy and compassion. We might spend a little bit more time getting personal with patients, and that comes a little bit in my specialty as well. We tend to spend a little bit more time with patients, and they really do appreciate that approach.
I think we are approachable as well. Females in medicine tend to be approachable; staff, nurses and partners, they all just seem to feel that they can come to us for anything whether it be something fairly routine or mundane or whether it’s something big. I think that kind of sets the females in our field or in medicine, apart from the males, and I think we should embrace that.
