Many medical practitioners find themselves overwhelmed with the long list of work they have to accomplish every single day, burdened further by their responsibility to save lives. Dr. Jordan Barber offers them a clear and actionable roadmap to make their careers more authentic and meaningful through his book, Realigning Medicine. Joining Timothy J. Hayes, he discusses how practitioners can prioritize not just the satisfaction and wellness of their patients, but their personal and professional fulfillment as well. Dr. Jordan also explains how to turn your passion into a financially rewarding journey, as well as the right way to perform at your best without experiencing burnout.
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Dr. Jordan Barber – Author Of The Book: Realigning Medicine
Dr. Jordan Barber is a highly respected healthcare consultant, acupuncturist, and educator with over two decades of experience in practice management and integrative medicine. In his new book Realigning Medicine, he set to revolutionize the way practitioners approach healthcare and their practices. Drawing on years of experience, Dr. Barber has witnessed first-hand how many practitioners struggle with burnout, misaligned values, and operational inefficiencies that hinder both professional success and personal wellbeing.
In his book Realigning Medicine, Dr. Barber provides a clear actionable roadmap to help providers build a health care practice that is financially viable, personally rewarding and deeply impactful for patients. He states, “When we put patient happiness over profits or productivity, we find personal fulfillment and success in our own careers.
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Dr. Barber, thanks for joining us. It’s delightful to see you again.
It’s a pleasure, Dr. Hayes. I’m excited to talk to you.
Introducing Dr. Jordan Barber
I’m hoping you get us started telling us a little bit about how you got into the work you do and what drives your passion for it.
Hopefully, I don’t get too long winded because I have too much passion for the work and it’s been a while. Briefly, I would say that I’m a chronic pain expert and focus on integrative medicine. I have a doctorate in acupuncture and oriental medicine. My early background started in manual therapy and got into massage therapy. Prior to that, I was in IT. Completely different. Through several healing crises and going through 9/11, when I was 21 years old led me down a healing journey and a wounded warrior path that eventually got me to where I am now. That’s a very short succinct way and we could probably unpack some of that. I would leave that to you to say how would you like to start unpacking all that?
What’s the connection to 9/11 for you?
For me, I was working down there in IT. I had a great directors position working in a commercial real estate transaction, VC funded firm, and doing systems engineering and as I said, it was a director position. I was pretty young, but I was in IT. My first job was when I was fifteen years old. This was the ‘90s, the dot-com boom and I wrote that wave. I was very excited. As a kid, I always had a very spiritual disposition, shall we say. I am always inclined to happiness and finding out what is the meaning of life. A great question for a fifteen-year-old kid, mixed in with some teen angst and all those other good things.
The more I got into Corporate America and got evolved into people who were making a lot of money and myself. I realized I was losing a piece of my identity and those role models that I had around me didn’t match that inner self but I was a little too young to understand that. I was like, “This is growing up. This is what you’re supposed to do.” I say I’m thankful for 9/11 now. I wasn’t at the time. I was there. I was at the Trade Center. Not in the building at the day. I was getting my breakfast. That was my favorite food cart. I would say I was not eating healthy food at that time, too, which was part of the healing crisis.
My favorite food cart was at the Trade Center and I watched the first plane hit then the second one hit from my building, which was on Rector which was right by there. I decided to get out of dodge, so to speak. I made it onto the Brooklyn Bridge by the time the first tower fell. I made it to Flatbush and got home on Long Island, where I lived at the time. There was a lot to process there and some PTSD and night terrors. A lot of things that came out with that, but I remember when I was on the Brooklyn Bridge, I made a promise to myself that I would at least do something that had meaning because at that moment, there was this thought that I might die.
I was on the bridge and there were planes in the air. I don’t know what was going on. There were a lot of rumors at that time because there was no communication. I was like, “I’m on a national monument here. It’s the Brooklyn Bridge. This is the next thing to get blown up maybe. I don’t know what’s happening. I might die.” That was the first time ever that I thought about immediate mortality. We all know we’re going to die. We’ve had people die, but I was like, “I might literally die right here.” Having seen some things that were more on sightly prior from the buildings and having impact. Death was in the front of my mind.
I became acutely aware that I needed to do something of meaning. Strangely, when I was younger, I wanted to be both a massage therapist and a tarot card reader. Now, very strange choice of profession, but my mother’s friend was that. I remember getting medical oriented massages because I was always working on computers. We get some back pain and stuff. I was also a very active kid and would injure myself constantly. Our insurance strangely paid for the massage at that time.
She was a county worker, so we had good insurance. I thought it was fascinating, the impact of that. She also did Reiki, which I didn’t know anything about at the time, but I thought it was fascinating. I was like, “This could be a real job.” She also read tarot cards and I was fascinated with it. I used to read for people in high school and I was like, “I want to do this for a living.” After doing some consulting and running my own business for computers after 9/11 because I got out of the city. I was freaking out every day taking that train. I don’t know what was going on.
I wound up going back to school from massage therapy. I was like, “This is true North. This is the one thing I knew that was true to me. Let’s do that.” At the same time, I was also dealing with some health issues. I had sinus issues and stuff that could not be remediated by medication or surgeries that I had. Within a few weeks of acupuncture, it was like 80% better. I was in and then the more I got into it, especially Eastern medicine.
I realized that it brought a lot of things I was looking for, a larger understanding of life, balance with nature, relationship with nature, relationship with how we live, circadian rhythms, relationship with food, relationships with people and our energy exchange with people as far as being nice and kind to people. Surrounding yourself with good people. While those lessons took a very long time, to say inculcate, to make firm. It started a good path. I found a system of medicine that both worked tangibly but also had a great philosophy that allowed me to find myself again.
Writing ‘Realigning Medicine’
You mentioned pain and that’s something that you’ve developed as a specialist into. What are the roots of that? What drew into that arena?
I never dealt as a kid with pain. I had no one that was suffering from pain, so I didn’t have any exposure to it. It was literally my geekiness. I got obsessed with the fascial system and what’s called trigger point therapy. I thought it was so unique and uncharted that my mind got obsessed with it. I started taking more classes in it and started going down that road. The stuff was extremely tangible and explained so many things that were not necessarily explained, especially at that time. This is the early 2000s.
We’ve done so much research. That was even before Harvard was doing their symposium symposia which were more 2008-ish or somewhere around there. I like things that are tangible and immediate. My mind tends to open urgent things, so I like that instant stimulus and the treatment of muscular skeletal pain and dysfunction tends to be much more immediate. I got that reward and I saw the reward on the patient’s face immediately. Whereas, in internal medicine, sometimes it takes a longer period of time.
For every gifted practitioner who cannot thrive is a failure for humanity. Share on XIf someone is suffering from indigestion. It might take a month or two to resolve. There is that reward at the end but I like that instantaneous. I also like touching. I like feeling. I like the palpatory diagnosis as opposed to just in query. I got obsessed with it. I write about this in my book. My book I wrote was for practitioners to find happiness and it’s called Realigning Medicine. It’s available anywhere. I have to give that plug. That’s what my marketing team tells me. “Always be selling.”
Let’s finish that, Realigning Medicine: Building an Authentic, Fulfilling, and Thriving Healthcare Practice. Say a little bit about that. What led you to decide, “We have to change something about the way we’re doing medicine?”
I was teaching a practice management class at a graduate level and I thought about that class many times. I’ve also done a lot of coaching and consulting which I still do for practitioners. I’ve also created many practices. I have four now but at one point, I had nine. As well as, I have a boutique practice as well. I don’t want to say I was tired of saying the same things, but it was unnecessary to keep repeating myself. It was more of, “Here, just read the book. I have exercises. If you have questions, come to me.”
Also, at a graduate level, you’re talking about ethics and jurisprudence. The things that they need to know to not get in trouble. Sometimes, there’s no time to talk about running a practice you want to work in or being happy and practice or avoiding burnout. It’s specifically for allied or integrative practitioners because I feel that medical practitioners and even like dentistry. It’s their own domain and while I’m sure the principles are applicable, I don’t have this much experience about it, so I write it more for the person who could be in social work, a massage therapist or acupuncture. Physical therapist going out on the road.
I’ve countered so many practitioners that are gifted but a clinician is not necessarily the same skillset as an entrepreneur. I feel that for every gifted practitioner that can’t thrive. It’s a failure for humanity. It’s a failure because they can’t access the people that they should be able to access. They wind up taking a hospital job or some group practice job that they don’t want. They can’t bloom as much as they want or conversely knowing where you want to be in a patient who want to deal with. Be able to leverage the job you have so that you can maybe talk to management and say, “This is the population you want to deal with but this is going to be good for you as well.”
Being able to expand within there because maybe you don’t want to run a practice. It’s annoying. It’s not the most fun unless you like being an entrepreneur and doing all that stuff. I wrote the book to help people. We hit bestsellers in a small business category in a few others, which I was surprised of because I wrote the book as a labor of love. I never expect to turn a profit on it. The world of books is not a place to make money but I’ve gotten some great emails from people and that made me happy.
The idea as you mentioned, many people who are good at a clinical skill level, connecting with people and bringing out a creative artistry in their field are not always good at managing the stresses of a practice or keeping the healthy balance in their life in terms of where their energy is getting expended. I imagine it’s a boon for a lot of people to have a book like that and it only came out in February of 2025.
What I would say too, because I got trapped in the same thing. I had to go back to my roots. Everyone has a reason why they go to school. For whatever the discipline is. You have that dream. School shapes you into the thing that you’re supposed to be, for good and for worse. By the time you graduate, you have an idea of exactly how you are supposed to practice. It may not be in line with how you want to practice or your patient population or anything else. It’s just how you got grouped. Now you have debt, most likely and you need to make money. You go do to things that you think is going to work.
Often, you realize that doesn’t work. Not in clinical outcomes. Maybe also in clinical outcomes. It depends, but in the entrepreneurial sense. There’s a lot more moving parts that are involved. For me, I came out and I was like, “I don’t know how to sell this stuff. I was just interested.” I wanted to help people and hung my shingle out and no one came. I try to bunch of other things and then I started copying other people what I thought was successful. Only to realize that I was riding hype and courses that people were selling for continued education you realized there was no market for.
I eventually found myself, as I was saying, talking about pain. That’s what always excites me. It was the thing that lit me up. What I always felt rewarded was, let’s say, someone came in the shoulder and couldn’t move. They didn’t have as much range of motion and they walked out with full range of motion. That excited me. I was like, “I want more of that in my clinic.” I just started chasing that and my patients were excited because I was excited. It was also the thing I read about all the time. I wasn’t reading about the treatment of allergies or the things that were popular back then.
I was reading about muscles function. I was working out. I was a martial artist. I was hurting myself. Me and my friends were putting each other back together constantly. It was the thing I did. The more I did it, the more my practice boomed and the happier I was. I feel that we all can get trapped there. I will say to this day, I’m always reinventing my practices, always growing, always scaling or scaling down. Some form of scaling.
There are always new roadblocks. I also talked about emotion. I call them emotional set points. I borrow from metabolic set point theory, but these things that are brains are set at, and I’m sure you could speak more to this. I remember one of my first set points was with money. When I started making more than a money that I felt comfortable with, I thought I was doing something wrong. I didn’t know what to do and I started freaking out. I was scared and it was adversely affecting me. It was adversely affecting how I was perceiving money and functioning how it would deal with it with people. I had to get comfortable with it. There was a set points on imposter syndrome, which is a big thing that we all deal with as clinicians.
I’m starting a boutique practice and I moved it from Brooklyn to the Upper West Side. I’ve done this a hundred times now, either for myself or other people. There are still moments where I’m like, “What if that’s wrong? What if that marketing position is wrong?” I know my industry inside and out at this point but there’s still these little nagging things of doubt. If I allow those doubts to come up and I don’t deal with them through my own proper channels, whether peer groups that I have or through therapy, which I’m a big advocate for. They can get in front of you and destroy everything.
I write about that more to identify it and advocate people to either find peer groups or therapists to work with because some of these things would be deep seeded and it could go back to childhood and some of them could be socio-economic. There are so many different things. My book does not gives you solutions. It gives you ways to identify them so you can find proper solutions for it. In some ways, running a practice has its own form of therapy because there’s so many different challenges that come at you.
You have to find a way of growing against those challenges. I find there’s more and more personal challenges. The more you are in business you realize that this business is easy. You can get marketers. You can get data for anything. You can find the right people. You can get the right social marketing campaign to find the people but if you don’t know how to do it or you’re scared to do it or you don’t know your product because you’re afraid to do something new or anything else. That’s where you fail, where you start copying everyone.
Why The Business Of Medicine Is Easy
When you said business is easy, I thought you’re going to follow it up with dealing with all the stuff that gets stirred up inside of you and your baggage as you engage your business is not so easy.
It’s basically what I mean. The business side is easy. If you can get you out of the way, business is so easy. There are certain things. Not every business is going to sell, but the business of medicine, if you’re there to help people. They are endless sick people. There are people that need help and they’re looking for you. The business is quite easy. Except, I’m sure you can speak to it. It’s very hard.
The people I’ve worked with do this work and put on multiple day intensives for people, whether it’s heal the healer or heal the individual. They tell you, as soon as you sign up for one of these things, all your stuff’s going to get stirred up. As soon as you make a commitment to come to a 5-day, or a 9-day or a long weekend intensive, pay attention because many people have so much stuff come up that they end up canceling before they show up or they want to leave halfway through. It’s that stuff we need to learn to handle to get our own garbage or bloated nothingness, as Emerson would say, out of the way.
The business of medicine is quite easy. There will always be sick people, and they will be looking for you. Share on XI signed a new lease, as I said I moved. I’ve signed so many leases. I have very large facilities and a very small lease. I didn’t take anything crazy and the moment I signed it, all the stuff starts stirring inside. Luckily, I stirred that stuff so many times, I was like, “That’s nothing.” It also made me think about when the first time I signed a lease and how scary that was. All these what ifs and all these things. It’s exactly like you say, the moment you sign up to endeavor, to look deeper or make a commitment towards something. Things start coming up and that’s true in business and in everything.
Treating People’s Chronic Pain
Thank you for writing a book like that, Realigning Medicine and helping people. Giving people a different road map for how to have a balanced person in professional practice life. We mentioned that and got derailed from your talking about your chronic pain work. Can we get back to that?
Nonetheless, I got involved, as I said, my practice started booming because I started following the things I love. I can continue to do that. I scaled my practices, focusing on orthopedics, pairing with physical therapists and medical doctors. Creating more robust treatment plans and understanding that no man is an island or had fairly good success with that. It seems that all the tragedies in my life were terrible things that always become gifts.
The gift of COVID gave me time to go back and do my research doctorates. I went down to Texas in Austin and I did a three-year program but COVID gave me the time to be accelerated in it. I did my research in pain in specifically trigger points and therapy called dry needling, which is a subset of acupuncture. It can be also used by medical doctors and PTs and published my first paper on that and since published others. Now, that’s what I’m doing. I’m also educating people in it. I teach the orthopedic treatment for orthopedic diseases and assessments of orthopedics and neurology at the Pacific College of Health and Sciences.
Life is good. I have a subspecialty in pelvic floor dysfunction, which what I realized is, as I started treating people with back pain, I started noticing that the pelvic floor, which are the muscles. We have a diaphragm. We have a pelvic diaphragm. It’s just the other set of those muscles and they’re in that deep bass and what we call the pelvis. They’re involved with what we say is general urinary function, so defecation, urination and sexual function but as well as movement. Your hips are there. Your back connects to all that.
I started noticing in inquiry that people had a lot of subtle pelvic floor dysfunction, then it started finding people with urinary incontinence and all these other things. I realized they didn’t know where to go. The only place was pelvic floor PT, which they’re wonderful people and I realized that there was a place for me. I started dealing more with those people and that patient population. Now, I’m even getting more niche because I realized men have no advocate because 60% of women will have some form of pelvic floor dysfunction at some point in their life, mostly because of giving birth.
Giving birth has lots of effects on the pelvic floor. They’re more prone to having it, but about 20% of men will suffer from it. They don’t even know what it is. It could be from sexual dysfunction, to numbness, tingling pain. Random pain down there. I’m interested in that and that’s my main specialty now. I still treat muscular skeletal pain but I’m focusing more on pelvic floor dysfunction. I also love it because that’s teamwork.
I love working with physical therapists. I feel it is so important to have people learn how to move again to strengthen your muscles and that’s not what I do. I’m there to norm modularly areas which essentially make them have the right resting tone and make sure that they function, break up scar tissue and free nerves. That’s all I do, so I love working with teams. I love that collaborative care. That’s what I’m doing now. I would say part of writing the book gave me the impotence to go forward and finally say, “That’s what I want to do.”
Part of writing your second book or your first?
The current book because as I was writing it, I was reflecting on all the points. I was like, “I want to do the thing that I love. I want to be a pioneer of it. I started creating my boutique clinic and that’s what we have now. As you alluded, there is a second book in work that’s a clinical book on fascial base treatments and things like that but we don’t know when that’s going to be out.
The Beauty Of Following Your Passion
Again, you mentioned this idea that when you’re following your passion or your bliss, as Joseph Campbell would say. It changes everything about your satisfaction in life, the energy that’s available, etc. Congratulations for finding that.
I’m very happy and thank you for congratulating me. You’re the first to congratulate me, so thank you. We need to congratulate people more because I remember telling people. I’m like, “I want to focus more on men’s pelvic health.” People are like, “Why? That’s so niche.” I’m like, “One, I’m male, so I understand it.” I feel like there’s a need and I want to follow that. Sure, all the data is there, 20% of males, so 16% to 20% left some dysfunction. That’s a good enough patient population, especially when you’re hyper niche.
The data was there. It’s good enough to go. Follow your passion. If no one’s sick and maybe that’s not a passion to chase but I’m ecstatic to do it. I have all the energy that I didn’t have prior. I spent most of my time writing papers because that was exciting and teaching because I love teaching. I love talking to people and I love igniting passions, interests, and intriguing people. Suddenly, mine got reignited because I’m like, “I can do something that gets my brain going and can make a difference for people.”
There are three and sometimes four different things. At least three that I mentioned to people about finding a way to clarify what your passion is or what your primary purpose in life is or for what your, as Greg Moore calls it, the heart virtue. The issue is, if you find that and refine it. Now, you’re focusing your energy so you get tremendously more efficiency in the results and then it lights you up inside as you’re helping others.
Greg Morris with his approach, takes the worst of the worst things. You’ve mentioned how the worst things in your life have turned into the blessing, etc. He says, “List the horrible things that have happened in your life and find the one that you say, ‘Nobody should have to go through that,’ and pick that one.” You have the energy for that and figure out how you’re going to start helping people who have to go through that or help people avoid going through that. Forge your purpose in life out of that.
Passion can teach us.
The passion test where she says, “List the things that you think you’re passionate about and rate them.” Give them to somebody to interview you and have them interview you. If you could only have number one and number two, which would you take? You go all the way through the list and they get reorganized and prioritized down to the point where you’ve got like five top priorities. Now, carry that around and read that every day and make sure that you’re not doing anything to distract you from fulfilling those top five priorities.
Dr. Michael Rice has a secondary purpose exercise. He says, “Take ten things you’re naturally good at and list ten things you love to do. Write a short narrative on how you think the world’s going to look through your eyes when it’s perfect. Take a few things from the first list with the few things from the second list and form a statement about how you’re going to make the world a better place by using these things.” You have things you love to do and things are naturally good at. You’re also helping the world be a better place. That will help focus your energies in a way that you’re lighting up and then people around you light up.
When you have that passion, you can go forward and do everything you want. You will have less doubt and the stir inside you gets quieter. Share on XI like that last phrase, focusing your energies because when you have that passion, which is that fuel then you can go forward and do to things you want. You have less doubt and old those little things that stir inside get quieter. They might be there but you’ll like, “I know this is what I’m supposed to be doing,” and that’s so exciting. As you grow, things change and that’s perfectly fine. You keep evolving and following that passion. As long as it’s anchored. It’s probably the best advice.
When you say anchored, what do you mean by that?
That’s great to clarify. It’s, can it be actualized? From a clinician, it’s like, what are those steps? How do I actualize it? How do I get to that? Can I get to that now or is there intermediary steps necessary? I write about that in my book where, you might have this long-term vision plan of where you want to be in practice and then say, “We can’t be there tomorrow because of funds, money, etc.” What are those into mediary steps? That’s how you anchor that high flute idea into reality by creating these little steps.
It’s a little more than goal setting because their actuality are ranking them of achievable little steps. I don’t use the word steps repeatedly, but achievable goals that are on point following that North Star or that that focus. Eventually, you realize you were finally at that giant clinic you want. It also allows you to try things on because what I realize is, sometimes we have these visions and they may not be as clear because they’re gigantic.
The closer we got to them, we were like, “That doesn’t fit exactly how I thought it would but I can now augment it and change it.” If we are anchored in these small little bite-sized steps that make it much more tangible, we get to try on these visions and reshape it and continually mold it into it becomes that perfectly fitting vision or whatever it is. At least, in a clinician sense.
Major Factors That Lead To Burnout
You mentioned burnout once or twice already. What are you think from your work and your writings are some of the major factors that contribute to burnout?
It’s multifaceted. One, you have to system. The system, what I call the business of medicine. If you’re doing standard medicine and working within the insurance industry. That could be for allied integrative professionals as well. You’d be holding to a model that might not necessarily be aligned to. You may have to see more patient volume. You may not be able to connect with the patients like you want or give them the time you want based on the billing codes, the coverage they have, and the frequency they can come in.
You don’t get to see the outcomes that you want and give the time that you want. It becomes this internal soul burnout because you’re not seeing things. Plus, a labor burnout of the workload. There becomes a disenchantment with medicine. The thing that you theoretically dedicated your life to. You went to school for it. This isn’t a thing that you just do for the weekend and try it on. You put years and years. This is your life. It is very easy to get jaded into disenchantment. Burnout stems from that and then becomes multi-variables from that core condition.
Secondarily, burnout can come from working too much. We were talking before, sometimes you love it so much that you forget to take time off. I love what I do. I’m excited. One of the things I like to say is I don’t have hobbies. This is my hobby. I love this. I love music. I have hobbies but this is what I would be doing in my free time. It’s very weird for me to take time off from it because you need space away from it.
You can love your partner endlessly but if you were on top of each other 24/7, living in 600 square feet, you’re going to be at your wit’s end with each other at some point. You need a little space to allow that romance to stay. We can get burnt out just from throwing ourselves into it, especially when we find passion. We have to learn to create a relationship with this inanimate thing called our business or a passion or profession or whatever it is. I see a lot of burnouts come from that.
There’s a psychological burnout that can stem from the first component. You see it a lot during COVID when finances get limited. The stress of the world and the changes of politics, then you’re trying to make it. You just don’t have that emotional bandwidth and it’s still an issue of the first. Sometimes, our house necessarily isn’t in order and it becomes very hard. That’s a very hard thing to do. It’s simple to say, “Our house isn’t in order.”
Anyone who’s lived a human life will tell you emotions and everything else are very hard and then you throw a pandemic or you throw politics or you throw social economic factors that are extraneous to the business and leads to burn out as well. Those are the main things that I see. People are disenchanted or they’re working too much.
I see all of those factors and generally, the solutions to it are stretching out other areas. You’re spending some energies in areas other than your primary passion and getting some of the physical movement, the artistic energies, and the social energies. As you said, making clear that the primary force of your energy each day is going towards something that is at least at least parallel to if not driving your passion. Your sense of having a purpose and connection to others in life fuels you rather than drains you.
Also, it makes things less complex. As humans, we like to make things complex in the business. Business in general is complex. Simplify and simplify. That was my high school yearbook quote. The fact that I’m still using that, I am happy that it’s still true. I knew something back then and I’ve learned that that’s so important. You can make your practice very simple. You don’t have to make it so complex of how the patient finds you or an onboarding process. You don’t have to have five different services or 30 different service lines because I’ve seen people do that.
Where they do this and they do that and they create all these different things they do because they’re trying to make money and they’ll have an interest in it. You could just make that easier and say, “I treat people when I use these modalities instead.” We don’t have to sell all those things and we can make it much easier to acquire the patient and interview them and treat them as opposed to, I have a patient coming in for EMDR. I have a patient coming in after that for CBT or coming in for trigger point injection.
Whatever it is and you’re running all over the place and now you feel disjointed. You can make a flow much easier because the model of medicine make things complex but the interaction with a human and the treatment of a human is very simple. Diagnosis and now comes is different but connecting with someone, hearing them, and seeing them is a very human thing to do. That’s why I say it’s simple. It’s the complexity that makes it hard, at least in my opinion.
The Challenge Of Connecting To People
As you say, connecting with people is of critical importance and yet, from my experience in the medical people that I’ve had contact with, interviewed and worked with. It’s almost no training about that in their medical profession. It’s all about the physical, the disease model, etc. Connecting with people, there are those who would say that’s a prerequisite to actual healing. It’s that therapeutic connection.
It’s very modern now to have someone both seen and heard. That’s the thing that we talk about now. It’s become more known, but it’s easy to say, see a person and hear them. To do it and to be present is so hard. Even like active listening skills. Are you listening to respond? Are you listening to understand? Many clinicians listen to respond, myself included. For the longest time, I’d hear those keywords and say, “This one I’m going to say next,” because I’m protocolized. I know how this is going to go. Here’s my active words. This is how we go to this. It’s almost a song and a dance.
Patients need to adopt a consumer mindset and demand more for their health. They should want practitioners to be there for them. Share on XEven trying to be integrative and even with my training that is supposed to be more holistic. It took me a long time to understand to hear and listen to understand and then respond based on what that person said to me. That’s actively seeing them and hearing them. That gets lost. We get caught in the words like singing and hearing patients or trauma informed. You take a weekend class and you’re trauma informed. There’s a lot more to that. There’s a lot more to understanding where this is coming from and it’s unique to every person. We love our bus words.
First, there are so many clinicians. It takes a little time. The word little sometimes doesn’t belong in that sentence but it takes some time to slow down enough to hear what a person is said or what they might be avoiding saying. As you said, to get out of being protocolized. To your own thinking, it’s just running and filling out a form and checking boxes as you’re listening. That’s a lot quicker. That interview technique is more efficient and quicker. I feel sad sometimes when about the different trainings I had.
They were training me to be able to diagnose somebody in the first 5 or 10 minutes of an interview. All those things are based on statistics in that bell curve, which is fine. You get a majority of the people better than that way or closer to an active care that is going to give ameliorate their symptoms in some way, shape or form. Some way or both sides of that bell curve are those people that are not served by it.
You said ameliorate their symptoms and that’s not necessarily healing.
That’s not healing at all, but if you’re present and hearing, you’re both going to hear the keyword. If they fall into that bell curve, great but you also go see the other things that might lead to a deeper resolution. If you think about most medicine or most therapy isn’t necessarily resolution the way that’s put out in a way it’s taught. Its amelioration, symptomatic approaches, and managing. We manage diabetes, depression, and anxiety. We don’t look at how do we make it go away and maybe it’s not possible. It depends on the person the condition or reason. Everyone’s unique but it’s the same for shoulder pain. How do we manage shoulder pain? How do we get rid of shoulder pain?
How do we restore health, flexibility and strength to the person?
Shoulder pain could also be inflammatory cycles. It can be all these other things that no doctor thinks about these days. Some are and the awareness is there. That’s what I’m excited and I feel like part of my mission and reason why I do a lot of shows now is to just talk about these things and raise awareness because the patient needs to be more of the consumer and demand more for their health. They should want practitioners that want to be there for them. The more people demanded, the more the practitioners are going to have to get it in a market economy, so to speak.
I’m all for helping people understand that elimination of symptoms is not necessarily the goal. That building a healthy lifestyle, building a life that you’re happy to be living and excited about some balance and some sense of social connection as well as your physical, mental, and emotional health. Some would say even spiritual health. That’s the goal or people could choose that as a goal as opposed to simply get rid of the pain in my shoulder.
I fully agree. Even when it comes to pain, I’ve always told my patients, the moment you don’t feel pain anymore. It’s not when you should stop your treatment. That’s the moment you stopped feeling pain but the biomechanic things that are going on, still probably need a few more sessions then you might not come back. If we stop the moment, we’re like, ‘I’m better or it’s not bothering me as much.’ It’s still there. It’s just hiding under the surface waiting for that day that you reach from wrong and suddenly, it hurts again or inflammation happens and anxiety gets worse or something else.
I think people are looking for a new version of health care. We see that trend and even governmental with like the MAHA Movement. Regardless of the political side of it where people want healthier food, whether they’re going to achieve it or not. I hope, but people are becoming more aware of saying like, “I want more for my health than just a quick fix.” I hope we can achieve that. It’s going to take way more than a government but I grew up always distrusting the government. Maybe I’m not the right person.
As you said, if you have this groundswell and we have people who are demanding it. There’s some things that are driven by that capitalist system. If the market is demanding something, the system will start providing it.
I remember as an acupuncturist starting. No medical doctors didn’t know what it was or what it refer. I get referrals constantly now. I get interest. They see it as part of the care plan. “I know this guy has good outcomes. You should see him before we think of surgery.” Things do change and that was literally by market awareness and patients inquiring. They finally are like, “I got to understand what this is.” There’s room for better health, better food, and all these other things.
Get In Touch With Dr. Jordan
I realize we’re pretty much out of time here. Let me just repeat that the book is Realigning Medicine: Building an Authentic, Fulfilling, and Thriving Healthcare Practice by Dr. Jordan Barber. If people want to reach out to you, how do you prefer they contact you?
I’m pretty accessible. You could find me on practically any social media channel. I’m more active on some than others than that’s. My handle on everything is @JBarberLAC at Instagram, TikTok and any of those things you could find me. My main website is DrJordanBarber.com. You could always send me a message. Email is on there as well. You could find the book anywhere books are sold, soft, hardcover or eBook. If you get it, email me. I’d love to know what you think because that makes me happy. When I get emails from people that say, “This one chapter fixed my problem or I’m moving this new direction.” That’s awesome to me. I didn’t expect that when I wrote it and now that’s the thing that I’m looking for.
Thank you so much for taking time to share with us. I look forward to reading this book and finding out about your next one.
It’s been my pleasure. I enjoy talking to you.
You, too. Blessings.
Important Links
- Dr. Jordan Barber
- Dr. Jordan Barber on Instagram
- Dr. Jordan Barber on TikTok
- Realigning Medicine: Building an Authentic, Fulfilling, and Thriving Healthcare Practice
About Jordan Barber, DAOM
Dr. Jordan Barber, DAOM, is a respected healthcare consultant, acupuncturist, and educator with over two decades of experience in practice management and integrative medicine. A former Institutional Review Board chair and partner in multiple clinics, Dr. Barber specializes in helping healthcare professionals build sustainable, values-driven practices. Based on Long Island, he blends clinical expertise with strategic insight to guide practitioners in aligning their work with their mission.
Dr. Barber’s groundbreaking new book, Realigning Medicine (Dymphna Publishing; on sale February 25, 2025), offers a roadmap for transforming healthcare practices into patient-centered, purpose-driven, and financially viable models. Drawing on his extensive experience, he addresses common challenges such as burnout, misaligned values, and operational inefficiencies.
“When we put patient happiness over profits or productivity, we find personal fulfillment and success in our own careers,” says Dr. Barber. “This book is my life’s work—helping practitioners realign their practices with their values while creating thriving, patient-focused environments.”
In Realigning Medicine, readers will learn to:
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Craft Their Unique Vision: Use core values and mission to guide decision-making.
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Set Healthy Boundaries: Communicate effectively to prevent burnout.
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Build Trust and Loyalty: Apply the “know, like, and trust” formula for stronger patient relationships.
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Align Actions with Values: Create cohesion between personal goals and professional operations.
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Empower Positive Patient Experiences: Design care journeys centered on empathy and clarity.
Combining real-world insight with research-backed strategies, Realigning Medicine empowers healthcare providers to create meaningful, sustainable change in their practices—and in their lives.
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