GITA BALAKUMAR MD, PEDIATRICS was unhappy. Not with patients, not with the science of medicine, but with something harder to name: the way the expectations around her role kept shifting, in real time, in ways that had nothing to do with being a physician. That distinction matters. It shaped everything that came next.
Balakumar is now a certified physician career development coach, working with doctors and healthcare workers while continuing to see patients in direct care. The dual path was a deliberate choice, rooted in a specific frustration with what clinical medicine had stopped providing: autonomy, the ability to build something, and a way to give back to the professionals she describes as "the foundation" of the system. The resistance she encountered in making that choice, she notes, has been significant.
She is part of a broader pattern. Across the country, physicians are developing income streams and influence outside traditional practice, moving into real estate, med-tech, consulting, podcasting, and online education. What drives them, by most accounts, is less financial pressure than a hunger for creativity and impact that the white coat no longer satisfies. The question that follows is an uncomfortable one for health systems: what happens when the profession's most trained minds start directing their energy elsewhere?
For Balakumar, the process of building something new has been its own education, and not an easy one. The coaching certification itself took six months. The business, she says, is still in progress. Venturing into areas where she has no formal training has meant uncertainty, trial and error, and dead ends. It has also meant accumulating costs she did not fully anticipate, not just the program fee but the layered expenses of operating in a new professional world: social platforms, networking, business cards, professional photos, and the considerable investment of time and effort behind all of it.
"The process is creative too so I like it."
That line carries more weight than it might appear to. It names something physicians rarely get to say about their work. And it surfaces the sharpest challenge Balakumar identifies for anyone attempting this kind of transition: getting that first paying client. After years of credentialed expertise and institutional belonging, the market does not simply extend the same validation. You have to earn it again, differently, in a domain where the rules were written by someone else. Whether the healthcare system takes note of what that search reveals about its own failures to retain physician engagement is, at this point, an open question.
