A lesson for financial advisors who want to earn doctors’ trust
While searching for a photograph of myself in a white coat, I found this family picture from the early 1960s.
That is my mother with my brother and me.
Look closely at my brother and me.
Those are not candy cigarettes. They are the real thing.
After a car accident left my mother with back pain, her doctor prescribed bed rest. When that failed, he prescribed something else:
Smoking.
Yes, smoking.
At the time, doctors appeared in cigarette advertisements. Smoking was not always treated as a dangerous habit that physicians should discourage. It could be presented as sophisticated, calming—even therapeutic.
A retired obstetrical nurse once told me a story that captures just how different medicine was then.
One particularly difficult obstetrician became angry when she called him before a patient was actively delivering. He explained precisely how he expected the process to work:
He wanted to walk onto the delivery floor, leave his lit cigarette in the ashtray at the nurses’ station, deliver the baby, and return in time to finish his cigarette.
Today, the image is almost unimaginable.
But at the time, it was normal enough that there were ashtrays at the nurses’ station.
Sometimes the experts are wrong
The point is not that doctors were foolish.
They were making decisions within the body of knowledge, professional culture, and accepted wisdom available to them at the time.
Then the evidence changed.
Medicine changed with it.
That willingness to update beliefs is one of medicine’s greatest strengths. It is also one reason doctors may approach other experts—including financial advisors—with a healthy degree of skepticism.
Doctors know from experience that today’s conventional wisdom can become tomorrow’s cautionary tale.
They have watched guidelines change. They have seen drugs celebrated and later withdrawn. They have seen common procedures abandoned when the evidence failed to support them.
Doctors understand that expertise does not confer infallibility.
That lesson matters when you are offering financial advice.
Your doctor clients are not simply evaluating your recommendations
They are also evaluating how you think.
What happens when new information challenges your original recommendation?
Can you distinguish what is known from what is assumed?
Can you explain uncertainty without losing confidence?
Can you say, “Based on what we knew then, this was reasonable. Based on what we know now, we should change course”?
Or do you become more committed to defending your original advice?
This is where trust is either strengthened or lost.
Doctors do not need an advisor who pretends to have a crystal ball. They need an advisor who has a disciplined process for making decisions in the presence of uncertainty.
That means helping clients understand:
- What assumptions support a recommendation
- What evidence could change the recommendation
- Which risks can be controlled and which cannot
- What will be monitored
- When the plan will be reassessed
- What the alternatives are
That is not weakness.
That is professional maturity.
What will financial professionals believe differently 20 years from now?
This old photograph makes me wonder which pieces of today’s financial wisdom will someday look like my mother’s prescribed cigarette.
Which products will fall out of favor?
Which planning assumptions will prove too simplistic?
Which “best practices” will be replaced when we better understand human behavior?
Which recommendations make sense on a spreadsheet but fail in the life of the person expected to implement them?
And which beliefs about doctors are already outdated?
A high income does not automatically create financial confidence.
Intelligence does not eliminate money anxiety.
Being trained to make life-and-death decisions does not mean a doctor wants to surrender control of financial decisions.
And a technically correct financial plan will not produce better outcomes if the client does not trust it, understand it, or implement it.
The most trusted advisor may not be the one with the most answers
It may be the advisor who asks the most useful questions.
The advisor who remains curious.
The advisor who can translate complexity without talking down to the client.
The advisor who makes room for a doctor’s lived experience.
The advisor who knows when to say, “Here is what I believe, here is why I believe it, and here is what could cause us to reconsider.”
Doctors have seen accepted truths change before.
If you want to become the financial advisor doctors trust, choose, and recommend, intellectual humility is not an optional personality trait.
It is part of the adapter that allows your expertise to plug into the medical world.
Sometimes we forget how radically different our lives have become.
And sometimes we forget how much remains the same.
People still want relief from pain.
They still turn to experts for guidance.
And they still need to know that the expert sitting across from them is more committed to helping them reach the right destination than to proving that the original map was right.