Interview with Dr. Mohit Bhandari
Parsa Razeghi, 2T8 MAM
Dr. Mohit Bhandari currently holds the title of Distinguished University Professor and Chair in the Department of Surgery at McMaster University. He holds a Senior Tier Canada Research Chair in Surgical Innovation. He received his Masters Degree in Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics from McMaster University and his PhD Degree from Goteborg University. He is recognized as a global leader in global surgical trials and the promotion of evidence-based surgery worldwide with 1100 peer reviewed publications and over 60 million in research funds. Dr. Bhandari’s commitment to evidence-based practice, high-quality globally relevant research and translation of evidence to patient care has garnered his induction into the Order of Ontario, McMaster University’s Distinguished Alumni Award, and the Order of Canada. He was recently awarded the King Charles III Medal for contributions to Canada.
Q: Tell us about your journey as an artist and creative. How did you get to where you are, considering the points where your creative side interacted with your professional work?
The hardest part of life is trying to figure out what you’re good at early on and what others believe your value is. I think my love of art goes back to primary school. I liked to sketch and draw silly little things. I realized that drawing, for some reason, came a little easier to me than my friends. [My friends] would always ask me about my art and I got this sense of value associated with art early on.
Fast forward to medical school at the University of Toronto in 1990. We all have a moment–an experience–that helps you choose your career path. I felt this sense of clarity during an elective in orthopaedic surgery at St. Michael’s Hospital. Orthopaedic surgery involved many of the skills I had developed as a child who loved to sketch and paint, such as visualizing the 3D anatomy of the limbs and bones. Putting a fracture together was both an artistic and creative endeavour.
Today, after a long-ish career in Surgery, I see art as being part of everything I do–it’s part of who I am.
Scientists talk about this idea of flow being a place where everything, the world around you, goes away. It’s led me to make [art] more of a daily habit than a necessity for my job.
“Art, in any form, is important. For me, it’s watercolour painting. Art has allowed me to see things differently and to continuously improve on my pursuit of creativity. When I’m painting, I’m literally in a state of flow.”
Q: You created the CReative COllective Gallery, showcasing the creative hobbies of the Department of Surgery. How did this space come together?
Arts and the humanities are critical in science. I believe the two fields are interconnected.
Dr. Sprague’s father was diagnosed with a terminal illness. One of her impactful memories includes painting, drawing, and colouring with her two daughters and father. She says those drawings, in a very difficult time, allowed them all to share something special – a lasting memory that no amount of talking or visiting would have accomplished alone.
As a Department Chair, we ask questions about creativity of our surgeons. “Well, I do love food,” Dr. Jaffer laughs. “Okay, well, show me something you’ve created.” The minute somebody shows you something they’ve made, I look at them—not the photograph. You can feel their excitement come through.
Dr. Jaffer said, “Not only do I enjoy making food, I also love the visuals. I was very deliberate about how I put these things together. I was very deliberate about the colours I chose.” He had all these stories—and more. I said, “Well, boy, you’re an artist to me.” And then he paused for a moment and said, “yeah, maybe I am. Maybe I am.”
As you walk through the “Creative Collective,”you see surgeons, medical secretaries, families of our staff, researchers, and surgical trainees across a variety [of specialties]. You understand that this is the domain of a Department full of diverse people.
“As humans, we are born creative. The challenge for us is to stay creative, not letting people or institutions around us, [such as] our education system, take that away from us.”
Q: What is “CREATE,” the vision for the Department of Surgery at McMaster?
Rather than IMAGINE, we went with CREATE. Imagining is great; lots of people imagined Facebook, but one person created it. Having lots of ideas makes you imaginative—acting on a good idea makes you creative. CREATE is an active word—it requires us to do something.
C is for culture. Nothing begins without culture—a culture that includes and builds. R is for Research that impacts. We can do research for the sake of doing research but what about the work that leads to meaningful change? You get more impactful research when you create a culture that focuses on ideas as the currency. A poor idea perfectly executed [leads to] poor outcomes. E is for education that inspires. You’ve got to think creatively about discovering who trainees are as individuals. A represents Advancement: personally, and professionally. It’s very easy to say that you’re going to come to a big network that is McMaster University or University of Toronto, but most people get lost. They say, “Well, I understand how our Department advances. I understand how my Division advances, but I don’t understand how I’m going to personally contribute to its vision. So, we’ve built in mechanisms that are allowing individuals to feel that we’re customizing an experience made just for them. T is transformation through innovation in entrepreneurship. There’s many [people], particularly in surgery, who were inventors but didn’t have a place to go. “What if I invent something?” Yeah, that’s super creative and important—now more than ever. E for excellence in patient care—which is improved through ideas, action, and innovation.
Q: How do you define creativity?
Mary Lou Cook defined creativity as inventing, experimenting, growing, taking risks, breaking rules, making mistakes, and, most of all: having fun. That’s creativity to me. Creativity is active, fundamentally an idea that matters. We can have thousands of ideas, but how do we decide which ones to cultivate that really matter?
Q: Where does creativity fit into medicine and surgery, which is increasingly based on evidence and precision?
When I have to make surgical decisions, I’ll do so per protocol. But when I leave the operating room, I immediately go back to a childlike sense of wonder with a deep knowledge of an area. By intertwining arts and science, I try to create something valuable that we can ultimately retest, evaluate, and put back into patients, allowing them to live better and healthier lives.
“We need surgeons with a dual mindset”
Q: Your only piece in the Creative Collective Gallery is a portrait of Rick Ruben. I’ve noticed that you predominantly tend to paint and sketch portraits of people. Why portraits? Where do you draw inspiration for your artistic style?
As a child, I never did portraits—I was terrified of them. They were really hard for me and, as a child, I didn’t want to do something that would result in failure. So, I avoided the hard stuff in painting—and stuck to what I felt came easier.
In 2018, I decided to invest in my creative mindset, going back to things I used to love doing. I don’t know why I gave it up; maybe I got busy with a whole bunch of other things. I realized that doing more work doesn’t actually give you a better life.
So, I took a step back and said, I’m going to reinvest in the 20% of the things that give me 80% of my life’s purpose.
One of them was being creative, learning [to be creative], and becoming a student again. I’ve never taken any formal lessons, and up front, I don’t consider myself an artist, but I like art. I do [art] because it gives me peace and it’s a beautiful escape for me.
I am not going to live the remaining days of my life without appreciating the world in a new way, without looking more carefully at details. I said, “I’m changing my life. I’m doing it today”.
I encourage our undergraduates and trainees to ask questions about anything! The more questions you ask, the better it is. It is through those questions that you get to learn about a person, how they think about problems, and how they think about life.
There’s the saying “We’ve always done it this way”.
To advance, we must challenge ourselves and think creatively about everything. Being highly productive is not the same as being impactful. Impactful people are uniquely different. In fact, there’s almost no correlation between highly productive scientists and highly impactful scientists. Because you’re so busy doing stuff, you never take time to sit back, think, and come up with new ideas that change things.
At McMaster Surgery, we’re trying to get people to slow down.
Slow down, definitely do less, and focus on quality over quantity.
Q: How can medical students balance creative pursuits with their workload? How do we even shift our mindset like you did to balance those creative pursuits?
Most us have given up something in pursuit of our careers. Everyone has something. For example, “I used to love mountain biking.” Why’d you give it up? “Ah, I don’t even know why. I got busy with school. I always thought I’d pick it up again.” You never pick it up again unless you take intentional steps.
“The message I have for any medical student is, don’t give up the things that give you great personal purpose. If you feel you are only focused on studies and academics, ask yourself: how do I cultivate a creative mindset on a daily basis?”
Q: You’ve previously mentioned the acronym THINK as a personal philosophy, where “I” stands for “Invest in the 20% that give you 80% of life’s joys.” What is your 20%?
I have a very personal sense of things that give my guiding direction. On December 31 every year, I look at my 20%. I write it down and think: is there anything that’s changed? I went from a 100 word descriptior, to 50 words, to what is now 3-4 words.
I don’t consider myself an artist, but I love arts and the humanities. I just want to learn more. I want to interact with people. I want to understand why they do what they do. Everyone does something that gives them joy.
I value micro-adventures—things I can do for two or three hours that rejuvinate me.
Academics are a huge part of my life. Anything related to scholarship; I’m here because of that.
Finally, attention to meaningful relationships. I look at that as my family, my parents, my cousins, my daughter, my trainees, and colleagues in the places I travel.
You know, I put about 180,000 miles in the air this year from travel. When I go to places, they would say, “Mo, thanks for coming! We know you’re very busy!” My response. “No, I’m here because I want to be here. I chose to come here. I really am happy you invited me, it’s great.” It’s a different mindset, and you get a different connection with the audience when you start off authentically.
Q: Tell us more about your work and advocacy efforts in trauma surgery shining a spotlight on domestic violence injuries in the fracture clinic?
We asked a fundamental question that changed everything: women who are coming into our [fracture] clinics with injuries may not have just had a fall.
We asked this critical question, we conducted large, international studies—and it led to major guideline changes in our field. At the time, everyone said, “what are you doing? There are social workers who manage this. This is not [a surgeon’s] problem.”
Never take it for granted that someone has sorted it out. Oftentimes we can all make a big difference. It became the number one issue within the Canadian Orthopaedic Association in 2009 for advocacy.
Q: Do you have any upcoming projects, personal or academic, in the fields of arts and creativity?
“The Art of Observation in Surgery,” is focused on surgeon-scientist trainees who sometimes get stuck in the ebb and flow of research, trying to figure out the data. I wanted to conduct an experiment where you walk through the places on your normal path every single day, but this time, noticing the small details.
This is the idea of training your mind to look at the same data in different ways.
We just had our first meeting, and we’ll be finishing that up in a couple of weeks.
We’re also doing a very big research program on creativity. We are looking at understanding what makes our trainees particularly creative and what their habits are: looking for outliers, understanding why the outliers are outliers, and understanding what’s happening to overall creativity based on validated tests that are available to us from the creativity literature.
There’s an open call for visitors to the Gallery and the Department of Surgery.
We welcome visitors all the time—if there’s a medical student interested in learning more, we’re always welcome to host. I may not always be physically here, but we’ll be happy to organize tours!
See more of Dr. Bhandari’s paintings, writings, and latest projects:
LinkedIn: Mohit Bhandari
Instagram: @mobhandari
Creative Collective Gallery: https://surgery.healthsci.mcmaster.ca/creative-collective-gallery/
McMaster Department of Surgery: https://surgery.healthsci.mcmaster.ca/
