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/
Interview with Michael Zarathus-Cook
Kelsey Gao, 2T7 MAM
Q: Tell us about yourself, where you come from, and your journey thus far. How have you been involved in the arts before medical school?
The very short story is that I’m a sort of “UofT lifer”. Academically, I started my undergraduate in Philosophy and eventually migrated to Human Biology, in which I completed my undergraduate and a master’s degree. But in the middle of that migration, I had a multi-year detour in the arts. I initially started working at the Canadian Opera Company as a teenager, then got into the performing arts as a hobby, and eventually ended up working for the Toronto Symphony as their Managing Editor. I also started a magazine—called Cannopy—that still exists today, and I write reviews of opera and classical music for The Globe and Mail. Now, I’m completing my medical degree at UofT as well.
Q: Could you tell us more about Cannopy, the magazine you created and still run?
A few years ago, during my undergrad, I started collecting vinyl records of classical music, which was my way of getting introduced to the genre.
I started writing reviews about these records online, and someone at the Toronto Symphony got a hold of my blog—and they loved it so much that they invited me to write reviews for them. That led to my first publications.
Later, a Toronto-based production company also found my blog and invited me to create a publication for them, which I called smART Magazine. I then had the opportunity to run smART for a few years, but when this production company was going bankrupt during the pandemic, I had the option to close down the publication but I took it on as an independent publication and changed the magazine’s name to Cannopy.
The whole idea behind Cannopy is to create a “big tent” for all forms of art. In Canadian arts publishing, we have many great but highly specialized publications. In medical terms, there are many surgeons in the field, but not too many general internists or family doctors. So Cannopy magazine is like the general internist or the family doctor of arts publications, covering everything from visual and performing arts, to dance and opera. We’ve interviewed graffiti artists, tattoo artists, pop artists, and some of the world’s biggest composers, like John Adams and Steve Reich. And we’ve interviewed artists from all over the world, from Japan to Ghana to anywhere that you can think of. I think what sets us apart is the amount of variety we cover. We try to package that variety in a way that feels appropriately digestible, that has editorial clarity, and an aesthetic identity.
Anyone in Toronto that takes the TTC could have access to our broad sheet, which is like an old-fashioned New York Times newspaper, and copies of our magazine version are distributed in retail stores such as Indigo, Loblaws, Walmart, and any place that has a magazine stand for sale. Most of our readership comes from the GTA, with about 140,000 subscribers, but we also have around 4,000 international readers.
Q: It sounds like you’re taking different types of artwork from all parts of the globe into an accessible sort of format for people in the GTA to get exposed to and learn about?
Yes, that’s a really good way to put it. The GTA is especially unique because of how diverse our population is. For example, we interviewed Arooj Aftab—an American Pakistani artist—who is incredibly prolific and an amazing singer. What’s incredible is when you interview someone like that, who has Pakistani and American roots, there’s a good chance that you’re introducing that artist to fellow Pakistanis that live in Toronto. So, building an international publication and then marketing it to a local population works when you live in an inherently international city.
Q: What kind of impact do you think your work on Cannopy has had on others – and yourself?
That’s one of the most important things we consider. I think publications contend with the idea of being a bridge between an artist, a potential audience, and the artwork that they consume. Over the last 10 to 15 years, both of those parties have relied heavily on social media to connect them, so having a publication that could do that for you—which has always been the case since the printing press was invented—was suddenly not as pressing or urgent. But what we’ve seen over the last decade is that these algorithms are not designed to connect; they’re designed to keep you on Instagram, on Twitter, and on Facebook. So, the purpose of a publication like Cannopy is to connect the reader with the art that we find inspiring.
For me, It’s incredibly worth it. Over the summer, I was in a bar listening to an experimental band when the Indigenous artist Jeremy Dutcher walked in. We started talking about art in Toronto and at one point I blurted out the realization that: art is true north. He paused the conversation to write that down and encouraged me to continue to meditate on that phrase.
“There are many distractions in life, and it’s easy for people to get into sort of divisive conversations about identity, but my background in Toronto has just shown me that one of the few places where you get people to all just focus in the same direction—sometimes literally sit side-by-side—is in the arts. So yes, it is a true north.”
Q: How do you think your identity as a lifelong artist writer/arts editor has influenced your decision to pursue medicine?
First of all, it’s very challenging. When I think of this pairing, I admit that it is an unusual pairing, and with that sort of atypical pairing, there’s a great deal of challenge in balancing it, but at the end of the day, it is possible—other people have done versions of it. I don’t see a lot of chief editors and medical students out there, but I’m sure people have done even more impressive things than that. Aside from the challenges, it’s also really inspiring, and just deeply fulfilling. Because, one of the things I think we might appreciate about medicine is that it’s a very, very, textual experience.
By textual, I mean, text is everywhere: in our paperwork for patient encounters, in our textbooks and research papers, memorization of texts, and applying text to tests. So, in that sense, it helps that the other life that I’m living is also a very textual life. Most of what I do editorially is textual, from writing emails to reading submissions to commissioning them, and planning—lots and lots of planning.
I started Cannopy complete from scratch in 2020, so it’ll be five years this August, and we ended up being distributed in over 2000 stores across North America. We were nominated for Best Arts and Culture magazine by the Canadian Magazine Awards in 2023. Most of these achievements were made possible by connecting with artists at a deeper level. There’s a lot of artistic knowledge that’s needed, and in order to speak to artists and interview them, you need to think like an artist, and so I’ve spent a lot of effort cultivating that. Similarly, in order to speak to patients, you kind of have to think from the patient’s perspective.
Another component of it is, at the end of the day, it’s a small business. So, I’ve had to learn on the job how to run a business, how to start from scratch, how to build distribution networks, how to hire people, and unfortunately, sometimes fire people, how to build alliances, how to write proposals (there’s a lot of advocacy of the brand involved in this work as well). I’m hoping that all of this translates to my medical career, when I have to encounter cases where either there are administrative hurdles, or when I have to step out of the caregiving role, into an advocacy or entrepreneurial one.
Q: How do you think your identity as a lifelong artist writer/arts editor has influenced your decision to pursue medicine?
More often than not when you meet a med student in our cohort, there’s like an ampersand to their identity: they are a med student plus something else, or maybe they have been something outside of medicine in the past.
But it is interesting to consider: does the healthcare industry make space or value someone as a staff physician when they also bring something else to the table? Do they see it as less of a burden and more of an opportunity if one of their doctors is also a pilot, for example? (I think someone in our cohort is actually a pilot and is now studying to become a doctor!) One of my early mentors was Dr Michael Hutcheon, who is a retired respirologist, but I actually know him from the opera world! We both worked for an opera company called Against the Grain Theatre—me as a Media Manager and he as a Board Director, a role I’ve recently entered. One of the things I learned from Dr Hutcheon is that you can do both. Obviously, medicine will always, always take the center field, but if you are dedicated enough, work hard enough, and care enough, it is possible to have a dual life as a very serious and very dedicated doctor, but also a similarly serious and dedicated artist or editor or pilot or whatever that other thing may be that you do.
I think that if you add art to any other aspect in life, art makes it better, and it makes the person who’s consuming it better. Applying art to medicine is actually quite simple. As a patient, I would want to interact with doctors who can contextualize my pathology or disease processes beyond merely being a system of organs, and into my whole experience as a human being. I’d want a doctor who interacts with my human story as well as my biology. As well, I would want a doctor who is capable of doing that, but also zooming out and looking at the organism of society. And in the same way that an abstract summarizes a complex paper, art is like the abstract of our social state and social health. So engaging frequently with art, I think good doctors are able to “read the abstract” of what is happening outside of the hospital. And just as a good abstract tells you basically what the research project has achieved, good art also reveals to you where society is, where it’s going, what it’s leaving behind.
But the really difficult question is, does art make us better doctors? One way to think of that question is, would it be weird or wrong to think that anyone would become religious, or start a family, just so that they can be a better doctor? Yes, that would be weird. You’re religious because that’s your True North. That’s what matters to you the most. And if that makes you a better doctor, that’s fantastic. But you wouldn’t want to say one goes to church so that one can become a better doctor. By the same logic, art is art. Art is an end in and of itself, and not a tool or means by which to become better at something else.
Yet it seems that’s how we tend to think in medicine when we think about art: how can art make me become a better doctor? How can it refine my practice? So, as powerful and as interesting as that question is, I think what’s even more interesting is realizing that we can engage in art separately from medicine, in the same way that we engage with religion or the desire to start a family—because it can make us better humans, and by extension, better doctors. But in order for it to work, you can’t use art as a means to an end. You just have to go to art and use it as a destination, rather than a road.
Q: Are you still finding ways to be creative in medical school, now?
Yes, when I find the time. I participated in a program called the Interprofessional Health, Arts & Humanities Certificate Program. The program brings together med students, occupational therapists, physiotherapists, nurses, and other players in the healthcare industry, and we establish and challenge narratives about care. For example, narratives of Indigenous healing—how do the narratives interact with how we provide care? And it’s been very creatively stimulating. The last couple of weeks have been our theatre block, and we’ve been working on improvisational theatre, which is powerful for helping to navigate real-life clinical situations.
One game we played is: let’s say there are 20 people in a room, and we’re all just walking
around in a room. I walk up to you, and I say a word, and then you say a word to me. I have to take your word, say it to someone else, and we do that continuously. Then, at the end, we pause, and then we all go around and we say the last word that we got. In a perfect world where communication is flawless, everyone’s word gets said. But, of course, because communication is a difficult art, there will be like half the group’s words missing.
You can think back to an operating room situation, where someone says something—maybe it’s the surgeon, the scrub nurse, or the medical student—and either an instruction is given or received. Because of the chaos of the OR, that line of communication isn’t always delivered accurately. We’ve learned that very simple tasks can become challenging because communication lines are broken. My hats off to that program; it’s been incredible. Perhaps the best thing it’s done for me is provide an opportunity to work with non-medical students as collaborators.
Q: What goals do you have for your future, both in medicine and art?
I’m going to spend the next two years before clerkship being the best medical student that I can be. And, my way of showing gratitude for being given this opportunity is trying as hard as I can to absorb as much material that I can in medical school. That’s my number one priority.
As for art, it sounds somewhat dire to say, but I want Cannopy to have a life of its own— I want it to go on without my leadership as I disappear into the hospitals. So I’m going to spend the next two years building it up, and hopefully, in the future, after a busy week in clerkship, I can briefly tune in during the week and see what cool work the team has done and read stories that I didn’t commission myself. I’m hoping that the team after me can innovate on what I’ve started. I think that would be really cool—to be a doctor somewhere in the future, with a magazine that is both what I created, but also much more than I intended.
We all have that medicine “plus one” thing that we do. I think we just need to keep on doing whatever it is—it could be art, or sports, or being a pilot. Whatever it is, we just need to keep on fighting the good fight of making sure that we keep our “plus one” and we bring it to the day. If we keep something outside of medicine with us, I think the industry may eventually have to appreciate and make room for that, and become comfortable with doctors who maybe do other things once in a while—with the understanding that it makes them better humans, which, thankfully, makes them better doctors.
