What Medicine Taught Me About Financial Planning: Applying A Medical Standard Of Care To Your Financial Life
getty Before I was a financial planner, I was an ICU nurse. I spent years at the bedside in a medical intensive care unit, a place where decisions happen in minutes, where incomplete information can have irreversible consequences, and where every patient is a complete human being whose circumstances, history, and condition are entirely unique. You dont treat a diagnosis in the ICU. You treat a person… the WHOLE person and their family at what is often the most vulnerable period of time. That experience has shaped everything about how I approach financial planning. We lead with compassion. A great financial planner is at their best when a client is at their worst. And the more I‘ve reflected on it over the years, the more convinced I’ve become that the financial services industry would be dramatically better if it borrowed one of medicines most important concepts: the standard of care. What Is a Standard of Care, and Why Does It Matter？ In medicine, a standard of care refers to the diagnostic and treatment protocols that a reasonably competent clinician would follow given a specific set of circumstances. It isn‘t a rigid script. It’s a framework, evidence-based, consistently applied, and anchored in the individual patients complete
