Growing up, Dr Liza Osagie-Clouard had a very clear ambition. Watching her older brother, whom she idolised, play with his Meccano sets, she too wanted in on the nuts and bolts \u2014 but of people, not construction pieces. \u201cI knew from the age of five that I wanted to fix people,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
A clear type-A personality, she excelled at school, came in the top 5 per cent of her year at King\u2019s College London, where she studied medicine and went on to specialise in orthopaedics. \u201cI thrived on the physicality and hands-on nature of the surgeries, where the whole team would work instinctively and together, like a dance, barely speaking.\u201d Craving more academia, she went to study stem cell medicine in New York, becoming a national academic fellow, writing papers and holding conferences. It was during this time that she met her husband and had a baby.<\/p>\n
Back in the UK and working in the NHS (\u201cwhich holds a very dear place in my heart\u201d), she wondered why there wasn\u2019t the same kind of \u201cconcierge medicine\u201d that was \u201cde rigueur in New York, where patients have one doctor who knows them literally inside out, and can spot the tiniest of changes in them, and in some cases suggest a preventative treatment plan. I thought this is how medicine really should be practised.\u201d So in February 2020 she launched her own concierge medicine practice, Solice Health, while maintaining her NHS workload.<\/p>\n
\u2022 Read more expert advice on healthy living, fitness and wellbeing<\/b><\/a><\/p>\n Then Covid<\/a> struck. All doctors were redeployed to frontline service. \u201cI wasn\u2019t used to seeing death as an orthopaedic surgeon. That changed,\u201d she says, bluntly. At the same time Solice Health was really taking off, so she decided that her \u201csecond baby\u201d \u2014 the business \u2014 needed her full-time attention.<\/p>\n To begin with it was just her. \u201cIt was typical start-up vibes,\u201d she says. \u201cI was doing everything.\u201d Not that it was stressful, she insists, \u201cbecause I was enjoying everything, I could deliver on everything, just as I always had done.\u201d But as the business grew, and she employed more staff, took on more patients and expanded into more countries, the workload grew.<\/p>\n By November of last year she started noticing some changes in herself, but brushed them off, too busy to really stop and think. She rarely found time to eat during her busy day and lost about 22lb. \u201cI noticed that I was feeling quite physically weak, that I couldn\u2019t pick up my son as easily as I had been able to.\u201d<\/p>\n Then there was the lack of sleep<\/a>. Emails and workload \u2014 including patients in different time zones \u2014 kept her working until 2.30am, before she got up again at 6am. Even that wasn\u2019t enough. She found herself waking up at 4am feeling inspired to read up on conditions that were affecting her patients on the research portal PubMed. \u201cI was getting between one and two hours\u2019 sleep a night,\u201d she says. \u201cAnd in a way, I thought, I used to do all-nighters as a junior doctor, it\u2019s no different to that. I took a perverse sort of pride in it.\u201d<\/p>\n In the office she was \u201cfunctioning at a high level for eight to ten hours a day\u201d. But at home in the evenings and weekends she was a shell of her former self. Not only did she feel \u201cextremely tired, like a ghost, when I walked in through the door\u201d, but also her mood was terrible. \u201cIn the park at weekends I\u2019d be furiously typing into my phone.\u201d On a family holiday she remembers sending her son and husband off to the beach to play while she did more emails. While she was formerly described as being so laid-back she was horizontal, now \u201cI was snapping all the time \u2014 not just occasionally. I was highly anxious the whole time. It was just my baseline.\u201d<\/p>\n She was suffering from migraines<\/a> and heart palpitations. Her periods became irregular and she started noticing hair loss. Then in March this year it came to a head. One Friday night her son, eight, said: \u201cMum, you\u2019re always angry.\u201d Then he turned and walked away from her. Something finally clicked. She realised that, like many of the high-powered patients she treated, she was suffering from burnout. Despite being all over the minutiae of her patients\u2019 symptoms, she had missed the warning signs in herself, driven by her innate need to keep performing.<\/p>\n Burnout, which Osagie-Clouard believes is dramatically on the rise (\u201clife is tricky and we\u2019re all running around at full pace\u201d), is recognised by the World Health Organization as an \u201coccupational phenomenon\u201d. It is a state of physical, mental and emotional exhaustion. While we\u2019ve heard about the dramatic stories \u2014 such as Arianna Huffington, who ended up passing out in her bathroom in a pool of her own blood owing to her extreme exhaustion \u2014 Osagie-Clouard says her own burnout was more insidious. \u201cThere was no explosion, although my husband later told me he thought I would work myself to the brink of collapse. But this crept up on me and was chipping away at me,\u201d she says. She says that ultimately, left unchecked, she probably would have experienced more severe consequences, not least considering her family history of heart disease.<\/p>\n \u2022 Beat burnout: the 14 simple and surprising tricks used by experts<\/b><\/a><\/p>\n Our collective stress levels appear to be rising. In a recent survey by Mental Health UK, 91 per cent of UK adults experienced high or extreme levels of pressure or stress at some point in 2024. The same report also found that one in five UK workers reported needing to take time off work owing to poor mental health caused by pressure or stress. A separate study by Mental Health First Aid England revealed that 63 per cent of UK employees show signs of burnout, including exhaustion and disengagement.<\/p>\n The next day Osagie-Clouard told her colleagues. \u201cIt was hard, and I was nervous because I was admitting I wasn\u2019t infallible. She was told to take a few days off to start with \u2014 the family went to France \u2014 and to not check her phone. Then she was assigned her own doctor, who treated Osagie-Clouard in the way that she would treat a patient: running blood tests, prescribing rest and recovery practices and generally doctoring the doctor back on an even keel.<\/p>\n It was nothing she didn\u2019t know. \u201cI tell almost every patient that they almost certainly need vitamin D, but I wasn\u2019t taking it myself. No surprise, my bloods came back with a deficiency, as well as high levels of cortisol.\u201d While breathwork sessions are often included in client care packages, she hadn\u2019t made time for it herself. Now she has a Solice practitioner whom she works with. \u201cI get up a 6.30am and instead of emailing straight away I go into the bathroom and do 10-15 minutes of breathwork.\u201d<\/p>\n She rates infra-red mats for their ability to help reduce inflammation in the body, \u201cbut my son and my cat used the mats I had at home\u201d. Now she takes regular ten-minute breaks with sunglasses on and headphones over her ears to block out noise on her mat in her office. \u201cThe team call it the \u2018Dr Liza breaks\u2019, and it is amazing how much that can restore you.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2022 I was a high-flying GP, before burnout. Here\u2019s how I bounced back<\/b><\/a><\/p>\n She also recommends contrast therapy \u2014 using heat and cold such as a sauna and ice bath \u2014 to her patients once or twice a week to help reduce stress. While she hadn\u2019t been doing them herself, despite a venue being moments from her central London office, she now takes advantage of a cryotherapy studio next door. \u201cIt\u2019s four minutes at minus 196C and I\u2019m good to go,\u201d she says, laughing.<\/p>\n Perversely, Osagie-Clouard is grateful for her burnout, which has forced her to slow down considerably from her old ways \u2014 although her life is still not what many of us would consider to be relaxed. \u201cIt\u2019s hard to pull back from feeling like you always have to squeeze in one more email, one more home visit, but actually this is more sustainable. I\u2019m a better doctor because of it.\u201d
solice.health<\/b><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Growing up, Dr Liza Osagie-Clouard had a very clear ambition. Watching her older brother, whom she idolised, play…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":295537,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4317],"tags":[105,218,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-295536","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-mental-health","8":"tag-health","9":"tag-mental-health","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114924509142929674","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/295536","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=295536"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/295536\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/295537"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=295536"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=295536"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=295536"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}