How Bonsai Trees Can Inspire Us to Build a Better Healthcare System

\r\nHe has published in several medical journals, including recent research on use disparities in telehealth visits & effective community outreach interventions to encourage COVID vaccination. His weekly MedPage Today column, \u201cBuilding the Patient-Centered Medical Home,\u201d focuses on improving patient care.<\/p>“,”affiliation”:””,”credential”:”MD”,”url_identifier”:”fp4223″,”avatar_url”:”https:\/\/assets.medpagetoday.net\/media\/images\/author\/Pelzman_330px.png”,”avatar_alt_text”:”Fred Pelzman”,”twitter”:””,”links”:null,”has_author_page”:1,”byline”:”Contributing Writer, MedPage Today”,”full_name”:”Fred Pelzman”,”title”:”Contributing Writer, MedPage Today, “,”url”:”https:\/\/www.medpagetoday.com\/people\/fp4223\/fred-pelzman”,”bluesky”:””}]”/>

Last year, for our 30th anniversary, my wife and I, along with our two kids, went on a fabulous trip to Japan.

This was sort of to make up for the fact that we never went on a honeymoon. We got married during my second year of residency with very little time off, and we kept putting it off, and life kept getting in the way.

It was an amazing trip — part of the world I’ve never seen before. We were exposed to amazingly different culture, food, sensibilities, art, architecture and colors, and it was just an overall inspiring experience.

I remember on the flight home feeling revitalized, with a sense of wonder, and thinking about ways I wanted to try to re-create some of what we’d experienced.

Looking back at my notes, there are quite a few things that we’ve accomplished, and a few that we haven’t gotten to. One was hunting down an amazing Japanese rollerball pen that was hailed as the number one new pen of 2025, and has been sold out in every stationery store and on every website for months at a time.

One pen shop in Japan finally emailed me that they had a limited supply available, and I spent far too much on shipping and handling to get it delivered here to the States. It’s been a dream to write with (I only wish I had ordered a few more).

Another was a pair of amazing shoes that I didn’t buy when I was there and wished I had, and I’m still on the hunt for those.

I reignited an old passion for the game of Go, which I played a little growing up, and my father had a passion for. And don’t get me started on that multi-nozzle Toto shower that we had in our hotel in Tokyo, hoping at some point to replace the one in our master bathroom with something like that to recreate the immersive multisensory experience with the skyline out the bathroom window. Oh yes, and I’m still trying to find more time to meditate twice a day.

But to the point, just recently, through an online search, my wife and I found a program that teaches introductory bonsai potting, trimming, and wiring; it meets at restaurants all over New York City. We signed up for an evening with Bonsai Bar, and joined about 20 people in a downstairs room of a midtown noodle restaurant to learn a little of the history of bonsai, and ultimately to get our hands dirty.

After some introductions and explanations, we were each given a plant, and went through the process of taking it out of the tiny pot it had been planted in, scraping away at the soil and exposing the roots, cutting some away to help stimulate new growth, and then re-potting it in a new shallow ceramic plate, paying careful attention to what was going to be the front view of our plant.

The instructors explained to us that we should create a vision in our heads of what we wanted the plant to look like years and years from now, and then set about the task of starting down this road.

This involved cutting away what seemed like perfectly viable growth on our new baby bonsai trees, with the vision of helping train it and guide it towards what we wanted it to be.

Some people went right at it, cutting with abandon, trimming and hacking away, thinning out branches and snapping off leaves, whereas others of us just sat there staring at it, not quite sure what to do. For me, it felt difficult to cut something that was alive and doing just fine, trying to force my vision of it, a vision that I wasn’t really sure I had yet.

Now that I’ve brought it home, and I’ve had some time to think about it a little more, I’ve been able to look at the little plant in its new pot and start to think about ways that change might positively affect it, how it might grow to become something that makes sense.

The relevance of all of this to healthcare is that, while we don’t have a baby healthcare system with new root growth, we certainly have one that could use some trimming, some pruning, some slashing and cutting back, some dramatic change and upheaval — all in the name of fostering something better.

Sure, it would be great as we set about the Herculean task of upending and fixing the healthcare system we have, to think about what we want it to look like, a vision of a perfect future, what the best front should be, how we envision the root structure, the curve of the trunk, the arc of the branches, the way it will look like a full-grown tree residing in a tiny space.

Our healthcare system is in no way tiny, but as we bring about changes, as we snip away and bring new ideas to foster change with the curve of a branch in a new direction, we can certainly recognize that we’re doing this for the health of the system.

Right now, there’s so much waste, so much duplication and unnecessary testing and treating, but everything we’ve tried in the past, from letting the insurance companies decide about this stuff, to popups in the electronic health record warning us about something not being the best standard of care, have really not moved the needle all that much.

Cutting off a branch that seems to be doing just fine, and leaves that are only doing what leaves do — trying to gather the sun and photosynthesize and combine nutrients and water for the sake of the tree — seems so counterintuitive.

Cutting back, pairing away, redirecting energy, helping guide something with pruning shears and encouraging wire, and then supporting new growth with sunlight, water, and some TLC, may be the just the ticket to transform our healthcare system into something that will take care of everybody, just the way we need it to.

So, we need to gird our loins and take up the pruning shears, gently twist a wire to change a direction, and turn things around to get a better view.

Banzai (hurrah) for the bonsai!