Surgery has trained me better than anything else to connect with people.

I have become convinced that the most overlooked tool in our medical arsenal is harnessing the body's own ability to heal through nutritional excellence.

My mother was all about unconditional love, and I don't think we give that to our patients a lot. At the end of the day, what they really need you to do is to look at them in the eye and say, 'I'm here for you. I'm going to make sure this works out.'

Every hour you sit at work increases your mortality 11 percent. Think about that.

The more decisions we make in a day, the more likely we are to make bad decisions - because deciding wears us down. You start making decisions in the morning, and by the middle of the afternoon, you're running on fumes.

One way to fuel the brain to make more decisions is to feed it carbs. So as the day goes on, you start to crave more carbs - especially women, because women tend to make more of the day-to-day decisions in our lives than men.

As a surgeon you have to have a controlled arrogance. If it's uncontrolled, you kill people, but you have to be pretty arrogant to saw through a person's chest, take out their heart and believe you can fix it. Then, when you succeed and the patient survives, you pray, because it's only by the grace of God that you get there.