On Being Nice

As you may know, I have been spending a great deal of the last 6 months in Las Vegas, working with an amazing team to get the Culinary Extra Clinic up and running.  This is the first Iora Health practice that we have opened, and it has been a whirlwind.  Amongst the many lessons, observations, and strange moments in the trenches of health care innovation--one situation has struck me a number of times, and is frankly quite troubling:

I have been told by multiple patients, home health services, and even our call center, that I am the "Nicest doctor they have ever worked with."

Humblebrag aside, this notion actually confuses the heck out of me.  For those of you that know me, I think I am fairly pleasant and polite, as my parents taught me to be, but not the nicest anything anyone has ever met.  So I figured I am just nice compared to the competition.

I started asking folks why they thought I was nice; more specifically, how were my colleagues from the world of medicine acting towards our p…