Life, Values & Legacy: Our Chat with Dr. Tigran Garabekyan of Santa Monica

We recently had the chance to connect with Dr. Tigran Garabekyan and have shared our conversation below.

Tigran, so good to connect and we’re excited to share your story and insights with our audience. There’s a ton to learn from your story, but let’s start with a warm up before we get into the heart of the interview. What makes you lose track of time—and find yourself again?
Golf. It’s a hobby I have cultivated for the past decade. Spending time on the course requires mindful awareness of the moment – both internally and externally. I have to calm my breath, learn how to be fully committed to the task at hand, and then also learn how to let go and accept what happens regardless of the outcome. All of life’s lessons can be experienced on the golf course – self love, acceptance, integrity, pursuit of mastery, and above all humility. I also find that when something is weighing on my mind beyond my conscious awareness, it will manifest in some way on the golf course. If I am trying to be too controlling, the game makes me pay for it. If I am lost in thought about the past or the future, my performance suffers. In this way it recapitulates the human condition beyond the game, and allows me to find my center.

Can you briefly introduce yourself and share what makes you or your brand unique?
I’m an orthopedic surgeon specializing in hip preservation – which means I treat younger patients (typically teens to 30’s) who have pre-arthritic hip problems as a result of abnormal development. These problems are quite common in the population and range from bony overgrowth causing restricted movement of the hip joint (impingement) to shallow hip sockets (dysplasia) resulting in insufficient support for the ball (instability). Most of my patents present with painful cartilage tears or recurrent tendonitis – but the underlying cause is much deeper. If we can identify the problem early, before any significant arthritis has developed in the joint, then I can do things to change the natural history of the condition by reshaping/realigning the joint to both alleviate the painful cartilage tears and to prevent or significantly slow down the future development of arthritis.

As you can see, this is a highly sub specialized practice within orthopedic surgery, but it is one that I enjoy immensely. The potential for making a huge impact on my patients is what drives me to keep advancing our understanding of pre-arthritic hip problems and how best to treat them.

Amazing, so let’s take a moment to go back in time. What breaks the bonds between people—and what restores them?
Insincere and poor communication breaks the bonds between people, and honest/caring dialogue helps restore them. Communication is a large part of my practice as I have to explain complex hip conditions to people with varying educational backgrounds. Much of the joy of my clinical practice comes from rising to the challenge of connecting with people of all walks of life, meeting them where they are, and helping them process the enormity of the decision they are faced with regarding their hip and how best to treat it. Orthopedics is unique in that the diagnosis is often easy to make. Anyone can see a broken bone on an x-ray. But, tailoring the treatment to the individual patient, in consideration of their aspirations and recreational pursuits, that’s where the art of medicine comes into play. The only way I know how to successfully navigate that path is through effective and caring communication.

What did suffering teach you that success never could?
Suffering is a condition we all want to alleviate. It is not a sustainable state. When we are in a state of suffering, we have two options – engage our faculties and find a way to alleviate that suffering, or succumb to it. Sometimes suffering is senseless, and there is a lesson to be learned there too. We like to ascribe our suffering to external conditions, but most of those conditions are objectively neutral. The suffering is brought about in how we give meaning and color the experience for ourselves. It is, for the most part, an internal creation and one that we can gain some semblance of control over. Regardless of the type of suffering, it is a call to action. We look for ways to alleviate it, either by reframing our own mind or finding external solutions. The result is that we grow stronger and more resilient, while innovating new solutions to the causes of our suffering.

Success is seen by many as a desired end result. As such, attaining it signals the end of a journey. But, that mindset is unsustainable as it robs us of future successes. When we answer a question correctly in class, we are less attentive to the follow-up discussion. In order to benefit most from success, we must reframe it as an intermediate step from which new problems and goals must arise. This is the only way to create a never ending stream of pursuits that nurtures our own growth and development, much like the pursuit of alleviating suffering.

So a lot of these questions go deep, but if you are open to it, we’ve got a few more questions that we’d love to get your take on. What’s a belief you used to hold tightly but now think was naive or wrong?
I used to believe that if I could address the underlying structural problems causing pain and suffering for my patients, that it would “fix” them. But, after years of experience in my field I have learned that the psychological impact that years of suffering can bring for my patients is not so easily undone with a quick physical solution. It takes years of learning how to re-process pain and dysfunction before patients are able to make meaningful progress in the face of chronic pain. I now have a much greater appreciation for mindfulness meditation and its beneficial effects for people suffering from chronic pain, even after the underlying problem has been addressed definitively/surgically.

Before we go, we’d love to hear your thoughts on some longer-run, legacy type questions. If you retired tomorrow, what would your customers miss most?
I think they will miss my caring and patient presence, the safe space I create for them when they are most vulnerable. The opportunity to be heard and understood.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.socalhip.com, https://commonsclinic.com/physicians/tigran-garabekyan-m-d/
• Instagram: garabekyanmd
• Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/tigran-garabekyan-md-santa-monica
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/socalhip