What Medicine Taught Me About Financial Planning: Applying A Medical Standard Of Care To Your Financial Life

BusinessWhat Medicine Taught Me About Financial Planning: Applying A Medical Standard Of Care To Your Financial LifeBy Patti Brennan,Forbes Books Author.for Forbes BooksAUTHOR POSTExpertise and opinions of authors published by ForbesBooks. Imprint operated under license. | Paid ProgramMay 28, 2026, 03:23pm EDT--:-- / --:--This voice experience is generated by AI. Learn more.This voice experience is generated by AI. Learn more.The financial services industry needs a genuine standard of care comparable to that in medicine.gettyBefore I was a financial planner, I was an ICU nurse. I spent years at the bedside in a medical intensive care unit, a place where decisions happen in minutes, where incomplete information can have irreversible consequences, and where every patient is a complete human being whose circumstances, history, and condition are entirely unique. You don’t treat a diagnosis in the ICU. You treat a person… the WHOLE person and their family at what is often the most vulnerable period of time. That experience has shaped everything about how I approach financial planning. We lead with compassion. A great financial planner is at their best when a client is at their worst. And the more I’ve reflected on it over the years, the more convinced I’ve become that the financial services industry would be dramatically better if it borrowed one of medicine’s most important concepts: the standard of care. “In the ICU, you don’t treat a diagnosis. You treat a person...the WHOLE person. Financial planning should work the same way.” What Is a Standard of Care, and Why Does It Matter? In medicine, a standard of care refers to the diagnostic and treatment protocols that a reasonably competent clinician would follow given a specific set of circumstances. It isn’t a rigid script. It’s a framework, evidence-based, consistently applied, and anchored in the individual patient’s complete clinical picture. A standard of care means that when you walk into a hospital with chest pain,...