About

Probably my own
most difficult patient.

I'm Sam — a family physician in Singapore, a writer, and, if you caught me at the worst of it, someone typing this at 1am with low vitamin D, indifferent gut health, and the kind of sleep pattern I advise my patients against. I'm working on it. Here's what I believe about medicine, and why I write about it.

Why medicine

I was fortunate. I got into medicine because I loved the academic rigour and the theory — the way the human body made sense as a system you could actually study. At 18, my plan was simple: deliver babies, ad nauseum, forever.

That plan lasted until I actually started working. What I didn't expect was that the long days and the overnight calls, the kind people warn you about in medical school, would be the thing that hooked me. There was a thrill in always learning something new that might help a patient down the line. The lack of sleep was real, but the sense of purpose was realer. (Something, I'll admit, I'm only now beginning to address properly.)

The second thing I didn't expect: how much my patients would teach me. People sit down in a clinic room and tell you things they don't tell their families. You're briefly, quietly, allowed into their world. That's a privilege very few professions offer, and the more years I spend doing this, the more I value it.

My clinical philosophy

I can't really tell you what to do. That almost never works, and I've stopped trying. Behaviour doesn't change because a doctor says it should. It changes when you see why it matters — when you understand why lowering your LDL is worth the effort, when you've actually felt what a week of proper sleep does to your head, when a zone 2 session leaves you calmer instead of drained.

My job, in that frame, is not to dictate. It's to be a guide and a consultant. I help you work out which changes are evidence-based, which give you the most value for the time and money you're spending, and which ones are specifically right for you. Because here's a thing that quietly drives me mad about health content: almost nothing works equally well for everyone. A protocol written for a 32-year-old man with no kids is not the protocol for a 54-year-old woman caring for a parent with dementia.

Case in point. I hate running. I was a child of the TAF Club in the 1990s (or as Singaporean kids my age read it, FAT backwards), which meant running was a punishment. At 13 I weighed 100kg. Telling me to go do zone 2 cardio on a treadmill was never going to work. So I picked up pickleball instead — it helps that I'm competitive enough that I flew to Vietnam for training — and now the cardio takes care of itself, because I actually want to show up.

That's the whole point. A plan that you'll do five times is worth more than a plan that you'll do once.

The most difficult patient I've ever met

Is me.

It is, as I write this, genuinely 1am. My sleep is short, my sleep timing is erratic, and my vitamin D has been stubbornly unimpressive for years. My gut health is suboptimal. I know what all of this looks like in a patient. I also know how hard it is to actually change, because I've lived the resistance to it.

Two things broke the denial. A biological age test flagged cognitive decline as my biggest age-accelerator, on the back of a genetic predisposition I'd been ignoring. A separate workup flagged a meaningful future risk of chronic kidney disease. Two pieces of data, neither of which my body had bothered to tell me, that I couldn't un-see.

I don't drink coffee past 3pm anymore, even though I can still fall asleep fine after one. I don't exercise within two hours of bed. I hydrate properly and use the toilet like a person who wants his kidneys to last. The change didn't come from a lecture. It came from data pointing at my own future, and from a slow, private decision that I'd like to be around and sharp for it.

I write about this because I think a lot of people are in the same position. You know the advice. You've heard it a hundred times. Something — a test result, a parent's diagnosis, a bad morning in the mirror — eventually makes the advice land. My job is to be useful when that moment hits.

Why I'm on social media

This started with COVID. I caught it early in the pandemic, and I noticed I was answering the same questions over and over in clinic — what symptoms to expect, when to test, when to worry, what isolation looked like in a Singapore HDB. So I started posting short videos about it. It turned out quite a lot of people wanted that.

It grew from there. Today I write and post for about 1.4 million followers across Instagram, TikTok, Facebook and LinkedIn. What I care about is real-life medical stories that shift behaviour — the ones people remember in the supermarket, or at their kid's birthday party. A friend who now watches how much soya sauce he drowns his sashimi in, because of the salt load. Parents who know not to give honey to an infant under one. A younger patient who understands why improper tampon use is not a joke. A 50-year-old who booked his shingles vaccine because he watched me explain the dementia link.

I'm tired of the Asian healthcare conversation being either "don't worry about it lah" or a panic-inducing wellness grift. There's a sensible, evidence-based middle, and it should be as accessible to read as a Telegram message from a friend. That's what I'm trying to make.

Where I'm a contrarian

Plenty of doctors I respect think social media is either beneath them or a risk to their professional reputation. I disagree. I think it is one of the most powerful public-health tools we've ever had, and the fact that doctors largely surrendered the space to supplement brands, anti-vax accounts, and cortisol-face influencers is, frankly, on us.

Done badly, social media is a problem. Done honestly, with citations and without ads, it meets people where they already are. In a country where people spend hours a day on their phones and rarely see a doctor for prevention, that's not a trivial thing. Good medicine is useless if it doesn't reach the people who need it.

Beyond medicine

Outside the clinic, I am, in the kindest possible description, enthusiastically distracted. I'm an avid collector of rare plants, particularly Platyceriums and Pachypodiums, which I consider a form of living art. (If you've never seen a mounted staghorn fern, you've been missing out.) I'm a devoted dog dad to Adele, a French bulldog of remarkable opinions. I've travelled to all seven continents, including the slightly absurd one with penguins, and I'm driven by the same plain curiosity that got me into medicine in the first place.

Pickleball, as mentioned, is the new sport. I'm not naturally athletic. I am, however, competitive enough to have flown to Vietnam for training. This probably says more about me than I mean it to.

Where I work and how I trained

I practise at Raffles HealthyLongevity in Singapore, where I look after patients across the full spectrum of family medicine, with a particular interest in preventive health and longevity. I trained at the National University of Singapore (MBBS, Dean's List) and at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health (Master of Public Health), and I spent a year in Baltimore during that time — a useful stint both medically and culturally. I hold a Graduate Diploma in Family Medicine and a Graduate Diploma in Family Practice Dermatology, and I'm internationally board-certified in Lifestyle Medicine, with additional training in functional medicine.

None of that is as important as showing up prepared for the person in front of me. Credentials tell you where someone has been, not how they think.

Get in touch

If something I've written resonates, or if you've got a question you can't find a sensible answer to, I genuinely want to hear from you. The easiest way is email: drsamuelgp@gmail.com. I read everything, even if I can't always reply quickly.

If you want the occasional note when I publish something new, the newsletter is below.