Preventive Medicine · Surgical Performance · Sustainable Practice

Show up first.Improve later.It begins today.

I've spent my career operating on the human body. The most powerful medicine, it turns out, happens long before anyone needs a surgeon.

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A way of working

The best surgery happens before the first incision — in the preparation, the team, the system, the steady habits that make excellence ordinary. Change rarely arrives all at once. It is built, a little at a time, by people who refuse to accept that good enough is good enough.

Dr Esmaeili
01

The Story

A boy arrives in a new country speaking none of the language. He learns it the only way he can — a little, every single day.

That discipline — small, repeated, unglamorous — became the philosophy behind everything that followed. Seven languages. A surgical career. And a conviction that the way we change our bodies is the same way we change our lives: not through willpower or grand gestures, but through showing up.

It has a name. Kaizen — the art of continuous, incremental improvement. The thread running through the operating theatre, the gym, and a ten-year habit of rolling a single coin every morning.

Read the full story →
02

The #5phabit Framework

Five pillars of preventive health. Not a programme to complete, but a practice to return to — the science of staying out of my operating theatre.

i.
i.
Sleep
Repair, consolidation, and the most underrated medicine there is.
ii.
ii.
Movement
Not exercise as punishment — movement as medicine.
iii.
iii.
Nutrition
The Mediterranean way. Nourishment without rules.
iv.
iv.
Mindset
Kaizen made personal. Progress over perfection.
v.
v.
Connection
The most connected generation, and the loneliest.
03

A Vision for Surgical Care

What if a surgical service were designed not only around the operation, but around everything that makes the operation go well — the systems, the data, the team, the time?

i.
Lean thinking
Borrowing from the disciplines that transformed other high-stakes industries — removing waste, smoothing pathways, and giving clinical teams back the time and calm that good surgery depends on.
ii.
Intelligent tools
Exploring how AI, simulation and performance data can support surgeons — not to replace judgement, but to sharpen it, shorten the learning curve, and make safety measurable.
iii.
A centre for excellence
The idea of a place where clinical care, training, research and continuous improvement reinforce one another — so that excellence is built into the system, not left to chance.

Ideas offered in service of better care — for patients, for the teams who deliver it, and for the institutions they belong to.

04

The Canteen Project

Preventive medicine doesn't begin in the clinic. It begins with the people who run it.

Imagined during the pandemic, the project reimagines a hospital's tired staff restaurant as a place to genuinely rest and recharge — a small, practical answer to a serious question: how do we care for the people who care for everyone else?

The thinking is simple. A healthcare system is only as well as its workforce. If preventive medicine matters, it should start with the staff who deliver care every day — a space to decompress, reconnect and return to work restored. What begins in one hospital could, in time, model a new approach to staff wellbeing more widely.

Developed as the dissertation for an Executive Master of Science in Medical Leadership — Bayes Business School, City, University of London.
The Restaurant Project
05

Areas of Focus

Clinical
Reconstructive surgery
Breast reconstruction, skin cancer and melanoma, hand surgery and complex reconstruction — with a longstanding interest in caring for patients across the whole of their journey.
Education
Anatomy as an art
Teaching surgical students at UCL since 2014 — bringing drawing, sculpture and tailoring into the study of anatomy, to understand the body as something both functional and artful.
Innovation
The future of surgery
An interest in how robotics, simulation and performance research can make surgery safer, calmer and better — for patients and for the teams who deliver it.
Sustainability
Caring for those who care
Preventive medicine, wellbeing and continuous improvement — the belief that healthcare is only as healthy as the people who provide it, and that small, steady change is how it lasts.
Adjust
the Light
06

The Podcast

Conversations on preventive medicine, performance and the small habits that change everything. Adjust the Light.

▶

The science of small change

Episode 01 · 42 min
▶

Why connection is medicine

Episode 02 · 38 min
▶

Sleep, and the surgeon's hours

Episode 03 · 45 min

Explore Dr Esmaeili's world

Connection

47 people. Zero eye contact.

The loneliness epidemic · 6 min
Mindset

Kaizen: the science of small change

Feb 2026 · 8 min
Movement

Walking is the most underrated exercise

Oct 2025 · 5 min
Nutrition

Tired of diets? Try the Mediterranean way.

Sep 2025 · 7 min
Movement

The court, and the discipline of practice

Sep 2025 · 4 min