Remina Panjwani

Remina Panjwani, DO, is a board-certified physician, a functional medicine specialist, an Air Force veteran and a best-selling author. She practices in Fort Worth, Texas, where she is a hospitalist and the founder of Optimizing Wellness Together, a concierge functional medicine practice.

She came to medicine by way of the military. The years in uniform are one of the two experiences that taught her what she now teaches about burnout, and her work now moves between the hospital, her practice, and the stages and retreats where she talks about it.

She served in the United States Air Force from 2003 to 2009, six years, and separated as a senior airman.

The Air Force is the first of those two experiences; the pandemic is the second. She has put the difference between them plainly: in the military, she knew what she was fighting; in COVID, she did not know what she was up against. Both, she has said, taught her the same lesson about burnout.

She left the Air Force in 2009 and went into medicine. She earned her doctor of osteopathic medicine degree and completed a residency in internal medicine.

A hospitalist is a physician who cares for patients in the hospital rather than in an outpatient practice, and her clinical work has been in hospital and internal medicine. She worked as a hospitalist and internal medicine physician with Questcare Partners in Plano, and she is now a hospitalist with Texas Health Physicians Group in Fort Worth. Alongside her hospital work she founded Optimizing Wellness Together, which works with clients one to one. The practice looks for the root cause of a chronic problem rather than treating each symptom as it appears.

She started her first job as a hospitalist as COVID arrived. She has described the lesson this way:

“Burnout isn’t a weakness, and it isn’t a buzzword. It’s a system problem, in the body and in the workplaces that keep it running.”

That is why she treats burnout as a system problem to be diagnosed and rebuilt, not a personal failing.

Her published framework, the DEPLOYMENT Method, is her answer to that problem. She uses it to help leaders and organizations find the cause of burnout and fix it at the root. It moves in three stages: recon, which assesses where a system is breaking down before anything is treated; deploy, which regulates first, then restores, then optimizes; and return, which reviews and builds what holds, so that no one is left in the field.

She brings the method to organizations losing people to burnout through keynotes, workshops and executive advisory work, and to individuals carrying it themselves through Deploy Peace retreats and workshops.

She is a TEDx speaker, has appeared as a guest on Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka and Dropping Bombs with Brad Lea, and hosts the Dr. Remina Panjwani Show. Her book is Odd Girl Out, Doctor Within.

The Air Force came first, and medicine came second. The argument she makes now belongs to both, and it follows her into the hospital, the practice and the retreat.