The best doctors and the best athletes share more than most people realize. Both perform demanding tasks under pressure, rely on years of unseen practice, and know that a single lapse in focus can undo much careful work. Raj Devarajan's career offers a useful way to explore that overlap. He spent decades in one of medicine's most technically exacting fields, and away from work, he gravitated toward games and sports that reward the same qualities. Looking at the two side by side reveals what athletic discipline can teach about the practice of medicine.
Precision Is a Habit, Not a Moment
In sports that demand accuracy, precision is never a one-time act. It is the product of thousands of repetitions until the correct motion becomes automatic. A tennis serve, a golf swing, or a controlled turn on a ski slope all depend on the body doing the right thing without conscious hesitation. That only happens through repetition.
Medicine works the same way, and few fields show it more clearly than the one Raj Devarajan practiced. Over a career that included founding Middlesex Gastroenterology, PC in 1994, he performed more than sixty thousand endoscopic procedures before retiring from clinical medicine in 2023. A number like that is not just a measure of experience. It is the clinical version of the athlete's practice court. Each procedure sharpened the steadiness and precision that the next one required. The lesson from sport is that precision is built long before the moment it is needed, and the same is true at the bedside.
Staying Calm When the Stakes Are High
Athletes often talk about performing under pressure, about slowing their heartbeat and executing cleanly when everything is on the line. Skiing down a steep slope or holding a serve at a critical point in a match requires staying composed exactly when instinct pushes toward panic. That composure is a trainable skill.
Physicians need the same capacity, and the stakes are higher. A demanding procedure leaves little room for a shaky hand or a distracted mind. Raj Devarajan founded the ERCP program at Emerson Hospital and Nashoba Valley Medical Center, taking on one of gastroenterology's more technically challenging procedures, used to treat problems in the bile ducts and pancreas. Work like that rewards the person who can hold focus and act with control while managing real risk. The athlete learns to be calm under pressure for the sake of a game. The physician learns it for a patient, but the underlying skill is remarkably similar.
Strategy and Thinking Ahead
Not every sport is about physical execution. Some are contests of the mind, and these may offer the closest parallel to clinical reasoning. Raj Devarajan has long played chess and bridge, two games built entirely on strategy, anticipation, and weighing options several steps ahead.
Chess asks a player to plan a sequence of moves while accounting for an opponent's likely responses. Bridge adds uncertainty and partnership, forcing decisions based on incomplete information. Both mirror the way a good physician approaches a difficult case. A diagnosis is rarely a single obvious answer. It is a process of considering possibilities, ruling them out, anticipating complications, and adjusting as new information arrives. The mental discipline that makes someone a strong chess or bridge player is the same discipline that makes a physician careful and thorough, and Raj Devarajan valued both.
Endurance and the Long Game
Sports teach that talent alone is not enough. What separates those who last from those who fade is endurance: the willingness to keep showing up and doing the work over a long stretch. A single strong performance means little without the consistency to repeat it.
Medicine is very much a long game, and Raj Devarajan played it that way. Across nearly three decades, he built one of the busiest gastroenterology practices in Massachusetts, worked closely with institutions including Emerson Hospital, Newton-Wellesley Hospital, Boston Children's Hospital, and Yale New Haven Medical Center, and took on leadership roles alongside his clinical duties. Sustaining that level of output required the same endurance an athlete develops through a long season. The person who understands pacing, recovery, and the discipline of consistency is the one who is still performing at a high level years later, whether on a court or in a clinic.
Reading the Situation
Skilled athletes are constantly reading their environment. A tennis player watches an opponent's stance to anticipate a shot. A bridge player interprets the bidding to understand what others hold. This ability to gather subtle cues and respond quickly is central to high performance.
Physicians rely on the same skill in a different form. Raj Devarajan trained in adult psychiatry at Yale, child psychiatry at Harvard, and internal medicine and gastroenterology at Tufts, a combination that taught him to read patients as whole people. He learned to notice how behavioral and psychological factors influence physical health, picking up on cues that a narrower approach might miss. That is the clinical version of reading the game. The best practitioners, like the best athletes, take in more than the obvious and act on what they observe.
Teamwork and Shared Goals
Even individual sports involve teams, whether coaches, partners, or the people who support a competitor's progress. Bridge in particular is a partnership game, where success depends on trust and coordination between two players working toward a shared outcome.
Medicine is deeply collaborative in the same way. Launching the ERCP program required Raj Devarajan to bring an entire hospital system along with a new initiative, earning the cooperation of colleagues and staff. He later served as President of the Medical Staff at Emerson Hospital and as Past President of the Massachusetts Gastroenterology Association, roles that were fundamentally about working with others toward common goals. The team mindset that athletes develop translates directly into the collaborative reality of modern healthcare, where no significant outcome is achieved alone.
Carrying the Lessons Forward
The parallels don't end with retirement from clinical practice. Today, Raj Devarajan serves as Global Medical Monitor at Cristcot, applying his clinical and regulatory experience to advance drug development programs. The role still demands precision, strategic thinking, and the ability to work within a greater effort- the same qualities that defined both his medical career and the pursuits he chose outside it.
All of this has a satisfying consistency. The precision of a controlled procedure, the composure of a difficult case, the strategy of a complex diagnosis, and the endurance of a long career each echo clearly in the games and sports he loves. The connection is not that sports make someone a better doctor in any direct way. Instead, both draw on the same deep well of human ability: the capacity to stay precise under pressure, think ahead, and keep performing when it matters most.
For anyone trying to understand what excellence in medicine actually requires, the world of sport offers a familiar mirror. In Raj Devarajan,MD's career, the reflection is easy to see.
