That's because Brock, once the respected director of cardiac surgery at Tampa General Hospital, no longer spends his days stitching arteries and removing lung tumors. Instead, he has joined an office practicing "anti-aging medicine," where he'll offer weight-loss plans and sell supplements.
Once, Brock saved lives at their most fragile.
"That's what I ... love doing," he said. "But I can't make a living doing it, to be honest with you."
Across the country, doctors in Brock's specialty, thoracic surgery, are leaving the field. Medicare payments for bypass surgeries have dropped 54 percent since 1989. The number of bypass surgeries performed has also dropped, replaced by less-invasive angioplasties and stents.
Brock, 55, said his take-home pay had fallen from $380,000 in the early 1980s to about $80,000. His malpractice insurance cost $70,000 a year, while he was being paid only $1,500 per bypass operation.
Brock says that he's excited about his new work and that he ultimately may save more lives preventing heart disease than he did fixing the damage.
But many doctors in Tampa Bay see Brock's defection in symbolic terms. Brock, after all, was supposed to be at the top of the medical heap. He was performing complex surgeries including heart transplants at a major trauma hospital. He even trained with Dr. Michael E. DeBakey, one of the world's best-known heart surgeons. If Brock is bested by rising malpractice costs and shrinking payments, what hope is there for the rest of medicine?
"He was trained by God," protested Dr. Daniel Greenwald, a Tampa plastic surgeon.
Dr. Neil Alan Fenske, chair of dermatology and cutaneous surgery at the University of South Florida, worries about a shortage of surgeons.