Justin Sterett is a correctional physician and a flight surgeon and can be reached at The Wandering Doc.

Medicine changed me by subtraction: a physician’s evolution

Physician
January 30, 2026

I used to think medicine would change me by adding things. Knowledge. Confidence. Authority. Certainty. I assumed growth would look like accumulation, more skills, more answers, more control. What actually happened was the opposite. Medicine changed me by subtraction.

When I started writing as a medical student, everything felt sharp and exposed. The hospital was loud, inefficient, and often cruel in ways no one named out loud. I wrote about scut …

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Medicine changed me by subtraction: a physician’s evolution

A new system for measuring the story of my life

Physician
March 11, 2021

Our lives are stories, and we are the narrators. The stories we tell have an arc across our lives as the plot, characters, and climax unfold. These narrative arcs are expected, for the most part, to follow a linear path defined by time. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how time flows through life and how we measure our life in relation to time. We have no grasp of …

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A new system for measuring the story of my life

The world is a scary place right now, and that’s OK

Conditions
March 30, 2020

As a society, we are faced with levels of uncertainty that are unprecedented for our times. This tension and fear doesn’t discriminate and permeates every corner of the globe.

People might compare the magnitude of this pandemic to events like 9/11 or Hurricane Katrina, but that misses a key element. The disasters we have lived through in our lifetimes up until now were, of course, tragic and devastating in their own …

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The world is a scary place right now, and that’s OK

What physicians miss when thinking about side gigs

Physician
April 7, 2019

In the search of looking for alternative sources of income in the last couple of years, I’ve had somewhat of an existential crisis that I think is worth sharing. As physicians looking for side gigs, we naturally limit the scope of that search to jobs that for the most part capitalize on our MD/DO credential. We have worked so hard for what we have become and the label of being …

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What physicians miss when thinking about side gigs