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Board-certified pediatrician and certified coach Jessie Mahoney discusses her article “Why doctors must stop waiting and reclaim their lives.” Jessie explains how medical training conditions doctors to view endurance as a virtue …
Waiting for the system to change causes burnout [PODCAST]
An excerpt from Physicians With Lived Experience: How Their Stories Offer Clinical Guidance (APA Publishing, 2025).
“Here is the truth: I have been on a stable dose of Wellbutrin (Bupropion) for thirteen years, and despite being quite a public advocate about self-disclosure and mental health, I have never once said that out loud. If you have ever read anything I’ve written before …
Why a chief wellness officer hid her medication use for 13 years
Last year, at her annual physical, one of my patients told me that February was the hardest time of the year for her. Her husband died three years earlier in February. Her daughter lives out of state and doesn’t visit often. She has a neurologic condition which makes it difficult for her to get around. Her days are marked by TV dinners eaten alone, a phone that rarely rings, and …
How February and Valentine’s Day impact lonely patients
The looming specter of death exerts significant psychological power over the living. Perhaps the most common ways of coping with our persistent death anxiety are to ignore it, actively deny it, or deliberately distract ourselves from it; but removing our protective blinders ultimately enables us to live a more meaningful and authentic life. If we genuinely wish to live well and to die well, we must intentionally develop our emotional …
The specter of death: Why mortality gives life meaning
An excerpt from Still Life with Stethoscope and Typewriter: Essays and Echoes of Narrative Medicine.
Every Olympic Games eventually produces its own mythology. Not the noble kind, ancient Greeks crowned in olive leaves, but the modern variety, where rumor, technology, desperation, and money form a cocktail best consumed at a safe distance.
The 2026 Winter Olympics in Milan have already delivered one such legend: the claim that elite ski jumpers were …
2026 Winter Olympics rumors: the truth about ski jumpers and hyaluronic acid
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Psychiatrist Sarah Hollander, clinical psychologist Kelly D. Holder, and physician advocate and physical therapist Kim Downey discuss their article “Joy in medicine: a new culture.” Sarah, Kelly, and Kim explore how the …
Teaching joy transforms the future of medical practice [PODCAST]
Egregious ethical failures in health care almost always gain attention. Less visible, but no less consequential, are the systemic ones that are often overlooked: routine acts that present themselves as morally neutral, procedural, and unremarkable. They usually do not provoke outrage and are not experienced as trauma. Yet over time, one must be concerned about how they quietly reshape our well-being and our professional identities.
The effect of these acts does …
Moral injury in medicine: When silence becomes a survival strategy
For most of my nursing career, my instinct when work felt overwhelming was always the same: Look inward, fix myself, and try harder.
If a shift felt chaotic, I assumed I needed to manage my time better. If an interaction went poorly, I replayed it in my mind, wondering what I could have said differently. If I came home exhausted and irritable, I told myself I needed thicker skin. I believed …
Remote nursing for burnout: How changing environments saved my career
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Board-certified pediatrician, certified coach, and mindfulness and yoga teacher Jessie Mahoney discusses her article “Pediatrician vs. grandmother: Choosing love over medical advice.” Jessie explores the internal conflict she faced between her medical …
Doctors often struggle to separate professional advice from family love [PODCAST]
Artificial intelligence in mental health has become an easy target. Headlines warn of hallucinating chatbots, reckless advice, and sensational claims that AI therapy is pushing vulnerable patients toward self-harm or suicide. The implication is clear: AI is dangerous, irresponsible, and incompatible with serious clinical care.
That conclusion is too simple and, in many cases, wrong.
The uncomfortable truth is that many patients are already receiving something far riskier than supervised AI therapy. …
AI-assisted therapy: Why supervision makes the difference
I once left grand rounds with a donut and a fake pager buzz because I couldn’t understand the speaker, who often was a natural Mandarin or Arabic speaker. Humor aside, this was not just my problem; it was a systemic failure.
I have spent decades in developmental-behavioral pediatrics, and one truth has never changed: Communication is the currency of medicine. Without it, trust collapses.
International medical graduates (IMGs) are vital to our …
When language becomes the barrier: IMGs and autism diagnoses
A single screenshot. A leaked email thread. A one-star review. Then the verdict arrives fast. Faster than any investigation. Faster than any courtroom. Faster than any truth.
Recent reporting describes how physician and author Peter Attia faced immediate public fallout after the Justice Department released Epstein-related records that included extensive email correspondence. Dr. Attia apologized for the tone of those emails and denied criminal wrongdoing. Major outlets repeated selected lines. Social …
Physician due process: Surviving the court of public opinion
An excerpt from Physicians With Lived Experience: How Their Stories Offer Clinical Guidance (APA Publishing, 2025).
“I am a Black gay man from Detroit,” spoke Chris Veal mid-way into a podcast when he was a fourth-year medical student at the University of Vermont Larner College of Medicine. He was coming out of a seven-year depression, COVID-19 had struck, he lost five family members to the disease, and on top of …
Breaking the silence: mental health and racism in medical school
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The inventor of the Post-it note deserves a medal. Not for convenience, but for clarity. In my practice, those little squares became tactical weapons, bright flags of truth in a sea of institutional delusion. My mother once told Kathy, before our wedding, never to touch the scraps of paper I left everywhere. She understood that my visual memory depended on those markers. Each Post-it was a breadcrumb, a map, a …
Why scale of effort matters more than ego in health care
I recently attended a very large professional conference. In a rush to make it everywhere and yet feed myself, I was running to get breakfast before the sessions and spilled the majority of this much-desired coffee all over my shirt. Here I was, standing with an impressive, unmistakable, impossible-to-hide giant stain of dark liquid spreading across the front of my solid blue shirt and sleeve with nothing to hide it.
It …
The coffee stain metaphor: Overcoming perfectionism in medicine
Human rights are understood to be universal and egalitarian. They are inalienable, indivisible, and grounded in a shared moral intuition: that human dignity deserves protection. One of the most widely accepted expressions of that intuition is the obligation to care for those who are physically or emotionally ill. Yet despite this near-universal belief, modern health care systems continue to struggle with a fundamental question: Is health care a human right, …
Health care as a human right vs. commodity: Resolving the paradox
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Nationally recognized psychiatrist, internist, and addiction medicine specialist Muhamad Aly Rifai discusses his article “How deprescribing in psychiatry offers a path to safer care.” Muhamad explores the growing movement to reduce unnecessary …
Stopping medication requires as much skill as starting it [PODCAST]
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Palliative care physician and certified physician development coach Christie Mulholland discusses her article “5 things health care must stop doing to improve physician well-being.” Christie challenges the pervasive narrative that younger physicians …
Blaming younger doctors for setting boundaries ignores the broken system [PODCAST]
During the COVID-19 pandemic, conversations about burnout and stress exploded, particularly among health care workers. Much of the advice centered on self-care practices: taking time off, scheduling massages and spa days, practicing mindfulness, protecting your evenings, using your PTO. While these strategies are valuable, they are not the full story.
Positioning self-care as the solution to stress oversimplifies a much deeper physiological process. For many patients (and clinicians) stress is not …
Nervous system dysregulation vs. stress: Why “just relaxing” doesn’t work
More physicians than ever are reaching out for support after being labeled disruptive, inefficient, delinquent, reactive, or poor communicators.
These are highly skilled, deeply committed professionals being written up for professionalism concerns, communication issues, behavior, and “reactivity.” These cases span every specialty, gender, and stage of career.
This is not a reflection of declining professionalism. It is a predictable outcome of practicing in an untenable and broken system. It is an expected …
Disruptive physician labeling: a symptom of systemic burnout
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