The Doctor's Art

The epidemic of physician burnout isn’t just a personal problem. Burned out doctors are more likely to make mistakes, less likely to follow preventative care guidelines, and more likely to have dissatisfied patients. When a burned out physician leaves an institution or quits all together, it can cost north of a million dollars to replace them. Unwell doctors lead to unwell patients — and an unwell health care system. The toll that the burnout epidemic has taken on physicians, patients, and even the bottom-line requires more than individual adaptation on the part of physicians. It requires a grass-roots movement to heal the healers. 

Our guest on this episode is Mary Brandt, MD — pediatric surgeon and Distinguished Emeritus Professor of Surgery, Pediatrics, and Medical Ethics at Baylor College of Medicine. Over the course of her clinical career, Dr. Brandt published over 245 peer reviewed publications, 26 chapters, and 2 books. She became particularly attuned to the suffering of trainees and physicians while serving as General Surgery Program Director and Dean of Student Affairs at Baylor, and she subsequently obtained a Master of Divinity Degree to better understand and articulate what she was observing. Dr. Brandt is a persistent advocate for physician wellness and correcting systemic issues in medicine. 

Over the course of our conversation, Dr. Brandt describes the moment she felt called to surgery, her fruitless efforts to resist this calling, and how the combination of competence and humility allowed her to manage the pressure of operating on children. We explore the evolution of the physician-wellness movement and why the health care system cannot afford to ignore the wellness of its physicians. Finally, Dr. Brandt posits that the hard work of compassion is what can sustain physicians long term. 

In this episode, you’ll hear about: 

3:00 - Dr. Brandt’s unexpected path to becoming a pediatric surgeon  

11:00 - Dr. Brandt’s mental approach to the high stakes work of pediatric surgery  

27:49 - The disconnect between the work of healing and the business side of medicine

38:15 - How Dr. Brandt’s studies in liberation theology have influenced her vision for the healthcare system and medical practice

42:00 - The three shifts healers can make to collectively change medicine

48:20 - The ‘practice’ of compassion and how it can protect physicians from burnout 

If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, rate, and review our show, available for free on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you know of a doctor, patient, or anyone working in health care who would love to explore meaning in medicine with us on the show, feel free to leave a suggestion in the comments or send an email to [email protected].
Copyright The Doctor’s Art Podcast 2026

The electronic medical record (EMR) has become an unwelcome interloper in the exam room. Too often, patients find themselves answering questions delivered from behind a monitor by physicians hurriedly typing away. This isn’t the kind of care anyone wants — but it’s what the system demands. Thankfully, change may be on the horizon.  AI scribes are now being rolled out in EMRs across the country, capable of listening to a visit, generating a clinic note, and freeing the physician to be present with their patient. But these scribes are only an opening act of a much larger experiment — one that asks not merely whether AI can redeem the medical record, but whether it can usher in something closer to a Golden Age of medicine. 

Our guest on this episode is Bob Wachter, MD, professor and chair of medicine at UCSF and a leading voice in hospital medicine and administration. In 1996, he and his colleague Lee Goldman coined the term “hospitalist,” giving rise to what has become the fastest growing specialty in the history of modern medicine. He has authored over 300 articles and 6 books, including the New York Times bestseller The Digital Doctor (2015) and A Giant Leap: How AI is Transforming Healthcare and What That Means for Our Future (2026).
 
Over the course of our conversation, Dr. Wachter traces how a long-held fascination with systems drew him into studying medicine's digital transformation over the past 15 years — a period spanning the turbulent rollout of electronic medical records and now the arrival of AI. We explore the bumpy history of adopting powerful but general-purpose technologies, how such technologies force complex industries to reshape themselves, and humanity's humbling track record of predicting what comes next. Dr. Wachter makes the case that AI's integration into medicine constitutes the biggest experiment the field has ever undertaken, and explains why he believes it will ultimately resolve many of the health care system's deepest problems and elevate the practice of medicine itself.

In this episode, you’ll hear about: 
3:46 - Dr. Watcher’s path to medicine and to his study of digital transformation
8:06 - The wins and losses of the transition to electronic medical records
26:45 - Why Dr. Watcher is optimistic that AI will deliver a “golden age” for medicine 
37:30 - Contending with the potential dangers of AI in the revenue-focused medical industry
50:30 - Dr. Watcher’s view on if there will always be an important place for doctors in the future 
If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, rate, and review our show, available for free on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you know of a doctor, patient, or anyone working in health care who would love to explore meaning in medicine with us on the show, feel free to leave a suggestion in the comments or send an email to [email protected].

Copyright The Doctor’s Art Podcast 2026

In recent years, Silicon Valley has imagined for us a new way of life – one where almost anyone can be a twenty or thirty-something-year-old with a supernatural glow, toned physique, understated intelligence, and a superabundance of vitality. This is not reality for most people, even for the twenty or thirty-something-year-olds, but medicine and technology originally intended to help people achieve baseline health are increasingly being leveraged to close the gap. This raises the question: what is medicine for? Is medicine about restoring people to some definition of “normal” health? And if so, what about all the people contentedly living in bodies considered medically abnormal?

Our guest is Devan Stahl, author, clinical ethicist, and professor of bioethics and religion at Baylor University. Professor Stahl received her PhD in Health Care Ethics from St. Louis University, before completing her Master of Divinity at Vanderbilt University. Her scholarship focuses on disability theology and bioethics, and her most recent books include Disability's Challenge to Theology (2022) and Bioenhancement Technologies and the Vulnerable Body (2023). In addition to her scholarly work, Stahl volunteers as a clinical ethicist with the Supportive and Palliative Care Team at her local hospital. 

Over the course of our conversation, we discuss whether it is the role of a clinical ethicist to determine what is “right” in a given situation – and if so, how that is accomplished. We explore how Silicon Valley’s promotion of the “optimized” human raises questions about the purpose of medicine, and the various ways medicine defines the idea of “normal” health. Stahl shares her experience in the healthcare system as someone with multiple sclerosis, cautioning that some providers are more comfortable focusing on the digitized version of someone’s disability than on the person themselves. Together, we imagine a doctor’s role not just in restoring patients to normality, but guiding them to flourish.  

In this episode, you’ll hear about: 

3:19 - The questions that have driven Stahl’s academic career as a professor of bioethics and religion. 

5:00 - The types of requests Stahl receives as a bioethicist at her local hospital.

12:51 - How Silicon Valley is skewing public perception of “health” — and the questions this raises about the purpose of medicine.

20:12 - Stahl’s experience navigating uncomfortable and confusing medical encounters as a person with disability herself.

25:24 - Stahl’s take on the “purpose” of modern medicine.

29:48 - Ways in which our society tends to value certain kinds of bodies over others. 

39:36 - Imagining the role of physicians in helping patients flourish. 

44:55 - How health care professionals can find deeper meaning in their work and lives.

If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, rate, and review our show, available for free on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you know of a doctor, patient, or anyone working in health care who would love to explore meaning in medicine with us on the show, feel free to leave a suggestion in the comments or send an email to [email protected].

Copyright The Doctor’s Art Podcast 2026

Electronic Medical Records have transformed the way we practice health care, making patient data readily accessible to health care providers, facilitating collaboration within and across large medical teams, increasing transparency, and drastically improving the legibility of patient charts and prescriptions. But despite these benefits, many physicians cite the electronic medical record as a primary driver of burnout, pointing to the overwhelming volume of documentation it requires. In this episode, we explore how the launch of EMRs within the context of America’s predominantly fee-for-service health care system led to the technology falling short of its promise — and how transitioning to value-based care models might redeem the technology, revitalize physicians, and recenter public health. 

Our guest on this episode is Farzad Mostashari, MD. After completing a degree in public health at Harvard, medical school at Yale, and residency at Massachusetts General Hospital, Dr. Mostashari spent over a decade working in public health: first for the CDC’s Epidemic Intelligence Service and then for the New York City Department of Health. From 2009 to 2011, he served as the National Coordinator for Health IT at the Department of Health and Human Services where he helped oversee the nationwide transition from paper to electronic medical records. In 2014, he founded Aledade, a company that helps primary care physicians form value-based care networks in the US.  

Over the course of our conversation, Dr. Mostashari shares how his childhood in Iran pushed him towards public health, how his experience watching his father being cared for in the hospital drove him towards medicine, and how he has spent his career in the liminal space between public health and medicine. We discuss the rollout of EMRs, and how fee-for-service payment models led to EMRs being optimized for documentation rather than patient care. We explore how value-based care not only solves the problem of over-documentation, but also better aligns the goals of patients, physicians, and even insurance companies. Dr. Mostashari maps out the progress we have made toward this kind of model and the hurdles we have to clear before we have a system that incentivizes preventing stroke as much as treating stroke. 

In this episode, you’ll hear about: 

3:35 - How Dr. Mostashari became drawn to the intersection between the intimate work of doctoring and the wide lens work of public health. 

12:12 - Dr. Mostashari’s experiences modernizing health IT systems and learning to optimize for the number of lives saved rather than the number of technological solutions implemented.

16:05 - Dr. Mostashari’s assessment of the rollout of the electronic medical record in the US.

25:09 - How Aledade frees primary care physicians to prioritize patient outcomes and reduces the burden of EMR documentation.

38:57 - What the US can learn from international health care systems. 

41:00 - Challenges in transitioning to outcome-based models of primary care.

50:30 - How Dr. Mostashari’s medical training has shaped his career in public health. 

If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, rate, and review our show, available for free on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you know of a doctor, patient, or anyone working in health care who would love to explore meaning in medicine with us on the show, feel free to leave a suggestion in the comments or send an email to [email protected].

Copyright The Doctor’s Art Podcast 2026

Over the past 160 episodes, two themes that have appeared repeatedly feel as relevant and urgent as ever are 1) the pros and dehumanizing cons of technology and 2) approaching suffering in the human experience. In this episode, we are excited to bring back a panel of notable past guests to discuss the interplay between medicine, suffering, technology, and the human experience. 
We are joined by historian Christine Rosen, PhD, philosopher Mikolaj Slawkowski-Rode, PhD, and palliative care physician Sunita Puri, MD. Rosen is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute whose work is focused on American history, society and culture, technology and culture, and feminism. Slawkowski-Rode is an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Warsaw and research fellow at the University of Oxford with a current emphasis on the philosophy of science and religion. Dr. Puri is a palliative care physician, associate professor at the University of California, Irvine School of Medicine, and author of the critically acclaimed book That Good Night (2019). 
As a panel, we consider a prominent aspect of the unwritten curriculum of medicine: how medicine often considers suffering and sorrow to be fixable and their eradication to be a metric of medical success. We explore ways digital technology can make our lives easier without making them better, and the pressing need to define and defend the (non-digital) human experience. We propose that the goal is not to eradicate all suffering, but to reduce needless suffering without denying the forms that accompany love, growth, and moral responsibility. When suffering is treated as an intolerable defect, we can become preoccupied with self-protection and less available to one another. The first and most important gift a caregiver can give is their undivided attention and the biggest mistake we can make in medicine is turning away from suffering. Finally, we ponder if for both patients and physicians, life, in the end, is meant to be a mystery.
In this episode, you’ll hear about: 
6:37 – Unlearning preconceived perspectives on suffering, technology, and human experience. 
13:08 – Engaging with digital technology critically instead of presuming that technological progress is inherently good.
19:28 – Suffering as an irradicable and sometimes necessary element of the human condition.
27:50 – Helping young terminal patients grapple with their diagnosis as a palliative care doctor. 
36:36 – How the pursuit of immortality can lead to moral sickness.
47:08 – How digital technologies are inciting a collective disembodiment from reality.
53:15 – Practices that will positively impact the modern lived experience.

Explore our guests’ past episodes on The Doctor’s Art: 
Human Experience in A Digital World | Christine Rosen, PhD
A Philosophy of Grief | Mikolaj Slawkowski-Rode, PhD
The Beauty of Impermanence | Sunita Puri, MD

If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, rate, and review our show wherever you get your podcasts. If you know of a doctor, patient, or anyone working in health care who would love to explore meaning in medicine with us on the show,  send an email to [email protected].
Copyright The Doctor’s Art Podcast 2026