The Doctor's Art
The practice of medicine–filled with moments of joy, suffering, grace, sorrow, and hope–offers a window into the human condition. Though serving as guides and companions to patients’ illness experiences is profoundly meaningful work, the busy nature of modern medicine can blind its own practitioners to the reasons they entered it in the first place. Join resident physician Henry Bair and oncologist Tyler Johnson as they meet with doctors, patients, leaders, educators, and others in healthcare, to explore stories on finding and nourishing meaning in medicine. This podcast is for anyone striving for a deeper connection with their medical journey. Visit TheDoctorsArt.com for more information.
Episodes
150 episodes
Human Experience in a Digital World | Christine Rosen
If you could be plugged into a machine that simulated the perfect experience — limitless joy, deep connection, a sense of purpose — yet you knew it wasn't real, would you choose to stay plugged in? This isn't just a philo...
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Episode 149
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1:01:58
Virtue and Good Medicine | John Rhee, MD, MPH
There is something uniquely haunting about many neurological diseases. These conditions often don't only affect the body — they reshape the very foundation of who we are, our memories, our personalities, our language. When the brain begins to f...
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Episode 148
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55:18
A Rebirth of Passion and Compassion | Joseph Stern, MD
Neurosurgery is known as one of the most precise and demanding specialties in medicine. It requires absolute technical mastery in a surgical field where a millimeter’s difference can be the deciding factor between lifelong disability or a life ...
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Episode 147
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57:03
Healing, Presence, and Comfort Amid Child Loss | Shekinah Eliassen
In medicine, we are trained to fight for life — to extend it, preserve it and restore it. But sometimes the goal shifts from curing to comforting. That, in brief, is the essence of palliative care. It compels us to ask what it means to truly ca...
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Episode 146
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58:42
A Doctor’s Reflections on Race and Medicine | Damon Tweedy, MD
Medicine is often framed as a meritocracy, where intelligence, hard work, and dedication dictate success. Yet, institutions of medicine are shaped by histories of exclusion, bias, and systemic inequities. And for clinicians coming from marginal...
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Episode 145
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53:41
All Physicians are Leaders | Peter Angood, MD
Physicians are trained to diagnose and treat disease, but they're not always taught how to lead. Yet in an era of increasing administrative burdens, evolving healthcare policies, and growing physician burnout, leadership skills have never been ...
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Episode 144
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56:41
How Not to Die | Michael Greger, MD
The American diet is the leading cause of death among Americans. Accumulating medical evidence now shows that poor diet not only contributes to heart disease, diabetes, and stroke, but also to cancer, Alzheimer's disease, liver disease, and muc...
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Episode 143
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54:15
A Prescription for Connection | Julia Hotz
In recent years, it has become evident that loneliness is one of the most pressing public health challenges of our time — so much so that the US Surgeon General has labeled it an epidemic with far reaching consequences. The pain of isolation do...
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Episode 142
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1:05:00
Personalized Medicine — A Threat to Public Health? | James Tabery, PhD
We have featured many techno-optimists on this show — healthcare leaders who believe that precision medicine and emerging technologies promise to revolutionize and democratize medicine in the best of ways. But look under the glossy veneer of th...
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Episode 141
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57:57
Navigating the Wear and Tear of Living | Vincent Deary, PhD
Life can be hard when we are sick. But even when we aren't, life can still wear us down in quiet, surprising ways. Indeed, major traumas are relatively rare, and it's the moments when too many things go wrong at once, or we are exposed to prolo...
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Episode 140
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1:03:25
Abolishing Death | Ariel Zeleznikow-Johnson, Ph.D.
Variations of cryonics — the long term storage of human beings, usually at low temperatures — have long been featured in science fiction. In stories involving space travel, it’s often used as a solution for long-duration journeys. But increasin...
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Episode 139
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57:30
Racing the Clock to Cure Prion Disease | Sonia Vallabh, Ph.D
One of the most mysterious and frightening entities in medicine are prion diseases — rare neurodegenerative disorders that are usually infectious in nature but involve not bacteria or viruses, but proteins. Prions are misfolded proteins that ca...
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Episode 138
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58:49
A Vision for Justice | Judge David S. Tatel
The second half of the 20th century saw monumental shifts in civil rights in the United States, with the end of legalized racial segregation, discrimination, and disenfranchisement affecting all spheres of life, from education to health care to...
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Episode 137
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52:48
Hard Truths About Addiction | Keith Humphreys, PhD
Addiction is often misunderstood not just by the public, but also by clinicians. It challenges us as individuals, families, and communities. To understand addiction is to understand not only human behavior and neuroscience, but also social netw...
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Episode 136
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58:11
Social Contagion and the Foundations of a Good Society | Nicholas Christakis, MD, PhD, MPH
One of the most fascinating concepts in human health is the idea of social contagion, meaning that emotions, behaviors, and health outcomes can spread through social networks, much like infectious diseases. Examples in the medical literature ab...
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Episode 135
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56:27
How the Internet “Shallows” Your Mind | Nicholas Carr
Digital technologies have saturated our lives and there is no going back. Given this, it's worth pondering whether and how they are fundamentally reshaping our mind and our relationships. A seminal work that explores thes...
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Episode 134
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58:33
The Craft of Medical Storytelling | Anna Reisman, MD
Medicine is filled with stories that illustrate the most beautiful, devastating, hopeful, and consequential moments of life. But how do we capture these moments and transform them into everlasting lessons that guide us on our search for meaning...
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Episode 133
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49:00
Burning Out on the COVID-19 Front Lines | Dhaval Desai, MD
During the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, the phrase “Healthcare Heroes” echoed through hospital walls and city streets. For many people, this felt like an overdue acknowledgment of the difficult and important work that healthcare profess...
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Episode 132
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52:07
At the Edge of Precision Medicine | Euan Ashley, MBChB, DPhil
Precision medicine — the approach to health care that involves tailoring medical interventions to an individual's genetic makeup, environment and lifestyle — promises to deliver the right treatment to the right person at the right time. From pr...
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Episode 131
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1:07:30
From Gunshot Survivor to Trauma Surgeon | Joseph Sakran, MD, MPH
Joseph Sakran, MD, MPH was a teenager in a small town in Virginia when, in 1994, his life took a dramatic turn. At the age of 17, he was out with his friends after a high school football game when a n...
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Episode 130
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52:23
The Link Between Love and Loss | Rachel Clarke
To the best of our knowledge, humans appear to be unique among animals in our awareness of mortality — at least in our capacity for existential reflection about death in an abstract, cultural, and symbolic sense. With this capacity comes profou...
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Episode 129
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58:43
Food for Thought | David Perlmutter, MD
Modern medicine has long considered many neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease to be immutably linked to the fate of certain unlucky individuals through yet-poorly understood genetic mechanisms. But incr...
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Episode 128
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1:01:36
A Physician to the Soul | Miroslav Volf
What makes a life worth living? This question has animated great thinkers and faith traditions for millennia. Interestingly enough, in our time of rapid globalization, technological advancement, and material abundance, we often seem more unmoor...
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Episode 127
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1:01:42
Inside the World of Outbreak Response | Syra Madad, DHSc, MSc, MCP
Most people shudder at the idea of an infectious disease outbreak — patients stricken with a mysterious illness, hospitals overflowing, and cities going into lockdown. But for Syra Madad,...
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Episode 126
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42:05
Finding the Right Words When It Matters Most | Shunichi Nakagawa, MD
For many physicians, having serious illness conversations with patients — talking about a dire prognosis or the futility of curative treatments — is one of the most daunting aspects of patient care. But to palliative care physician
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Episode 125
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47:22