How Burned-Out Doctors Can Find Our Creativity Again With Dr. Emily Silverman

“That was the moment where I realized I'm in the business of helping people be healthy, but then why am I making myself sick?”

Dr. Emily Silverman is an internal medicine physician and host of the award-winning medical storytelling podcast The Nocturnists, which she launched in 2016 with the goal of humanizing medicine through the voices of doctors and other healthcare workers.

On this episode of How I Doctor, Offcall co-founder Dr. Graham Walker talks to Emily about her personal experience with burnout, and how it sparked a year-long-health crisis that helped inspire her to start The Nocturnists. They discuss how Emily uses narrative storytelling to create community, understand medical culture, and examine structural health policy questions. They also touch on some of those larger questions and “riff” on creativity in medicine — how it gets lost and why it’s crucial.

Here are four highlights from this illuminating episode.

1. A year-long-struggle with pelvic pain indirectly led to The Nocturnists

“I think at a certain point, if you force yourself to work that hard, your body just says no.”

About halfway through residency, Emily worked two 20-hour shifts in a row thanks to a scheduling fluke. She had the option to call Jeopardy and offload part of one shift, but she caved to the pressure — “because of so many cultural reasons” — and worked both. In terms of Emily’s physical health, “everything went haywire” after those shifts: She developed pelvic pain from what turned out to be endometriosis, and then wound up in surgery a year later.

The whole experience was a wakeup call for Emily, who realized that she wanted to understand what was happening in medical culture and how burnout had become so ingrained in it. Part of the answer, for Emily, was building a creative space for doctors and other healthcare workers to come together, share stories and process everything. The first version of this space was a blog. But Emily decided it wasn’t advancing the conversation enough. After going to see a live-taping of The Moth, NPR’s storytelling series, Emily was inspired to ditch her blog and launch a Moth for medicine. The Nocturnists was born.

2. When doctors talk about burnout, private equity should be part of the conversation

“Just looking at the sprawling web of businesses that is the U.S. healthcare system, and asking ourselves how much of that is trickling down and affecting us day to day?”

The question of how to fix burnout has been haunting Emily for a while, she says. The problem is undoubtedly layered, as is any solution to it. Doctors have the most control over the personal layer — things like changing work schedules and making lifestyle improvements. But studies suggest these personal factors have a limited impact. “We all have the same reaction when we're told to meditate and do yoga,” Emily says.

Solving burnout mostly needs to happen at the systems level. Though there are mixed feelings about tools that drive systemic change, like unions, Emily feels like more physicians are coming around.

But, Emily says, there’s something else to consider too: Doctors need to ask themselves how they’re being affected by PE buying up hospital systems and changing workflows, and consolidating independent rural practices into something that feels a “a little bit more fast food-like.” What do doctors think about PE’s healthcare takeover making them more like cogs in a system than physicians with agency over their patient-care decisions?

3. Many physicians feel sad about losing their creativity

“Why do we have this again and again — people coming up through the medical education system, and emerging on the other side, very well-trained, extremely skilled, very good at what they do, but feeling like there's been a sort of death or that something has atrophied inside of them?”

Emily gets so many emails from physicians who say they’ve lost their creativity, and she wonders if it’s a natural effect of medical training.

She can often tell when someone she’s talking to is a doctor because they demonstrate a “clarity of communication.” But, in the process of developing that signature clarity, Emily thinks doctors might lose some of their ability to riff and improvise. Does spending so many hours in a structured environment “atrophy the part of the brain that’s more open”?

Emily thinks it’s important to find opportunities for physicians-in-training to flex their creative-thinking muscles, so they don’t feel depressed years later.

4. Younger physicians: Think outside the box about your careers

“Often, there's voices, whether it's your parents, or your boss, or whoever, telling you to be a certain thing or go a certain way. If the more you can turn those voices down and listen to the inner voice and where that's leading you, I think the better.”

Early-career doctors can expect to get a lot of emails from recruiters about “off-the-shelf jobs” at big hospital systems. If these don’t feel like the right fit, don’t feel pressured to take them, Emily says. A lot of exciting stuff is happening in medicine that’s generating less conventional jobs. There are opportunities at digital health companies, telemedicine companies, and direct primary care practices, to name a few blossoming areas.

Not to mention, more physicians are moving away from single full-time roles and spreading their working hours across several part–time jobs. Emily is one of them — she practices outpatient primary care, podcasts, and writes. Friends of hers in academic medicine are taking a similar “mishmash” approach, and splitting their time equally between clinical work, teaching, and research.

Connect further with Emily on LinkedIn here.

To make sure you don’t miss an episode of How I Doctor, subscribe to the show wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also read the full transcript of the episode below.

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Transcript

Emily Silverman::

I think that was the moment where I realized, I'm in the business of helping people be healthy, but then why am I making myself sick?

Graham Walker:

Welcome to How I Doctor, where we're bringing joy back to medicine. Dr. ES is a practicing internal medicine physician, fellow San Franciscan, and the founder of the popular podcast series, The Nocturnist, that shares raw, honest, deeply human stories from healthcare workers. I'm excited to talk to Emily today for many reasons.

First, she's a fellow physician podcaster. Second, her series on Shame in Medicine has helped me personally, and I think she be required listening for everyone. Third, so I can learn about Emily's personal experiences with burnout and the groundbreaking work that she has pioneered in using storytelling to address that.

Welcome to How I Doctor, Dr. ES. I think maybe we'll start talking a little bit about burnout, and then move to the podcast. Do you have a core memory that comes out and says, "Oh, yeah, this is me burnt out," or, "I'm starting to recognize something's changed about me?"

ES:

I do. It wasn't a split second moment, but it was more a period of time or an episode. Grew up wanting to doctor. I didn't have any doctors in my family, but for whatever reason, when I was five years old, I was running around the playground, saying, "I want to be a doctor, I want to be a doctor." I'm not sure exactly where it came from. I loved my pediatrician, I loved science, I loved biology, I loved the body and understanding it, and what it is, and how it works.

The Reality of Physician Burnout

I think my way in was a little bit more through that wonder. For me personally, it took the shape of a health issue. I was about halfway through residency, I was working really long hours, as people do when they're in residency. Every other month, I would work 20-hour shifts every fourth night. It was actually this one scheduling fluke that occurred, where it was a four-week rotation, and it was two weeks on the hospital wards, and it was two weeks in the ICU, so it was sort of a split in half month.

The ICU and the hospital ward had different call schedules. It just so happened that I finished my hospital week on a call day, and then the next day, switched to ICU, and landed on a call day. I was actually scheduled to work two 20 hour shifts in a row. I reached out to the program leadership, and they offered me a few things of, they were like, "You can call Jeopardy to cover 12 hours to give you a break, or you could just do it and then take another day off at the end."

I actually already had a day off scheduled at the end, and for all of the shame and medicine reasons, decided not to take them up on the offer to call Jeopardy because of so many cultural reasons that I'm sure you and your listeners understand. I ended up just working two 20 hour shifts in a row, and came out of that feeling, just feeling, I don't know, like something isn't right. Then it was actually later that month when I started to experience pelvic pain, and had some changes and issues with my cycle.

That catapulted me into a year long actually struggle with pelvic pain, and what later ended up being diagnosed as endometriosis, and culminated in me having a surgery. The surgeon was like, "Oh, my God, it was all over your pelvis," and I don't know, part of me feels like it was the body says no kind of a thing. It was like the cycle right after that back-to-back shift where everything went haywire. I think at a certain point, if you force yourself to work that hard, your body just says no.

I think that was the moment where I realized I'm in the business of helping people be healthy, but then why am I making myself sick? That was one of the things that launched me into this journey of trying to better understand things about medical culture that weren't working, and also just the state of healthcare in general, and how physician overwork and physician burnout was not just a me issue or a my hospital issue, but actually a national issue, and actually an international issue, in some cases. That was my low point.

GW:

I immediately knew, I could immediately tell you what she's about to say about, "Oh, she's going to get stuck with two calls shifts in a row." I immediately knew that because that is part of medical culture, that like, "Oh, probably the hospitalists and the ICU doctors aren't thinking about this from a resident perspective. They're thinking about of a rotator. They're just both doing their own schedules, and expecting the resident to just figure it out," or, "Okay, just keep going, push through."

Emily, how do you think that the other players besides physicians in the system, whether it's a residency director, or a chair of a department, or they're a healthcare executive and administrator, how can they be part of the solution to burnout, as opposed to it being a physician thing that only physicians or other healthcare workers can really solve themselves?

The Personal Factors, Systemic Failures, and Other Causes that Contribute to Burnout

ES:

This question of how to fix burnout is one that's haunted me for a while. There's so many different layers to that. There's obviously the personal individual layer, which is the layer we have the most control over, which I think there are some studies that show that 20% of burnout is made up of individual personal factors. Things like editing your schedule, changing things about your lifestyle, changing jobs, or exercising more, and all those things.

We all have the same reaction when we're told to meditate and do yoga. That's not going to get us all the way where we need to be. That remaining 80%, that's a systems level stuff, trying to identify pain points and remedy those through QI projects and things like that, that's sort of small scale improvements. There's tools we have, like labor actions, and unions, and things like that. People have mixed feelings about whether or not that works or not.

It does seem like the tide is turning and physicians are starting to turn to that more than they have in the past. That's another thing. Then also, just looking at the sprawling web of businesses that is the US healthcare system, and asking ourselves how much of that is trickling down and affecting us day to day? What do we think about things like private equity coming in, and buying up hospital systems, and changing workflows?

What do we think about the fact that the old country family medicine doctor who cares for the community, that's becoming more and more of an endangered species and things are getting much more consolidated, and starting to feel a little bit more factory-like, a little bit more fast food-like, some might even say, and how that is affecting our sense of being more of a cog in a system as opposed to being a physician in society who has agency over what they're able to do with their patients?

Then I think for somebody who's grinding at the bedside, some of us have more to time than others to engage in that fight. For those who do have time, and space, and energy to do that, by all means. Then sometimes looking outside of the profession to allies who can help us can also be helpful, and that includes nurses. We know nurse burnout is also a huge problem.

I learned a lot about that when we did our COVID storytelling project. I received a lot of emails from nurses, talking about similar patterns going on with them too. Hopefully we'll move in a better direction in the future.

GW:

Let me move a little bit to The Nocturnist, because I just absolutely love it. How did you decide to start it? Was it inspired by your own personal experience with burnout, or your own challenges, or where did it come from?

ES:

Yeah, so my whole life, I had this artistic gravitational pull toward the arts. I did it for fun, but I also did it because it was the way I found that I was able to understand the world the best. I was never a huge data person. I was much more of a narrative person, a storytelling person. Then what ended up happening is right around the time that I was hitting that burnout wall, not just because of my health issues, but other things, noticing things about medical culture, and also noticing things about healthcare was changing in the last 10 and 20 years, and what that meant for us, and how many hours we were spending at computers.

A Space Built for Storytelling in Medicine, Inspired by "The Moth"

I started to crave a space where we could all come together, and process together, and tell stories about our experience. Actually, it started as an idea for a blog and I wrote blog posts and I invited guests, blog posts from my friends. That was fun in a lot of ways, but I noticed in the end that it wasn't advancing the conversation, and there were already a lot of really amazing medical literary magazines out there, the Bellevue Literary Review, and Examine Life Journal, and Intima, and places like that.

I remember asking myself, "What is this adding? What can I bring that's fresh? What can I bring that's new?" Then a friend of mine invited me to go see a live taping of The Moth at San Francisco Public Works, which for the listeners who may not know what The Moth is, it's an oral storytelling program. It's often heard on NPR. I walked out of that event and I said, "I'm going to try this for the medical community." The very first live show that we did was January of 2016, and that was kind of off to the races from there.

How Medical Training Stifles Creativity

GW:

It feels like the path to medical training, kind of the pre-med stuff, even pre-clinical med school, and med school, and residency, a lot of it is getting rid of creativity. Step one, here is a multiple choice question. Here is the answer. There's only one answer, and there's three other incorrect answers. Then when you become an attending, you have, I think both the opportunity, but also the need to kind of be a little bit more creative and make your medical plans a little bit more creative.

You realize there are multiple ways to practice medicine. Your patient that's coming in to see you may have very different values or different expectations, and you have to often get more creative. It is interesting that we hammer this thing out of all these humans, and then I don't think we do a very good job of acknowledging that the creativity actually needs to come back. I think that's actually what makes somebody a particularly good physician as well.

ES:

I get so many emails from people. They say, "I feel like I lost myself. I lost a piece of myself, or I lost my creativity." It's like, why do we have this again and again and again, people coming up through the medical education system, and emerging on the other side, very well-trained, extremely skilled, very good at what they do, but feeling like there's been a sort of death or something has atrophied inside of them.

Is that a normal, natural, necessary part of the process, or is there a way we can rethink that? I think there is a lot about medical training, where your brain is trained a certain way, and some of that's beautiful. When I'm talking to someone and they're a doctor, even if I don't know they're a doctor, I can sometimes kind of tell, because there's a clarity of communication, I think, that I just pick up on sometimes.

I'm like, "Are you a physician?" Sometimes they'll be like, "Oh, yeah." I'm like, "How did I know?" It's because a certain turn of phrase or a way that they spoke, but I think you're exactly right. There is sometimes, I think, in that process, we lose the ability to riff, or to improvise, or to get into that spontaneity. Maybe it's because of the sheer number of hours that our brain spends in that structured environment, that it literally does atrophy the part of our brain that's more open.

How can we create those opportunities for people coming up through med-ed to make sure that we exercise those muscles, so that they don't atrophy and then get depressed 20 years down the line?

GW:

Emily, looking at the evolution of the show, have your goals for it changed at all, or your thoughts on how it should work?

"The Nocturnists": From Frontline Physicians to Health Policy Questions to Disease From the Patient POV

ES:

It has. In the beginning, it was very, very centered on frontline clinicians, and their voices, and their experiences. We produced over a dozen, well over a dozen live storytelling performances with frontline clinician talent. These were ordinary people, doctors and nurses getting up on stage, and sharing their experience. Nine years later, I feel like I've gotten a lot of that out, and I'm sort of itching, like, "Okay, what's the next thing? What's the next thing?"

I've been thinking a lot more about patient voices, more about subjective experiences of illness or disease from inside the patient's perspective, and what clinicians might learn from that. We recently had a guest on the show, Susanna Fox, who wrote a book called Rebel Health, which is all about patients experimenting and tinkering on the fringes of medicine to solve their own problems. That was really humbling to me, getting more into that perspective. That's something that I'm feeling myself drawn toward.

Also, feeling myself drawn much more lately toward bigger structural questions, so health policy stuff. We just had Dhruv Khullar, who's a physician writer for the New Yorker, he wrote this piece called The Gilded Age of Medicine is Here, and we're talking about private equity, and we're talking about the data being the oil of the healthcare system, and what does that mean, and these bigger-level questions, all sorts of different ways that the conversations on the show have evolved beyond the first-person storytelling.

GW:

I spent a lot of time talking about being normal or the ideal physician. Why do you think that is, that physicians really have this ideal that we maybe never measure up to, or that we're somehow not normal for having emotions and feelings, and that I need to listen to a podcast to be reminded that other people feel the same way as me?

The Main Differentiator Between Medicine and Other Fields

ES:

I think for physicians, because they're interfacing with life and death, it's a bit different than other professions which are dealing more abstractly with money, or with legal things, or with systems, or business. Nobody dies if a contract doesn't get signed usually.

GW:

Usually.

ES:

I think on some level, it does make people uncomfortable to realize that the person holding their life, whether that's in the ER, in the OR, or in some other way, is a flawed human. We don't like that.

GW:

Whoa.

ES:

I think that's where we implement things like systems, and processes, and checklists, and AI, and decision support, and layering on as much as we can to augment our natural human abilities, but then remembering it is those human flaws sometimes that can kind of ironically be turned inside out and become an asset.

If I've gone through a difficult time in my life, I just shared the story of a personal health issue, for example, that I went through, I can connect with a patient in a way that I wouldn't otherwise, because of that personal experience.

GW:

How do you encourage physicians to share these vulnerable stories that they do on your podcast?

The Cathartic Benefits of Storytelling for Doctors

ES:

I always remind people that they have agency over what they share and what they don't share. Anything that they do share, that they have full agency over that, and that's their choice. I think some of that is about building that culture of safety, and celebrating the humanity, shining light on it, doing it in community, things like that. I think people also hunger for it.

I think there's something can be really cathartic about coming forward to talk about a challenge that you face, and then come out the other end, being embraced by your community, rather than, say, being rejected or shamed by your community, that that's actually really important for the health of communities. It binds them together. Sometimes we tell people, "This may not be the moment to tell this story." People will present us with stories about some challenge that they faced, and maybe that challenge was three months ago.

GW:

Yeah, too fresh.

ES:

They get into it and we're like, "You know what? This feels a little too fresh. Let's revisit in six months, or let's revisit in 12 months." It really, it's about being in dialogue with people and kind of following their lead.

GW:

You're recently a new mom, congratulations. Maybe can you share a story about some of the challenges that you face today that maybe you didn't face a year ago, two years ago?

Challenges of Practicing Medicine as a New Parent

ES:

What's changed? I think for me, what can be tough sometimes is losing mornings, losing evenings, I don't want to say losing. I get so much. I love spending time with my kids, but my eldest, I have two, she has gone through this thing where she doesn't want to sleep by herself. Lately, I've been sleeping with her more. Sometimes I'll lay down with her and lay there until she falls asleep, but then by the time she falls asleep, I'm really sleepy, and sometimes I fall asleep and it's 8:30.

Then I lose my evening. Definitely have to budget my time more intentionally than I did in the past. I also just think about wanting to role model for them, wanting to build a life that is happy and rich, and give them things I didn't have, and make sure that they're in an environment of unconditional love and warmth. How do I balance that with the fact that there's so many things I want to be doing professionally and creatively?

That's always a balance. I would say on the whole, it's been a huge plus, and I highly recommend it to anyone listening.

Systems to Support Women in Medicine

GW:

Emily, what systemic changes do you think could better support women in medicine?

ES:

It came up for me when I got pregnant, of course. Maternity leave is great. Let's have maternity leave so that we can bond with our little ones, not worry that we're going to lose our job and lose our income, that kind of thing. God, what a great invention. Maternity leave, who came up with that? They should get a medal. It's so wonderful to be able, and now dads are getting it too, to be able to make space for those human experiences amongst what is often a decade-plus long career.

Just little things, little things that can help, child care is so expensive, and how do we think about that? I'm really fortunate to have an amazing husband, but thinking about family structures, and how do we optimize that? What do we think about things like family and community, and how that can fill some of the gaps, in addition to more detached institutions, like corporations and the government? I don't want all of my help to come from corporations in the government.

How do we build communities that can support each other as well in that more human way? I will say, though, that a lot of, some of my greatest allies and cheerleaders in my career have been men, and I've been fortunate to be supported and lifted up to Dave Logan, and Dustin Corcoran, and Mark Shapiro, and many others who have supported me along the way.

GW:

I have this theory that it is very much a healthcare worker's market right now. We have physicians leaving the practice of medicine. We have patients that are sicker and more complex. The workload is higher and higher. I feel like it would be a big job benefit if we had a health system or a hospital that offered better childcare. It's kind of a pro-family benefit. It is a problem.

There are many double physician or double healthcare worker parent households. It feels like that is an obvious benefit that a hospital or a health system could offer that would drive healthcare workers to want to work there as well.

ES:

What a great idea. If I worked at a big hospital, I don't anymore, but if I did, if they had a lovely little childcare, and some hospitals have nursing facilities, old folks homes attached to them, why not also have daycare? Then maybe the old folks and the kids can hang together, and you can get some intergenerational interactions going on. Yeah.

GW:

One of the things we're working on with this platform Offcall is trying to address salary transparency and benchmarking, and trying to level the playing field. How do these issues impact female physicians differently, or in more notable ways that you found?

Gender Pay Disparities in Medicine

ES:

There's evidence out there that there's still a wage gap, I believe, so that's something to look at, but I've been very fortunate to, I think once you were hitting attending, I have to say, it is bizarre to go from med school, where you're hemorrhaging money, to residency, where if you look at the per hour wage, it's working class, if not less. Then you graduate from residency and then boom, it's like 200K.

That whiplash just feels really strange, and there feels to me like there's something wrong there. My value didn't quintuple overnight. I do wonder about how we could potentially smooth out some of that transition, or just think differently about those steps up the ladder, and what does that mean? I can see why people want to hold onto their big salaries, and maybe they would be less guarded around those salaries if we could fix some of these other upstream issues.

The other way I think about it is take a list of all the medical specialties, and then look at what they get paid. That's a really interesting conversation to have. Quantized services, so like knee replacement, cardiac cath, like colonoscopy, you can measure them out, how many have you done?

Then something more amorphous and more relationship-based, like primary care, family medicine, pediatrics, psychiatry, these are the specialties that because you can't dispense a unit of mental health as a psychiatrist, and also, you wouldn't want to pay a psychiatrist on how many tabs of Zoloft they prescribe either, because then those incentives get out of whack.

Yeah, how do we think about the services that we provide, and how those are quantized, and measured, and reimbursed? If you look at physicians, and how they self-select and filter into these specialties, the relationship-based ones often are a little bit more female-dominated, for example. That's another aspect of this conversation that I think could be really interesting to break open and explore.

Advice for Early-Career Women Physicians

GW:

Do you have career advice for younger women entering residency, or becoming new attendings that you'd like to give out?

ES:

I would say first and foremost, follow your authenticity. When you have that feeling to pay attention, and then shift and look at where do my aptitudes lead me? Where do my passions lead me? Just continue to follow that light. It's a lot easier said than done, because often there's voices, whether it's your parents, or your boss, or whoever, telling you to be a certain thing or go a certain way. If the more you can turn those voices down and listen to the inner voice and where that's leading you, I think the better.

The other thing is to embrace creativity and how you think about building your career. I think there's a lot of off-the-shelf jobs that you can get, constantly getting emailed by recruiters, big hospital systems looking to fill slots, and that might be a great fit for you, but if it's not a great fit for you, there's a lot of exciting stuff happening. There's a lot of digital health companies, there's a lot of telemedicine companies.

There's direct primary care, which is a blossoming movement. Just to be open-minded, and ask around, and do research, and you might be able to find something that's a really good fit that's outside of the traditional box of what we think of with these jobs.

GW:

I think there's more and more physicians that want a diverse career. Maybe they want to do clinical medicine three days a week, but they want to do something else two days a week or one day a week.

ES:

Yes, I am one of those people. Right now, I part-time outpatient primary care, and part-time podcasting, storytelling, writing, all those fun things. That balance is really nice for me. There's a lot of people who are able to carve out those types of jobs for themselves. A lot of them do that at academic medical institutions, where they'll come on at 100% clinical, and then they'll take on different jobs and roles, and "buy down their time."

I have a lot of friends who are like 30% clinical, 30% teaching, 30% research, and have a mishmash. Academic medicine is not the only way to do that. There's a lot of ways to do that, because you're right, with health, and tech, and AI, and policy, and journalism, and writing, and storytelling, and we need physician voices in those spaces-

GW:

Thank you.

ES:

... So badly. So badly. If that is exciting to you, I would say lean into that, because we really need you. The system we know isn't working, and it's great people who are going to help guide it toward a better system.

GW:

Yeah, I think if anything, we need more physicians speaking out about their lived experiences of being a doctor, so that other people can understand what we're going through, and we can advocate for our patients, and advocate for everything better in the healthcare system. Emily, I've got some quick questions just to round us out here. What's something you didn't learn in medical school but is crucial to your daily practice?

ES:

Well, there's a lot of business-y insurance stuff. I was talking to, who was it? I think it was Drew on the podcast. I was telling him I learned so much about immunology and T-cell receptors, which I love, by the way. I think that stuff is so cool, but I didn't learn anything about health care 101, this is how the American healthcare system works, and where the payments-

GW:

Where the money flows.

ES:

Yeah, that kind of stuff, I didn't learn in med school. It's a real shame, because patients ask all the time like, "Oh, is this covered," or, "How much is this?" I often don't know how to respond, or I'm getting better at that. A lot of doctors, I find actually can't answer that, because nobody knows.

GW:

Yeah. Last question, Emily, if you could send one message to yourself on your first day of residency, why do you think it would be?

ES:

Maybe something like setting boundaries. What would've happened if I had called in the 12-hour Jeopardy coverage when offered? Would I not have gotten sick? You're going to feel guilt. You're going to feel like you should just power through, but which is not to say that you shouldn't work hard and give it your all, and give it your best, and take ownership over your patients, and stay late.

If there's a day where you're like, "I'm going to stay late because XYZ," but that in those moments, the moment I described at the top of this episode where I was like, "This doesn't feel right, two 20 hours just in a row," when you get to those moments, like having the permission to set a boundary and take care of yourself. Maybe something along those lines.

GW:

Emily, where can listeners find you and support the work that you're doing right now?

ES:

Yes. I run a medical storytelling live show and podcast called The Nocturnist. You can learn more about that at thenocturnist.org. You can learn more about me on my personal website, EmilySilverman.com. If you want to reach out to me by email, you can do that. I'm at Emily.Silverman@UCSF.edu. Yeah, I hope people check out The Nocturnist. It's been a really fun project.

GW:

Like I said earlier, I think the Shame Series, you guys have a 10-part series on shame that I think is extremely powerful. If you listen to nothing else, please listen to that entire series. It's incredible. I promise you it will help you understand yourself as a physician as well.

ES:

I'll add, we have a new series coming out this year on Uncertainty in Medicine.

GW:

Amazing.

ES:

That I've learned a lot from. Keep an eye out for that as well.

GW:

Wonderful. Thank you, Emily.

ES:

Thank you. Thanks for having me.

GW:

Thanks for joining me today. For interviews with physicians creating meaningful change, check out Offcall.com/podcast. Make an account on Offcall to confidentially share your details about your work, and sign up for our newsletter, where you can hear more about the latest trends we're seeing in physician pay.

You can find How I Doctor on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. We'll have new episodes weekly. This has been and continues to be Dr. GW. Stay well, stay inspired, and practice with purpose.