The saddest question Dr. Travis Haneke hears from his patients:

"So you're my new doctor. Are you going to leave in one or two years, like all my others?"

He is an interventional cardiologist in Hays, Kansas, a rural town where the nearest heart care can be hours away. He trained for the hardest, highest-risk cases in medicine, then chose to bring those skills to the kind of place most doctors leave.

In this conversation, Priya and Travis get into what actually heals people, and why it is so rarely the procedure.

IN THIS EPISODE

Travis grew up around rural Kansas and came back on purpose, to a place where he is often the only one who can do what he does.

He taught himself the highest-risk procedures in cardiology, writing out every step by hand until he could do it alone. Out there, there is no one else to call.

But the conversation moves past technique fast.

Travis talks about the meditation practice he stumbled into as a medical student, and how he now shares it with the stoic farmers, ranchers, and oilmen who come to him after a heart attack, at the one moment they are finally ready to change.

He and Priya, both interventional cardiologists, get into gut instinct in the cath lab, quantum entanglement, angel numbers, and the strange knowing he shares with his twin brother.

Underneath all of it is a single idea. Fixing a blocked artery is not the same as healing a person. The part that actually helps people, the trust, the presence, the relationship, is the part that never shows up in a study.

This one is for anyone who has ever felt unseen in an exam room, and for anyone who suspects that being present might be the most powerful medicine we have.

ABOUT DR. TRAVIS HANEKE

Dr. Travis Haneke is an interventional cardiologist in Hays, Kansas, one of the few practicing at his level in a rural, underserved region.

Trained for the most complex, high-risk cardiac cases, he chose to bring that expertise home, where patients often travel hours for care and being the doctor who stays means everything. He is also a longtime meditator who teaches mindfulness to his patients.

ABOUT OPEN HEART WITH PRIYA RAO, MD

Open Heart is a podcast at the intersection of science and soul, hosted by Priya Rao, MD, a practicing interventional cardiologist.

She didn't start this show to leave medicine behind. She started it because she kept meeting patients, colleagues, and people in her own life who were having experiences medicine couldn't fully explain, and she realized she was one of them. She had questions her training never prepared her for, so she decided to ask them out loud.

Each episode, Priya sits down with healers, doctors, researchers, and people who have lived through the unexplainable. Not to argue. Not to resolve everything into science or into spirit. But to hold both at the same time and see what opens.

Subscribe: youtube.com/@openheartthepod

openheartpodcast.com

Instagram: instagram.com/dr.kothapalli

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Greg Berryhill has spent decades managing other people's money. What he has learned is that almost none of it is actually about the money. It is about fear, trust, scarcity, and what you decided about safety long before you ever earned a dollar.

IN THIS EPISODE

Priya opens with what she calls the doctor's dilemma. We are trained for years to care for the human body, and never once taught how to care for our own financial future. She has watched attendings well into their 70s and 80s who feel they cannot retire, not because they failed to earn enough, but because money was never something they were taught to face.

Subscribe: youtube.com/@OpenheartPodcast

openheartpodcast.com

Instagram: instagram.com/dr.kothapalli

ABOUT GREG BERRYHILL

Greg Berryhill is a wealth manager who speaks the language of both numbers and soul. Over a career built almost entirely on referral and relationship, he has come to see his work less as picking investments and more as coaching people through the fear, scarcity, and psychology behind every financial decision they make. He describes himself as more a human behaviorist than an investment advisor, and this conversation is a window into why.

Learn more: https://worthwealthadvisors.com/

Connect: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gregberryhillfinancialadvisor/

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I'm an interventional cardiologist. I work on the heart when people are closest to death. I've spent years in the cath lab doing procedures that can change someone's life in seconds.

And somewhere along the way, something happened in my own life that medicine couldn't measure. I felt something shift that I couldn't explain and couldn't ignore.

I followed every rule we're taught to follow. I trained hard, showed up fully, and believed deeply in the science I practice. But I started to wonder — with openness and curiosity — whether there is more to healing than what our current tools can measure. Not instead of medicine. Alongside it.

This season, we sit with the questions conventional medicine hasn't learned to ask yet. Why did science and soul become so disconnected in the first place? What happens when a physician follows every protocol and still feels something essential is missing? How are practicing doctors quietly using intuition, ancient healing traditions, and tools that don't show up in a textbook — and why does it work?

Open Heart is where those questions live. Honest, grounded conversations about healing — what medicine gets right, what it misses, and what opens up when we stop pretending those two things can't coexist.

If you've ever had a moment — in a hospital room, in the middle of the night, or somewhere completely ordinary — where something shifted and you couldn't explain it, this is for you. If you've ever sensed that medicine had the diagnosis right but still missed something essential, this is for you. I'm learning to ask these questions right alongside you.

This is Open Heart.

If this resonated, subscribe on YouTube or wherever you're listening. And become part of this growing circle.

Follow Priya Rao, MD Website: https://www.openheartpodcast.com

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dr.kothapalli/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pkothapallimd/

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