Why does the United States spend more on healthcare than ever before while chronic disease continues to rise?

In this episode of Surgeon Interrupted, Frances Mei sits down with reconstructive plastic surgeon Dr. Joshua Mirrer to explore the systems behind modern healthcare. From residency burnout and preventive medicine to agriculture, economics, chronic disease, and the incentive structures shaping American health, this conversation goes far beyond the operating room.

Dr. Mirrer shares how his experiences in surgical training led him to study the larger forces influencing health outcomes, and why he believes meaningful change will require both individual action and community-level solutions.

Topics include:

• Why healthcare is built around treating disease rather than preventing it
• The rising cost of chronic illness in America
• How food systems and healthcare incentives intersect
• The role of community in improving health outcomes
• Lessons from diabetes prevention programs
• Writing, medicine, and making sense of complex systems
• What surgeons can teach us about long-term thinking

If you've ever wondered why healthcare feels broken, or what it might take to fix it, this conversation offers a thoughtful place to start.

Host: Frances Mei Hardin, MD

Guest: Joshua Mirrer, MD

Connect with Joshua: http://www.linkedin.com/in/joshua-mirrer-ab27436b

https://substack.com/@jmirrer

Presented by: The Hippocratic Collective

Follow Frances Mei on Instagram & Tiktok @francesmeimd

And subscribe to ⁨@HippocraticCollective⁩ on Youtube for all of the other shows the Hippocratic Collective has to offer.

What happens when a longtime magazine editor leaves the world of celebrity journalism and finds herself at the forefront of narrative medicine?

This week on Surgeon, Interrupted, Frances Mei sits down with Donna Bulseco, editor of the literary and arts journal Intima and co-editor of Where It Hurts: Dispatches from the Emotional Front Lines of Medicine. Together, they explore the power of storytelling in healthcare, why medicine needs the humanities, and what physicians can learn from writers, poets, and artists.

Donna reflects on her journey from InStyle magazine to Columbia University's Narrative Medicine program, the lessons she's learned from editing thousands of submissions from clinicians, and the common writing mistakes physicians make when trying to tell meaningful stories. The conversation also dives into creativity, taste, ego, revision, and why the most powerful stories often trust the reader enough to leave conclusions unsaid.

Whether you're a clinician, writer, artist, or simply someone interested in the human experience of healthcare, this episode offers a thoughtful look at the stories that shape us, and the ones that help us heal.

Topics discussed:

• Narrative medicine and physician storytelling
• The transition from publishing to healthcare humanities
• Why doctors need art, literature, and philosophy
• Developing taste, voice, and creativity
• Common pitfalls in physician writing
• The making of Where It Hurts
• Finding humanity in modern medicine
• Trusting the reader and embracing revision

Books Mentioned:

Where It Hurts: Dispatches from the Emotional Front Lines of Medicine

Host: Frances Mei Hardin, MD

Guest: Donna Bulseco

Connect with Donna: @dbulseco

Presented by: The Hippocratic Collective

Follow Frances Mei on Instagram & Tiktok @francesmeimd

And subscribe to ⁨@HippocraticCollective⁩ on Youtube for all of the other shows the Hippocratic Collective has to offer.

In this episode of Surgeon, Interrupted, Frances Mei sits down again with her husband Colin for an unfiltered conversation about residency culture, hyper-productivity, and the psychological habits that follow physicians long after they leave the hospital.

What begins as a discussion about planning Hippocratic Collective’s first West Coast event in the Hollywood Hills evolves into a broader examination of how medicine conditions people to equate suffering with value. Frances Mei and Colin unpack the “culture of sacrifice” mentality in residency — bragging about missed weddings, sleepless nights, impossible workloads, and constant exhaustion — and question whether any of it actually makes better doctors.

The episode explores:

• Why suffering is often mistaken for productivity in medicine
• The toxic martyrdom culture embedded in residency training
• How physicians lose the ability to rest guilt-free
• Hyper-vigilance, comparison, and the “zero-sum game” mindset in surgical culture
• Why high-achieving people struggle to play, relax, or exist without output
• The long-term effects of residency on identity, nervous system regulation, and self-worth
• The difference between loving medicine vs. loving the culture surrounding medicine
• How Frances Mei still carries residency habits into entrepreneurship and creative work, even a year after leaving clinical practice
• A recent study showing physicians are leaving medicine at younger ages than ever before

Through stories about migraines, video games, art, childhood conditioning, and even a neighborhood encounter with children playing outside, the conversation becomes a larger meditation on adulthood, performance, and what it means to reclaim joy after years of survival mode.

This episode is for physicians, trainees, and high-achieving professionals who feel trapped in cycles of overwork — and for anyone trying to learn that rest, creativity, and play do not need to be earned.

Host: Frances Mei Hardin, MD

Presented by: The Hippocratic Collective

Following Frances Mei on Instagram & Tiktok @francesmeimd

And subscribe to ⁨@HippocraticCollective⁩ on Youtube for all of the other shows the Hippocratic Collective has to offer.