What if the thing you were told would destroy your credibility actually made your voice more powerful?

On this episode of Surgeon, Interrupted, Frances Mei Hardin, MD, is joined by Colin to talk about a major new chapter: Frances Mei’s monthly STAT First Opinion column, Chief Complaint.

When Frances Mei left clinical medicine, she was repeatedly warned that her career was effectively over. She would lose professional prestige, stop being taken seriously, and give up her ability to create meaningful change. She was also told that if she wanted to change medicine, she had to stay inside the system.

That turned out not to be true.

Instead, Frances Mei spent the following years developing a distinct voice and point of view. And when conversations about the column began, something unexpected happened: rather than asking her to become more institutional, neutral, or palatable, her editors wanted the opposite. They wanted the perspective and sharp edges that made the work hers in the first place.

Frances Mei and Colin discuss why physicians are trained to sand down their opinions, why academic writing can strip the life out of an argument, and why strong writing requires making a claim that some people may actually disagree with.

They also talk about creativity in the age of AI. Frances Mei shares what happened when she briefly ran the manuscript of Surgeon on the Edge through Grammarly and watched her writing become technically smoother but increasingly less like her. For writers who want to produce exceptional work rather than merely competent work, optimizing everything toward the average can become its own problem.

The conversation then turns to the STAT Summit, social anxiety, networking, and the uncomfortable reality that building a career often means introducing yourself, taking a swing, and accepting that plenty of those interactions will go nowhere.

In this episode:

• Announcing Frances Mei’s Chief Complaint column at STAT

• Why leaving medicine did not end her career

• Building your own table when nobody offers you a seat

• Why a strong point of view can make you more valuable

• The problem with “academicizing” creative writing

• Why doctors instinctively soften controversial opinions

• Developing a distinctive writing voice in the age of AI

• Why Grammarly nearly ruined Frances Mei’s memoir voice

• Social anxiety at professional conferences

• Networking when you would rather be a wallflower

• Why physicians and the broader healthcare world remain siloed

• The gap between public perception and the modern physician experience

• Pulling back the curtain on medical culture

• Why taking more professional swings means accepting more misses

• Building thought leadership as a physician

• Why artists, writers, and physicians have to keep putting their work out there

The lesson Frances Mei keeps returning to is simple: if every introduction works, every application succeeds, and every pitch gets a yes, you probably are not taking enough swings.

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.

Can becoming an artist make you a better doctor, or simply help you become more of a person again?

On this episode of Surgeon, Interrupted, Frances Mei Hardin, MD, sits down with dermatologist and artist Rachel Lee, MD, whose oil paintings are now being exhibited for the first time.

Rachel did not grow up thinking of herself as an artist. Creativity entered her life near the end of residency, after years spent almost entirely inside science and medicine. What began as a creative outlet eventually became an important way to process the grief, stress, and accumulated experiences of medical training while discovering who she was outside of being a physician.

Together, Rachel and Frances Mei talk about why medicine teaches physicians to think of their careers as their entire identities, and why pursuing something outside of medicine can initially feel almost transgressive. They discuss the strange difficulty physicians have calling themselves writers, artists, entrepreneurs, or anything else without first earning another degree or credential.

Rachel also shares exactly how she started. No art degree. No childhood spent painting. She signed up for a weekend workshop, then enrolled in a class literally called “Drawing for the Absolute Beginner.” From there, she kept taking classes, eventually found oil painting, and years later exhibited and sold her work.

They discuss why trying something new as an adult can require real courage, how investing money can create useful accountability, and why physicians already possess many of the skills necessary to become beginners again.

Rachel also shares the story behind one of her paintings, Sad but on Vacation, which began as a painting inspired by tulips in Amsterdam and eventually became an exploration of sadness, dissociation, and the strange reality that beautiful things can be happening around us while something inside still does not feel right.

In this episode:

• Why physicians need identities outside medicine

• Art as a way to process medical training

• Becoming creative later in life

• Why doctors struggle to call themselves artists or writers

• Starting with “Drawing for the Absolute Beginner”

• Learning to tolerate being bad at something new

• Why creative work can be deeply healing

• The difference between medical education and art education

• How financial investment can create accountability

• Why oil painting taught Rachel patience

• Letting go of linear timelines

• Creating Sad but on Vacation

• Why life is often more interesting when you take the exit

Rachel leaves us with advice she now gives aspiring medical students: life is much more about the exits than the highway. The exits are where we take the scenic route, try something unexpected, and discover parts of ourselves we never would have found by staying on the prescribed path.

Host: Frances Mei Hardin, MD

Guest: Rachel Lee, MD

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 you do everything “right” in medical school and still don’t match into residency?

On this episode of Surgeon, Interrupted, Frances Mei Hardin, MD, sits down with Dr. Sijia Zhang, a PGY-2 psychiatry resident at UCSF, to talk about one of the most painful and stigmatized experiences in medical training: going unmatched.

Sijia entered the Match with strong clinical grades, extensive research experience, and reassurance from advisors that the question was not whether she would match, but where. Then Match Week arrived, and she received the email telling her she had not matched into any position.

She shares what happened next, from the shame and shock of Match Day to navigating SOAP, institutional pressure to secure any available residency position, and the mentor who gave her a completely different piece of advice: if she had been selective about college and medical school, why should she suddenly stop being selective about residency?

Instead, Sijia took additional time, rebuilt her application around psychiatry, pursued research and away rotations, found mentors who believed in her, and gradually rebuilt the confidence she thought she had lost forever. She ultimately matched into psychiatry at UCSF.

Frances Mei also shares her own experience of not matching and SOAPing into ENT, and together they discuss failure, shame, mentorship, the hidden curriculum of medicine, and why a professional setback does not necessarily mean what we immediately assume it means about us.

In this episode:

• What it feels like to go unmatched in residency

• Why strong medical students still sometimes do not match

• The emotional aftermath of Match Day

• How SOAP works and why medical schools may encourage it

• Deciding not to SOAP into a program just to move forward

• Rebuilding a residency application after going unmatched

• Changing specialties from dermatology to psychiatry

• The importance of mentors after professional failure

• How to increase your “surface area for luck”

• Being highly productive while privately struggling

• Why failure can fundamentally change your relationship with risk

• Rebuilding confidence after rejection

• Matching at UCSF after an unsuccessful first cycle

• Sijia’s future in women’s mental health and consultation-liaison psychiatry

A conversation for anyone who has ever received an email, score, rejection, or result that made them wonder whether the future they imagined for themselves had disappeared.

It hadn’t.

Host: Frances Mei Hardin, MD

Guest: Sijia Zhang, MD

Connect with Sijia: @sijialater

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.