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Dr. Tali Lando is a pediatric otolaryngologist, storyteller, speaker, breast cancer survivor, mother of 3 girls, and self-proclaimed worker bee.

She has held the same job since finishing fellowship. Sixteen years in one place. In the beginning, she describes running around like a chicken with her head cut off, but the work felt worth doing. Over time, the system became more rigid, and the space to practice medicine on her own terms seemed to shrink. She hadn't changed. The environment around her had. And she is still grappling with what that means for her as an academic surgeon.

Dr. Lando first ventured onto social media ten or eleven years ago to promote a book about her own breast cancer experience, written as a girlfriend's guide. She started with rules: case-based, de-identified, educational content. No dancing. No singing. Eventually, she found her voice and discovered she actually enjoyed bringing humor and fun into her work online. Then came a complaint. After she posted a video dancing with a nurse anesthetist well after hours, someone recognized the room and reported her. The experience gutted her. It also left her looking over her shoulder, wondering who was watching and what might happen next. That fear has come in waves ever since, growing alongside an ever-expanding list of rules about what physicians can say, share, and do.

We spend much of this conversation talking about what happens to physicians after a complication or lawsuit. Dr. Lando walks us through the choreography of second victim syndrome: the adrenaline-fueled calls to risk management and legal, the conversation with a trusted friend or colleague, the self-blame and shame, and eventually the deposition. You ask for an early start so you can get back to work, then spend an hour answering questions from a lawyer who seems to have already decided who you are and why you did what you did. Your intention throughout was to help a patient. The institutional response may be to remind you that therapy is available. Then you get back on the horse, because the patients keep coming. You drive to clinic and see people with the very condition you're being sued over.

There's also the court of public opinion, where physicians have almost no ability to defend themselves. Dr. Lando shares the story of a colleague who was publicly condemned over a case in which he had done nothing wrong, while his own institution prohibited him from explaining what happened. The damage to a physician's reputation can be profound, and there may be very little recourse.

Recently, Dr. Lando was asked to write a chapter on resilience, even as she was struggling to find some of her own. We talk about how familiar that tension is for so many physicians, and about the difference between sharing from a wound and sharing from a scar. Vulnerability has its own timing. Sometimes we can help others most when we've made enough of our way through the experience to become the sherpas guiding someone else up the mountain.

This is a conversation about broken systems, institutional scrutiny, physician autonomy, and second victim system.

Learn more about Dr. Lando on we website here.

Find Dr. Lando on Instagram here.

Get her most recent book, Breathless: Surgical Tales from the Brink here.

If you're in litigation right now: the Physician Support Line (1-888-409-0141) is free, confidential, and staffed by volunteer psychiatrists for physicians and trainees, 8am–1am ET daily.

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Dr. David Canes is a urologist and the CEO of Wellprept. He was born in South Africa to a foreign-language teacher and an actuary, moved to Canada and then New York while he was still very young, and was fascinated by doctors from the time he was a kid. Medical school settled it: he fell in love with anatomy, and from the first day of the course it was obvious he was going to be a surgeon. Eight years into practice he hit a wall, and the way he describes recognizing it is the most useful thing in this episode.

He does not forget a face. He remembers his surgical patients. So when he started opening the drape in the pre-op holding area and not recognizing the person underneath it, that registered as alien. Not a failure of memory so much as evidence that something had gone wrong. The second signal was the sensation of giving a cancer diagnosis while standing slightly outside himself. He had delivered the prostate cancer talk so many times that he was running it the way you drive to work without remembering the drive. He also noticed he had started to resent the moment a patient pulled out a list of questions. He was still fully present in the OR. It was clinic he had come to dread, which he found genuinely shameful in a job he knew he was fortunate to have.

He names the taboo directly: it feels forbidden for a physician to admit they're tired of explaining things from scratch. His position is that there's no shame in knowing which conversations you enjoy and which you don't, and that what makes a conversation enjoyable is unpredictable anyway. That unpredictability is not a defect in the doctor. It's evidence of being a human being rather than a delivery mechanism.

The fix he reached for was simple. The NCCN publishes patient guides in five languages. He asked his staff to email the relevant one ahead of the visit and made a short bit.ly link for it. Among the patients who actually read it, everything changed. Instead of starting at zero, he could pull up the MRI and show someone exactly where the tumor was bulging and why nerve-sparing wasn't on the table. Patients began opening with thank you. He compares it to university prerequisites — the work you finish before the seminar so the seminar can be the seminar. That workaround is how he became, in his words, an accidental entrepreneur: he was trying to fix a broken way of seeing patients, not start a company.

Wellprept grew out of it. The target is the administrative load that encroaches on the minutes between a physician and a patient — digital journeys that drip the right amount of content at the right time, and a single source of truth a team can answer from. For example: "can I swim after ear tubes?" is now a question a staff member can resolve without interrupting the doctor. It gives answers a permanent shelf life. They're in hundreds of practices across the US and Canada.

Learn more about Well Prept here.

Follow Dr. David Canes on Instagram here.

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Dr. Sandra Stinnett is a laryngologist at the University of Pittsburgh and director of its swallowing disorders center. She has always believed the soul lives in the throat, which makes her choice of specialty feel almost inevitable. Laryngology sits at the intersection of her two great loves: music and medicine, art and science, the voice and the person behind it.

Married to a musician, Dr. Stinnett was drawn to the variety of laryngology, the short cases, and the immediate, tangible difference she could make in a patient's life. But the moment she knew she'd found her place came during residency, when she performed a delicate phonomicrosurgery without rupturing the capsule around a mass. Her attending told her she had good hands. Sometimes, you just need someone who knows what they're looking at to see something in you before you fully see it yourself.

Dr. Stinnett's interests have always extended beyond the operating room. Before medicine, she loved journalism and dreamed of becoming a VJ. Today, she's an academic surgeon and content creator, building a public presence alongside her research, publications, and funding. We talk about what it means to create publicly when you know your institution is watching, how to earn the trust and flexibility to speak in your own voice, and why institutional alignment matters. Sandra is deliberate about the issues she speaks on. She's not interested in chasing hot takes. She wants to be a surgeon, a human, and a mom, and she's done pretending those identities need to exist in separate compartments.

As a woman of color in surgery, Dr. Stinnett believes every physician needs three people in their corner: a coach, a mentor, and a sponsor. Her own visibility has become a kind of advertising, opening doors and putting her name in rooms she never imagined she'd enter. But visibility isn't just about career advancement. Some of Dr. Stinnett's most meaningful work involves rebuilding trust between the Black community and medicine. She shares what it's like when a patient makes it clear they don't want her as their doctor, and we explore the role of allyship, including the importance of having a trusted friend and ally within her own department. We also talk about how her faith helps her resist the urge to vilify people, and why genuine curiosity about people whose lives look different from our own matters.

Dr. Stinnett does research on stress and the voice. The larynx is an emotional organ, and our voices can reveal what our bodies have been carrying. Through her work examining allostatic load, the cumulative physiological wear and tear of stress, Dr. Stinnett is exploring how that burden affects the very instrument through which we communicate who we are.

If you've ever wondered how to build a public presence as a surgeon without putting your career at risk, or how to make room for all the parts of yourself in a profession that rarely makes that easy, this conversation is for you.

Learn more about House of Nephesh here. Follow Dr. Sandra Stinnett on instagram here.