There was a time in medicine when I thought being a good doctor meant learning to set emotion aside.

Not because I didn’t care.

But because emotions felt messy and I needed clarity and objectivity.

There were patients waiting.
Charts to finish.
Diagnoses not to miss.
And somewhere along the way, many of us absorbed the same quiet message:
stay objective,
stay efficient,
keep moving.

So we did.

We didn’t realize that we were becoming skilled at functioning as “good doctors” at the expense of disconnecting from ourselves.

Like many of us, I thought emotional life was separate from our physiology. It is not. In fact, it is an integral part of it.

Over time, through my work in behavioral health and my study of social neuroscience, I began to see something differently:
human beings are not machines with interchangeable parts.
We are relational beings whose nervous systems are constantly responding to one another and to the world around us.

The exhaustion so many clinicians feel is not simply burnout from too much work.
Often it is the strain of trying to care for others while remaining cut off from parts of ourselves.

And patients feel it too.

I don’t believe that doctors have stopped caring.
Rather, medicine has become increasingly organized around productivity, measurement, and performance — and this comes at the expense of presence, relationship, and humanity.

The answer is not to become less scientific.

It is to become more fully human.

This space is an exploration of what that might look like.