Health & Fitness

On Becoming a Healer

by Saul J. Weiner and Stefan Kertesz

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Latest episodes

Medicine's Missing Center: The Failure to Engage

October 20, 2026 · 57 min

As On Becoming a Healer begins its seventh year, Stefan turns the questions on Saul: What does it actually mean to "become a healer"—and why does that idea remain at the center of both the podcast and Saul's 2020 book, On Becoming a…
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September 15, 2026 · 34 min

What happens when a healthcare system organized around profit repeatedly gets in the way of doing what is right for patients? Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP) calls one consequence moral injury: the distress physicians…
From East Pakistan to West Texas: What One Immigrant Doctor Gave America

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Fazlur Rahman, a retired oncologist, is the author of The Temple Road, a richly evocative memoir about growing up in what was then East Pakistan, before it became Bangladesh. His second book, Our Connected Lives, chronicles several…
The Clinician in the Difficult Encounter

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Most of us who care for patients can remember seeing a name on the schedule and feeling our heart sink. What makes some clinical relationships so difficult? Is it something about the patient—or something about the interaction itself? Dr…
Contextualizing Care: From Competency to Curriculum (BONUS Episode)

June 30, 2026 · 20 min

Over the past several years, contextualizing care has surfaced repeatedly on On Becoming a Healer. In 2025, contextualizing care was incorporated into new Foundational Competencies for Undergraduate Medical Education. Around the same time…

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Do Mental Illness Diagnoses Obscure More Than They Reveal?

June 16, 2026 · 50 min

What if many of the core assumptions of modern psychiatry are wrong? In this episode, we speak with internist and author Dr. Khameer Kidia about his provocative new book, Empire of Madness: Reimagining Western Mental Health Care for…
"Dire Consequences": When students do not receive appropriate accommodations on the USMLE examinations

May 19, 2026 · 46 min

In last month's episode we learned that there is no evidence that time limits that impose any sort of pressure on even a small percentage of students improves test validity and that, in fact, there is ample research showing that they make…
Why it's time to remove time limits on tests, like the USMLE exam

April 21, 2026 · 44 min

There is a widely held misperception that being able to complete a test quickly is an indication of mastery when compared with those who need more time. As a result, it is often difficult to obtain accommodations on high stakes…
Why Good Primary Care Is Non-Negotiable

March 17, 2026 · 45 min

In a recent five-part series in the New England Journal of Medicine on the future of primary care, the author asks: "Has the long-term general doctor become obsolete? In other words, should the dying primary care system be saved?" The…
Preventing Suicide: How can we do better?

February 17, 2026 · 39 min

Forty-five percent of patients who die by suicide saw a primary care physician in the prior month. Physicians screen for suicide risk just half the time when seeing patients under treatment of depression. Meanwhile, suicide rates continue…
Bad Leadership in Academic Medicine and Health Care: Let's Talk about It

January 20, 2026 · 54 min

Unfortunately, bad leadership is common, with 50% of American's leaving a job because of a bad boss, and medicine is no exception. Saul and Stefan, with a combined 60 years in academic medicine and clinical practice, share personal…
Poems about the wretched illness experience when your doctor is"clinically detached"

December 16, 2025 · 50 min

Writing about the illness experience, medical sociologist Richard Frank described an unspoken agreement with his doctor that if he adopted their detached and clinical language when discussing his illness, "I would have at least a junior…

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About the show

Doctors and other health care professionals are too often socialized and pressured to become "efficient task completers" rather than healers, which leads to unengaged and unimaginative medical practice, burnout, and diminished quality of care. It doesn't have to be that way. With a range of thoughtful guests, co-hosts Saul Weiner MD and Stefan Kertesz MD MS, interrogate the culture and context in which clinicians are trained and practice for their implications for patient care and clinician well-being. The podcast builds on Dr. Weiner's 2020 book, On Becoming a Healer: The Journey from Patient Care to Caring about Your Patients (Johns Hopkins University Press).