In this conversation, Dr. Priya Rao, Interventional Cardiologist, sits with Dr. Mel Thacker, a female surgeon who has walked through the fire of medical training and come out with a deeper understanding of what authentic healing requires. Together they explore the lived experience of women in medicine, the layers of pressure placed on a female physician, and the way those pressures can shape identity, intuition, and self worth. Nothing here is abstract. These stories are rooted in real hallways, real operating rooms, and the quiet exhaustion that so often hides behind the title of surgeon or doctor. Dr. Thacker opens her world with honesty, revealing the emotional cost of modern training, the long calls, the normalization of sleep deprivation, and the subtle culture that pushes clinicians to ignore their own bodies. Her voice echoes a reality many clinicians know well, the creeping weight of physician burnout and hospital burnout that affects even the strongest among us.
These reflections touch on the wider mental health crisis within medicine, including the unspoken fear many carry when the topic of physician suicide is quietly mentioned in staff rooms and whispered among colleagues. Without dramatizing or sensationalizing, this conversation recognizes the landscape as it truly is, while also naming the possibility for something more human. Priya and Mel explore what it means to step outside the rigid expectations placed on surgeons, especially women in surgery who often feel watched, evaluated, or pressured to hold everything together without ever breaking. They discuss the fear of being judged, the courage required to challenge norms, and the liberation that comes from allowing oneself to be seen beyond a professional identity. Detaching from that single identity and returning to the full self becomes part of conscious medicine and heart centered leadership, not separate from it. Clinical intuition emerges as a powerful thread. Both speak to moments when the body knows before the mind does, when experience, presence, and inner sensing work together with evidence based care. This is the heart mind connection in real time, not theory. It is the subtle knowing that becomes clearer when a physician is rested, grounded, and connected to their own emotional truth. They also speak to the importance of creating genuinely inclusive and safe environments, places where clinicians can voice burnout, grief, or uncertainty without fear. Teamwork becomes another form of healing, a reminder that none of us are meant to carry this work alone and that joy in medicine often returns through community, not productivity.
