Last 3 spots for the Women Surgeons retreat! Interview for a spot here.

Joing us inside Empowered Surgeons Group here.

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.

***********SENSITIVE CONTENT WARNING**************************

This episode discusses suicidal ideation. Please listen carefully.

Join us inside Empowered Surgeons Group here.

Jeremy Heffner is a trauma and acute care surgeon fifteen years into practice. He ran the COVID response at his institution. Somewhere in there, his compartmentalization strategy stopped working. He would find himself in situations where he couldn't contain his emotions and couldn't locate where any of it was coming from: which part of the past, which patient, which year. He had hypercompartmentalized to the point that he could no longer find the source. He saw therapists. He did EMDR. Eventually he admitted himself to a residential program for a month. Frontline workers, he says, are given almost nothing to process the day-to-day, so they don't.

In surgery we keep running until we hit a wall. He describes a room full of surgeons nudging each other about who is earning more and taking the harder cases, and nobody ever asking the only question that matters: did you ever figure out the work-life balance thing? His own verdict is unsparing: you have to run the race yourself and reach your limits before you'll believe they exist.

After admission to the residential facility, things got worse. Without the normal stressors he felt empty, and there was one night he came very close to dying by suicide. He couldn't work out what defined him anymore. He knew he couldn't go back to being who he had been, because that version hadn't worked. If he wasn't producing ridiculous RVUs, had he failed? For the first time in his life, he didn't know what the path forward looked like. Two realizations moved him. The first was that every single moment of the day is his choice — that the excuses, starting with “if I don't see these patients, then…,” were his own. The second arrived as a willingness to be fired: once he understood he didn't have to prove himself, the rest of the stress fell away. Recognizing your own intrinsic value, he says, is the muscle. And he's blunt about his own part in it; he had been blaming the system for hiding what he was keeping from them.

He also turned to AI during that stretch, in a state of high vulnerability and shame. It helped him, he says, by forcing his mind onto a new problem. But it also showed him what the models actually do. He argues the models can induce psychosis in vulnerable people, and he lays out three places this could land — we believe we're steering when we aren't; too many destabilizing ideas arrive at once; or we learn to work alongside these systems as neither boss nor slave, which he calls the real threading of the needle. His warning for medicine is sharp: whatever efficiency AI creates does not entitle administrators to more of a physician's time.

What got him through PTSD was his wife, and a life rebalanced around something other than output. He is worried about the surgeons being trained right now on a model that no longer matches the world, sent out like deer to the slaughter by leaders who haven't noticed the game changed, World War One generals all over again. His closing thought is about leverage: once you genuinely believe in your own worth, you simply stop accepting the terms. You are not an easily replaced part.

Follow Jeremy on LinkedIn here.

Join SurgeON here.

Get his book, Proof of the Impossible here.

If you're struggling: the Physician Support Line (1-888-409-0141) is free, confidential, and staffed by volunteer psychiatrists for U.S. physicians, residents, and medical students, 8am–1am ET every day and nothing is recorded. The 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline is available any time by call or text.