Healing from the Inside Out: How Medicine Must Learn to Share Its Power with Dr. Rana Awdish

Speaker A: Welcome to Soundpractice, the business podcast for physicians and healthcare leaders, hosted by Mike Tsakopoulos and produced by the American association for Physician Leadership. What does it take to change the culture of medicine? And what can a physician learn about healing only by becoming a patient? Dr. Rana Odish is the Medical Director of Care Experience at Henry Ford Health and the best selling author of In Shock. Her new book, Aftershock is a profound reckoning with the limits of medicine and the body's own capacity for wisdom. Dr. Oddish will talk about learning from within, the courage of vulnerability, and why the future of medicine must be built on shared power. Next on Soundpractice. My guest today is Rana Oddish. Dr. Audish serves as the Medical Director of Care Experience at Henry Ford Health. She is a nationally known author. Her book In My Journey From Death to Recovery and the Redemptive Power of Hope was a bestseller. Dr. Oddish speaks nationally and is widely regarded as a leading thinker on the moral and emotional dimensions of caregiving and healing. Ron Odish, welcome to Soundpractice.

Speaker B: Thank you so much for having me.

Speaker A: It is my absolute pleasure. Dr. Oddish, as you know, this is the podcast of the American association for Physician Leadership. Could you please describe your path to becoming a physician leader?

Speaker B: Absolutely. I did my pulmonary and critical care fellowship here at Henry Ford Health and I had the experience at the end of my fellowship of becoming critically ill, which really changed my sense of what physicians needed to know in order to do their job well. I worked with other physicians here to just start a communications curriculum in a very organic, grassroots kind of way. And we were doing that really without any formal leadership role for a number of years. When it started to work and the institution wanted to scale it, I was offered a role as the medical director of Care experience for the system. Um, and that really is a testament to my organization that they, they saw the errors that I had pointed out in the way that we work and saw that I was working towards a solution and really built me a bigger platform to do that work. And it's really from there that my career has grown. It's been organic in the sense that I wouldn't have named the space I was working in as culture change or professional development necessarily. But as I've added different aspects to my work, they've all fallen at the intersection really of communication, culture change, joy in work, longevity, um, all of the things that I really care about, and

Speaker A: all things very important to your colleagues. So, um, excellent. But you wear a number of hats at Henry Ford Health. Director of pulmonary hypertension, uh, program leading care experience, overseeing, uh, physicians onboarding in the Leadership Institute. How do the roles connect for you? Is there a, uh, through line?

Speaker B: The clinical part of my role is very important to me because it really informs the day to day practice that I know my colleagues share. And when I get too far away from that I start to have ideas in the non clinical space that aren't really operationalizable. Um, I need that grounding in why it's hard to care for other humans, what is difficult about a medical practice. And so I keep that um, leadership role in pulmonary hypertension because that's very important to me to have that work. The onboarding piece at Henry Ford is really interesting. Um, there is from day one a sense of you are joining a place with a really special culture and we want to help you thrive here. So we pair new hires with what we call senior peer partners who are really clinicians in the system who exemplify the attributes and um, sort of vision of who we are on our best day. And they meet once a month over the course of the first year. And they're not meant to be mentors within the same department or research mentors. They're really social mentors of how does a Henry Ford physician handle it when they get into a situation like this? Are we a pick up the phone culture? Are we a send an email with everyone? CC culture. Um, so that acculturation piece is really special. And we also have a foundational curriculum in communication called Fundamentals of Communication that everyone takes. And it's a way of saying to be here means to care about how we communicate with patients. And we're going to invest in your professional development and your acculturation right from the outset because we want you to have these skills. So that's the onboarding piece. The Physician leadership um Institute is something I became involved with in the last few years and I enjoy so much. I get to meet the emerging leaders, I get to help them round out their leadership skills. We look at topics ranging from the role of AI in healthcare to EI in healthcare and everything in between between. And that is a one year curriculum that they matriculate through and do a pretty, uh, robust business project as a capstone at the end. All of these things are at that intersection of professional development, culture change, joy and work longevity. That is the space that I think is the most nourishing and what makes Henry Ford special.

Speaker A: It does sound special. And I love the concept of a social mentor because I think so many times, um, the emphasis is on, uh, the purely clinical and not how you fit in culturally. So, uh, well done. And I assume that, uh, that's, that's well received by people on both ends of the, of, uh, the equation. Right.

Speaker B: Yeah. Our senior peer mentors are often surprised by how much joy they get out of it. These are all busy people. Finding time to meet is often the biggest strug. But getting to share your insights, getting to help someone navigate challenges, it is really rewarding. And we have a list of people who volunteer every year.

Speaker A: Very, very nice. So your first book in Shock came out of nearly dying, as you mentioned in the opening. Um, and that experience revealed about how healthcare treats, treats patients. How did writing that book change the way you lead?

Speaker B: Mhm. So writing that book, I probably wouldn't have thought this or said it at the time, but it was a very vulnerable and brave act. I was naming mistakes that had happened in my own organization, our failures, our lapses in communication, our culture viewed through the lens of a patient. And it was what happened. And I felt very grounded in that. And I felt that if I shared it, we would have a common starting point to talk about solutions. And I live with an attorney who, when he read it, said, you know, you're probably going to get fired. Most institutions don't take kindly to people sharing mistakes in a public forum. So you need to be settled with that. And we need to be settled with that as a family, because you can't make that risk go away. It's just true. And I, because I knew that risk, I didn't let anyone at the health system see it until it was bound, because I didn't want it to be polished. I didn't want the marketing people to say, well, we'll let you do it, but only if we add in these stories or. I had all sorts of narratives in my head about what it might mean. And what I saw instead was that we embrace this idea that these things happen everywhere. We are not unique. These, this is the culture of medicine. We are very special. And if we can work to change it, then we should do that and we should lead that. And that's why I'm still here 20 years later. Because in no way was it suppressed or polished. It was just embraced. And I was given a longer rope, um, to do the work. I didn't know how it would be met by my colleagues. And I was really surprised how much self recognition they found on the pages. I sort of thought, like, with any experience before we share it, that it's so atomized and your own, that no one else could possibly relate to it. And it was relatable, and that became common ground from which we could build. So the lesson to me truly was our vulnerability is often met with vulnerability, and that can be a starting point for real change if we can be brave enough to take that risk.

Speaker A: Um, what a tremendous lesson. And, um, in a certain way, a gift from your organization, right?

Speaker B: Very much so.

Speaker A: Doctor, you have a new book coming out in 2026. Uh, the book is after learning to reinhabit my body after illness. Uh, the title's striking. Reinhabiting your body suggests something deeper than a recovery. At least it does, uh, to me. What were you trying to capture, and how do you, um, hope readers will, uh, respond and what will they take away from this new book?

Speaker B: I came out of, really my first critical illness awed by what medicine could do. I survived something that was unsurvivable. And I so esteemed medicine that I sort of ceded my healing to it. I, I thought, however far medicine can get me, that's how healed I'll be. I didn't take really personal responsibility for the adjacent aspects of healing beyond the medical part. And what happened was all of the sense making, all of the writing. I had healed in a really cognitive way, and the healing simply hadn't reached my body. I still felt like I was a balloon suspended above a ticking time bomb. And I was afraid of it. I was anxious. Any pain I thought was another catastrophe. And I realized that I had more healing to do and that this was healing that medicine probably couldn't help me with. And I went on a little bit of a re embodiment quest of trying to learn how to value sick bodies differently, something that I did not learn in training, how to actually have reverence for the healing that they're able to affect and almost redistribute credit for healing away from medicine and back to the body, the body as an owner of healing. And that process of reaffiliation, um, was astonishing to me how much it made available. And I started to be able to tune into messages that we all get from our body in a different way. And ultimately I received a message that said I would be dead in five years. And I didn't know how I received it, but it was undeniable. I knew it was true. And I followed it and found that indeed I had cancer that I didn't know I had. And my m body really saved my life. And I couldn't have had that relationship without first acknowledging the gaps that medicine leaves behind the emotional and spiritual and bodily aspects of healing that we don't know how to attend to. So I really hope that readers gain a new trust for the wisdom and sacredness of their own bodies and an understanding that medicine can't be power over bodies. It has to be healing with.

Speaker A: It seems to me that you're speaking of the art of medicine in so much of the time. Obviously, medicine is both an art and a science, and so much time and energy is devoted to the science. It sounds like you are, uh, focusing here on the art. Am I correct?

Speaker B: You are very wise, because the book actually anchors even on art as a different way of knowing. We overvalue the science so much that I wanted to demonstrate that there are different ways that we can receive wisdom, whether it's from a child who just has these insights that are so pure, which I experienced with my son, or through art or through just interoception, really tapping into what our body knows on a very cellular level.

Speaker A: Were there things that, um, surprised you in your journey, writing your newest book?

Speaker B: Lots of surprises. Um, you know, you. I wrote in shock and thought that I was healed. I thought that I had done the work. And it's incredible to me how recursive the process of healing is. It feels to me more not like in the first book, which was a little bit of a hero's journey. I was well, I got sick, I got better. Redemption. There's even redemptive in the title. What this book taught me is that healing is much m. More of a spiral. We revisit our injuries with new tools each time and new perspective. And in that circling, we can get a little bit closer to ourselves and to a, uh, healed state. But it's a process, and it never ends.

Speaker A: You talk about transforming culture from the inside of an organization. For a physician leader who wants to do that but feels like, um, they're working against the current, where would you recommend they start?

Speaker B: You know, if I could be so bold as to recommend a book that is not my own. There's a great book called New Power by Jeffrey Hyman and Henry Timms. Um, um, they. So Henry Timms was the CEO of the 92nd Street Y in New York and innovated the Giving Tuesday campaign, which was meant to counterbalance some of the rampant consumerism of Black Friday and, um, Cyber Monday. And they talk about how you can lead and create change within institutions. That is not from a place of having a title necessarily, but is from a, uh, collective finding. People who want to be activated and engaged in accomplishing a shared goal. And how just naming the action. For my projects, it's often this communication work for Giving Tuesday, it's donating to a cause, how that makes you feel connected and part of something with people who share your values. And if that action can then be extensible in other ways. That's how culture change happens. And I think we have this idea sometimes that you can only lead from a certain position. Or if I just had a team to do all of these things, then I could really affect change. And the truth is, the only way things ever change is a few committed people giving everything they have to something they care deeply about and growing closer as they do it. So my advice is truly don't wait. Don't wait to be anointed or tapped on the shoulder to do it. If you see something, you have the power to create something different.

Speaker A: Excellent. Great, um, great points. Uh, wrapped in a beautiful answer. Uh, there's often a gap between what an institution says its values are and what people actually experience day to day. Uh, how do you close that gap? Who's responsible for closing it?

Speaker B: You know, I think it's not just true for institutions, it's true for us as people. And institutions are nothing more than the people that they're made of. Every day, I have a sense of how I want to respond in a situation and how I respond if I'm stressed or I don't have enough time, or I feel competing pressures and obligations. And my work as a human is to close that gap, to notice the stimulus, to take a beat, and to respond closer to the version of myself that I hope to be. Institutions are doing that all the time. They are operating under tremendous stress, with competing priorities, often on the brink of financial ruin in today's healthcare economy. And they're having to make choices that align with their priorities. All they can do is take a beat, check on their values, and work closer to their idealized vision, just like we do as individuals.

Speaker A: We spoke a little bit about onboarding, but onboarding is one, uh, of your areas at Henry Ford Health. Most organizations, I'm sorry to say, treat it just as some paperwork and, um, maybe a compliance checklist. Uh, clearly you see it as something different. Uh, what should the onboarding experience actually accomplish?

Speaker B: And I don't want to misrepresent. There's plenty of paperwork and compliance here, too. And there's this, uh, idea of who we are as a culture. Um, ideally, it should be welcoming. Right? These are people who, by and large, are going to Devote not only their energy but their social capital, their, Their work to your mission. The idea that, um, we have to show that we value that we support it and we want them to have all the tools that they can to succeed because their success is our success. We lose when people lose, leave, right? Like that loss is tremendous. We want people to come here and want to stay. We want it to feel like a home.

Speaker A: Do you believe beyond retention and staff happiness, um, for lack of a better word, that, uh, there are benefits to the patients that you, you see and care for?

Speaker B: I. Everything I believe helps patient experience, helps providers experience long before it reaches the patients. Activated, engaged providers who are willing to put discretionary effort in that they don't have to in service of the patients are the only way that we get an experience of care that feels special. I will only get behind initiatives that help providers and patients. It cannot be one without the other. It is meaningless and it won't affect change.

Speaker A: If you could change one thing about how, um, medicine trains physicians to lead and communicate, what would that be?

Speaker B: What I've found since I went to medical school is that we've gotten really good actually at, ah, training physicians how to communicate. We've gotten really good at training them in interdisciplinary team care models. We've gotten really good at, uh, understanding the structural determinants of health that we didn't have a language for when I trained. Where it comes into friction, I think, is with corporatized medicine. These people come out ready to change the world and armed with all the skills that they need to do it. But there's friction there because it's very difficult to run a health system profitably in today's economy. And what we really need to figure out is how we can unleash that power in the system that we have

Speaker A: is our time together grows to, to an end. Um, I'd like once more to, to focus or, or turn to your, Your new book, Aftershock. What, um, is your hopes for how that book will, uh, impact your profession?

Speaker B: My hope for Aftershock is that we can start to see that we need to redistribute some of our power to our patients. Medicine for a very long time has been a model of old power consolidation, not really sharing resources, very closed door. We have rituals. It's got to change. Our, uh, patients have changed. They have communities, they run their own research. They are, they have everything at the tip of their fingers. And I think the future of medicine is collaborative. It is relational care. It is understanding that you're meeting someone that, while they're sick, are still whole and competent and able to heal in partnership.

Speaker A: What a great way to end our time together. Uh, Ron Odish, thank you so much for being on Soundpractice and, um, great success with your new book, uh, Aftershock. Thank you so much.

Speaker B: Thank you.

Speaker A: My thanks to Ronna Audish. Dr. Audish reminds us that culture change doesn't wait for a title or a team. It begins with a few committed people working towards something they deeply care about. Dr. Oddish is a true physician leader. My thanks also to the American association for Physician Leadership for making this podcast possible. Please join me next time on Soundpractice. We release a new episode every other Wednesday. You've been listening to Soundpractice, the business podcast for positions and healthcare leaders. Check out the show notes for this episode@soundpractice.com if you have any suggestions for future episodes, we'd love to hear them. Email us@infoooundpractice.com subscribe to SoundPractice wherever you listen to podcasts so you can automatically receive our episodes. And please rate us and comment on the podcast in itunes and Google Play. Soundpractice is presented and produced by the team at American association for Physician Leadership. We are the world's best premier organization for all aspects of physician leadership in every sector of healthcare. Learn more at physicianleaders. Org Pattis Holy cow.

Speaker B: That man and Robin Whitman Capal.