In recent years, Silicon Valley has imagined for us a new way of life – one where almost anyone can be a twenty or thirty-something-year-old with a supernatural glow, toned physique, understated intelligence, and a superabundance of vitality. This is not reality for most people, even for the twenty or thirty-something-year-olds, but medicine and technology originally intended to help people achieve baseline health are increasingly being leveraged to close the gap. This raises the question: what is medicine for? Is medicine about restoring people to some definition of “normal” health? And if so, what about all the people contentedly living in bodies considered medically abnormal?

Our guest is Devan Stahl, author, clinical ethicist, and professor of bioethics and religion at Baylor University. Professor Stahl received her PhD in Health Care Ethics from St. Louis University, before completing her Master of Divinity at Vanderbilt University. Her scholarship focuses on disability theology and bioethics, and her most recent books include Disability's Challenge to Theology (2022) and Bioenhancement Technologies and the Vulnerable Body (2023). In addition to her scholarly work, Stahl volunteers as a clinical ethicist with the Supportive and Palliative Care Team at her local hospital.

Over the course of our conversation, we discuss whether it is the role of a clinical ethicist to determine what is “right” in a given situation – and if so, how that is accomplished. We explore how Silicon Valley’s promotion of the “optimized” human raises questions about the purpose of medicine, and the various ways medicine defines the idea of “normal” health. Stahl shares her experience in the healthcare system as someone with multiple sclerosis, cautioning that some providers are more comfortable focusing on the digitized version of someone’s disability than on the person themselves. Together, we imagine a doctor’s role not just in restoring patients to normality, but guiding them to flourish.

In this episode, you’ll hear about:

3:19 - The questions that have driven Stahl’s academic career as a professor of bioethics and religion.

5:00 - The types of requests Stahl receives as a bioethicist at her local hospital.

12:51 - How Silicon Valley is skewing public perception of “health” — and the questions this raises about the purpose of medicine.

20:12 - Stahl’s experience navigating uncomfortable and confusing medical encounters as a person with disability herself.

25:24 - Stahl’s take on the “purpose” of modern medicine.

29:48 - Ways in which our society tends to value certain kinds of bodies over others.

39:36 - Imagining the role of physicians in helping patients flourish.

44:55 - How health care professionals can find deeper meaning in their work and lives.

If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, rate, and review our show, available for free on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you know of a doctor, patient, or anyone working in health care who would love to explore meaning in medicine with us on the show, feel free to leave a suggestion in the comments or send an email to info@thedoctorsart.com.

Copyright The Doctor’s Art Podcast 2026

Electronic Medical Records have transformed the way we practice health care, making patient data readily accessible to health care providers, facilitating collaboration within and across large medical teams, increasing transparency, and drastically improving the legibility of patient charts and prescriptions. But despite these benefits, many physicians cite the electronic medical record as a primary driver of burnout, pointing to the overwhelming volume of documentation it requires. In this episode, we explore how the launch of EMRs within the context of America’s predominantly fee-for-service health care system led to the technology falling short of its promise — and how transitioning to value-based care models might redeem the technology, revitalize physicians, and recenter public health.

Our guest on this episode is Farzad Mostashari, MD. After completing a degree in public health at Harvard, medical school at Yale, and residency at Massachusetts General Hospital, Dr. Mostashari spent over a decade working in public health: first for the CDC’s Epidemic Intelligence Service and then for the New York City Department of Health. From 2009 to 2011, he served as the National Coordinator for Health IT at the Department of Health and Human Services where he helped oversee the nationwide transition from paper to electronic medical records. In 2014, he founded Aledade, a company that helps primary care physicians form value-based care networks in the US.

Over the course of our conversation, Dr. Mostashari shares how his childhood in Iran pushed him towards public health, how his experience watching his father being cared for in the hospital drove him towards medicine, and how he has spent his career in the liminal space between public health and medicine. We discuss the rollout of EMRs, and how fee-for-service payment models led to EMRs being optimized for documentation rather than patient care. We explore how value-based care not only solves the problem of over-documentation, but also better aligns the goals of patients, physicians, and even insurance companies. Dr. Mostashari maps out the progress we have made toward this kind of model and the hurdles we have to clear before we have a system that incentivizes preventing stroke as much as treating stroke.

In this episode, you’ll hear about:

3:35 - How Dr. Mostashari became drawn to the intersection between the intimate work of doctoring and the wide lens work of public health.

12:12 - Dr. Mostashari’s experiences modernizing health IT systems and learning to optimize for the number of lives saved rather than the number of technological solutions implemented.

16:05 - Dr. Mostashari’s assessment of the rollout of the electronic medical record in the US.

25:09 - How Aledade frees primary care physicians to prioritize patient outcomes and reduces the burden of EMR documentation.

38:57 - What the US can learn from international health care systems.

41:00 - Challenges in transitioning to outcome-based models of primary care.

50:30 - How Dr. Mostashari’s medical training has shaped his career in public health.

If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, rate, and review our show, available for free on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you know of a doctor, patient, or anyone working in health care who would love to explore meaning in medicine with us on the show, feel free to leave a suggestion in the comments or send an email to info@thedoctorsart.com.

Copyright The Doctor’s Art Podcast 2026

Over the past 160 episodes, two themes that have appeared repeatedly feel as relevant and urgent as ever are 1) the pros and dehumanizing cons of technology and 2) approaching suffering in the human experience. In this episode, we are excited to bring back a panel of notable past guests to discuss the interplay between medicine, suffering, technology, and the human experience.

We are joined by historian Christine Rosen, PhD, philosopher Mikolaj Slawkowski-Rode, PhD, and palliative care physician Sunita Puri, MD. Rosen is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute whose work is focused on American history, society and culture, technology and culture, and feminism. Slawkowski-Rode is an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Warsaw and research fellow at the University of Oxford with a current emphasis on the philosophy of science and religion. Dr. Puri is a palliative care physician, associate professor at the University of California, Irvine School of Medicine, and author of the critically acclaimed book That Good Night (2019).

As a panel, we consider a prominent aspect of the unwritten curriculum of medicine: how medicine often considers suffering and sorrow to be fixable and their eradication to be a metric of medical success. We explore ways digital technology can make our lives easier without making them better, and the pressing need to define and defend the (non-digital) human experience. We propose that the goal is not to eradicate all suffering, but to reduce needless suffering without denying the forms that accompany love, growth, and moral responsibility. When suffering is treated as an intolerable defect, we can become preoccupied with self-protection and less available to one another. The first and most important gift a caregiver can give is their undivided attention and the biggest mistake we can make in medicine is turning away from suffering. Finally, we ponder if for both patients and physicians, life, in the end, is meant to be a mystery.

In this episode, you’ll hear about:

6:37 – Unlearning preconceived perspectives on suffering, technology, and human experience.

13:08 – Engaging with digital technology critically instead of presuming that technological progress is inherently good.

19:28 – Suffering as an irradicable and sometimes necessary element of the human condition.

27:50 – Helping young terminal patients grapple with their diagnosis as a palliative care doctor.

36:36 – How the pursuit of immortality can lead to moral sickness.

47:08 – How digital technologies are inciting a collective disembodiment from reality.

53:15 – Practices that will positively impact the modern lived experience.

Explore our guests’ past episodes on The Doctor’s Art:

Human Experience in A Digital World | Christine Rosen, PhD

A Philosophy of Grief | Mikolaj Slawkowski-Rode, PhD

The Beauty of Impermanence | Sunita Puri, MD

If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, rate, and review our show wherever you get your podcasts. If you know of a doctor, patient, or anyone working in health care who would love to explore meaning in medicine with us on the show, send an email to info@thedoctorsart.com.

Copyright The Doctor’s Art Podcast 2026