Episode
Why a rheumatologist asks every doctor to remember being six years old
- Podcast
- The Podcast by KevinMD
- Published
- May 14, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 1154
- Processing state
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Summary
What if the cure for physician burnout isn't a wellness workshop but a 10-minute exercise you can do alone in a quiet room? Brian Sayers is a rheumatologist in Austin, Texas, with nearly 40 years in private practice who founded an anonymous counseling program that has funded almost 4,000 visits for fellow physicians. In this episode, based on his KevinMD article " Finding meaning in medicine: Reconnecting with your childhood calling ," he makes a case that reconnecting with your origin story in medicine can realign you with the purpose you may have lost under paperwork, frustration, and systemic pressure. You will hear how he traces his own calling back to a homemade doctor's smock his mother sewed him as a child, how watching physicians care for his dying father shaped his vision of what a doctor should be, and why he asks physicians in small groups to write and share the moment they first wanted to practice medicine. He also tackles the controversy around calling medicine a "calling" and whether that language enables exploitation. If your daily practice no longer resembles the dream that launched it, this conversation will remind you where to look. Tune into our episode " 2026 Cholesterol Guidelines: LDL goals, lipoprotein(a), and coronary calcium scoring ," brought to you by Novartis Pharmaceuticals Corporation. For the first time in eight years, LDL cholesterol goals have changed, and preventive cardiologist Seth Baum says the new guidelines are a long-overdue course correction. He breaks down the new LDL targets for your highest-risk patients, why the LDL hypothesis should be retired in favor of the LDL fact, why lipoprotein(a) screening finally belongs in every patient's workup, what a coronary calcium score over 300 really means for how aggressively you treat, a…