Dr. Rana Awdish is a pulmonologist, critical care physician, and Medical Director of Care Experience at Henry Ford Health in Detroit. She is also the author of In Shock, a book that has changed the way countless physicians walk into a patient's room, and her new book After Shock, which picks up where that story left off.

Rana nearly died as a fellow from a catastrophic illness that left her hospitalized in the very system she had trained inside. What she heard, experienced, and absorbed from the other side of the bed became the foundation for a decade of research into how medical language shapes patient outcomes.

In this episode of How I Doctor, Dr. Graham Walker sits down with Rana to explore what it actually means to heal, both for patients and for the physicians caring for them. They dig into Rana's Never Words research, published in Mayo Clinic Proceedings, which identifies specific phrases physicians use that strip power from patients and offers concrete alternatives. And they get into the harder questions: how do you build trust with patients, why the data shows compassionate care actually makes clinical visits more efficient, and what it means that medicine has spent decades rewarding physicians for ignoring their own bodies.

What You'll Learn in This Episode:

The specific words and phrases from Rana's Never Words list that physicians should stop using, and what to say instead
Why redistributing power through language is not just ethical but changes clinical outcomes including adherence and return visits
Why medicine rewards disembodiment in physicians and what the cost of that has been for trainees, patients, and the profession
What curiosity can do when every other communication tool has run out
Why the culture of medicine is not fixed, and what physicians can actually do to reshape it from within

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