Surgeons with Purpose

Surgeon-writer, Dr. Cornelia Griggs joins me this week.
Check out her article with Dr. Andrea Merrill, The Hidden Reason Women are Leaving Surgery: They're Being Pushed Out here.
Check out her book, The Sky Was Falling here.
The first physician in a family of writers, artists, and communicators, she grew up surrounded by people willing to speak openly about medicine’s vulnerabilities. A former theater kid, she found early inspiration in Atul Gawande’s Complications and the patient safety movement—so much so that she wrote her senior honors thesis on its history. After college at Harvard and medical school at Columbia, she developed a deep interest in health policy and the cultural forces shaping modern medicine. She reflects on how differently she writes when her “research hat” is on—passive voice, sterile, stripped of self—compared to the personal writing she uses to metabolize the hardest moments of her career.
We talk about what it was like to be a young surgeon in New York City when COVID hit—what was meant to be the crown jewel of her training. Following intensivists on early medical Twitter, she became convinced by February that disaster was coming. What frightened her most wasn’t ventilator shortages but the prediction that hospitals would run out of staff as clinicians fell ill. She felt dismissed, even gaslit, when others minimized the threat. Yet she knew—capital B Bad was coming. When the surge hit, it felt dystopian: inadequate PPE, mounting loss, the emotional toll of watching a system strain and fracture. That experience deepened her commitment to nurturing the softer, intuitive, vulnerable parts of herself—and to helping others do the same.
Cornelia also speaks candidly about women’s attrition from medicine, including her co-authored work with Dr. Andrea Merrill examining why so many are leaving. From differential treatment in the OR to referral streams quietly diverted to younger male partners, from pay disparities to the subtle “thousand paper cuts” of heightened expectations, she describes the cumulative mental load women surgeons carry. She has a unique vantage point watching how OR staff treat her husband compared to how they treat her and her female colleagues. Meanwhile, medicine offers few of the perks seen in tech and other industries—despite the time, sacrifice, and invisible labor the profession demands.
We explore the erosion of public trust, the ways academic medicine has ceded ground to the wellness industry, and how rebuilding credibility will require more than data—it will require humanity. For Cornelia, the path forward means reinjecting compassion into the profession, setting boundaries, and redefining what it means to be a powerful physician in today’s world.
Follow Dr. Griggs on TikTok here.
Check out Dr. Frances Mei Hardin's book, Surgeon on the Edge here.
Sign up for "When you Can Cut the Tension with a #10 Blade: Anxiety, Performance, and the Surgical Nervous System" here.
Join us inside Empowered Surgeons Group here.

Join us inside Empowered Surgeons Group here.
Life is more fun when your career path isn’t linear. Dr. Raymund King knows this well. From performing magic to practicing medicine, from the courtroom to the screen, Raymund’s life reflects a deep willingness to evolve and follow his inner knowing.
We talk about witnessing tragedy, bucking the norm, the mindset of a doctor vs lawyer vs creative, reinvention of self, becoming a good steward of service, and the importance of trust, even when things are scary and uncertain.
For physicians navigating burnout, or identity shifts, Raymund’s story is a reminder that your path does not have to be singular to be coherent. Reinvention is not failure. And sometimes the most powerful next step is the one that makes the least sense on paper.
Find Dr. Raymund King on IMDB here and Linkedin here.

Join us inside Empowered Surgeons Group here.
”It makes you feel crazy as a patient,” Tiphany Kane.
As physicians, we have more influence than we realize over how patients feel and how they perceive us (and the profession in general). Whether or not we diagnose them or operate on them, patients want—and deserve—to be treated humanely.
At its core, our job is simple: serve the patient.
But that becomes profoundly challenging inside a dehumanizing healthcare system rife with moral injury and burnout. I get it. It’s easy for physicians to slip into a transactional mindset when the system itself is transactional.
And still, both things can be true.
We can humanize ourselves, humanize every patient we see, and work to change the system at the same time. In fact, I believe everyone wins when we choose this path.
In this episode, you’ll hear one patient’s journey. Tiphany Kane is an entrepreneur and a medical mystery. She shares what it was like to be gaslit for years by her primary care physician, cardiologists, nephrologists, and endocrinologists. It wasn’t until she independently enrolled herself in a clinical trial that she finally received the care she had been searching for.
And it wasn’t easy. Despite surgical complications and unexpected setbacks, Tiphany speaks with gratitude and deep respect for the surgical team who cared for her.
Her story is a powerful example of what becomes possible when physicians make compassionate, patient-centered, service-based care their highest priority.
Follow Tiphany and her medical journey on instagram here.

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What happens when the skills that make you a great surgeon begin pulling you toward a different kind of impact?
In this episode, I sit down with Dr. Ivan Capobianco, who trained as a hepatobiliary and transplant surgeon and whose career journey spans Italy, Germany, global health work in Angola, academic research, AI, entrepreneurship, and medical publishing.
Ivan shares a deeply honest account of how he moved from the operating room into startup life and research, not because he couldn’t handle surgery, but because he began asking a bigger question:
How else can I serve?
We talk about:
-Growing up in Italy in a creative family, and why medicine wasn’t always the obvious path
-Training at the University of Padua, one of the oldest medical faculties in the world
-Key differences between European and U.S. surgical training systems
-How a year “off” before residency led him to Angola and permanently changed how he saw medicine
-Why pediatric surgery culture felt different, and what that revealed about surgical identity
-Burnout that didn’t announce itself until it did
-A pivotal moment during parental leave that forced a reckoning between career, family, and self
-Attrition in surgery, particularly for women
-The unfortunate truth that productivity and profit override patient-centered values in modern surgical systems
-The realization that helping healthcare workers may help more patients than operating alone
Ivan also shares how his love of research, data, and prevention led him to:
-Learn coding and machine learning
-Found the healthcare documentation startup Briefly
-Create STITCHES, a daily newsletter that curates and summarizes the most relevant surgical literature from hundreds of papers published each day
We explore:
-Why most “AI in surgery” papers miss the mark
-The value of small case reports and practical technique papers
-Why knowing open surgery still matters in a robotic era
-The loss of discussion and collaboration in modern academic medicine
-The myth of “I don’t have time”
-How essentialism can reduce cognitive and bureaucratic burden for surgeons
This is a conversation about agency, courage, and redefining service and usefulness in a system that often narrows our sense of who we’re allowed to be.
About the Guest
Dr. Ivan Capobianco leads the Surgical AI anda Digital Phenotyping Group at the Department of General Surgery, University of Tübingen. His research focuses on machine learning and artifical intelligence, Big Data in medicine, with a a particular emphasis on natural language processing methods applied to clinical data. He is the founder of the healthcare startup Breeflee, and creator of the surgical research newsletter STITCHES, which reaches over 5,000 readers daily. His work focuses on improving working conditions for surgeons and other healthcare professionals through better data, automation, and access to meaningful research.

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