As On Becoming a Healer begins its seventh year, Stefan turns the questions on Saul: What does it actually mean to "become a healer"—and why does that idea remain at the center of both the podcast and Saul's 2020 book, On Becoming a Healer: The Journey from Patient Care to Caring About Your Patients?

Beginning with an encounter in which a patient's worsening back pain could not be understood apart from a devastating recent trauma, Stefan and Saul explore the difference between treating a clinical problem and engaging with the person experiencing it. They consider why genuine engagement is not friendship, forced intimacy, "good bedside manner," or additional emotional labor; how boundary clarity makes openness safer; and why medical education has such difficulty teaching something that cannot be reduced to a script or competency.

In a profession increasingly shaped by financialization, bureaucracy, and the efficient-task-completer mindset, it is not enough to ask what physicians are against. We must also ask what they are for. This episode argues that engagement is not an optional grace note in medical care. It is medicine's missing center—and the foundation of a healing interaction.

What happens when a healthcare system organized around profit repeatedly gets in the way of doing what is right for patients? Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP) calls one consequence moral injury: the distress physicians experience when the system prevents them from providing the care they believe patients need.

PNHP president Diljeet Singh, MD, DrPH, joins Stefan and Saul to discuss the organization's recent report on moral injury and the financialization of American medicine. Saul strongly shares PNHP's commitment to universal health care—but challenges whether the language of moral injury puts too much emphasis on what the system does to physicians and too little on physicians' own agency and responsibility within that system.

What follows is a candid and provocative exchange that begins with substantial agreement about what is wrong with American health care and the need for universal coverage, but moves into harder questions about moral distress, physician complicity, professional responsibility—and how much courage we should expect from doctors when doing the right thing comes at a personal cost.

Fazlur Rahman, a retired oncologist, is the author of The Temple Road, a richly evocative memoir about growing up in what was then East Pakistan, before it became Bangladesh.

His second book, Our Connected Lives, chronicles several patients he cared for during his 35 years as a cancer doctor in West Texas – and his relationships with them in the rural region where he was the only oncologist. Fazlur is a gifted writer who became a beloved physician in a community that needed him.

Fazlur also faced prejudice along the way, and his story is a reminder of how much America gains from those who come from seemingly far-off lands. It is an inspiration and illustration of humility, presence, compassion and joy in patient care.