Hormones as the Body’s Language of Meaning, Not Just Molecules

When a patient says, “I feel like a different person in this body,” they are rarely talking only about lab numbers. They are talking about meaning: Who am I now? What happened to my energy, my desire, my steadiness, my sense of myself? Hormones sit at the center of that question. They are not just […]
From Burned-Out Internist to Competing Physician: How Performance Changed My Medicine

I was 20 pounds overweight, chronically exhausted, and running on coffee and willpower. As an internal medicine hospitalist, I spent 12-hour shifts managing other people’s health crises while my own body was quietly falling apart. The irony wasn’t lost on me. One night, after another brutal shift, I caught my reflection in the hospital bathroom […]