Podcasts

The Second Pass at Healing
Dr. Rana Awdish, critical care physician and author of In Shock, reflects on her near-death experience and its transformative impact on her understanding of medicine and healing. Written seven years ago, In Shock marked her "first pass" at recovery. Now, as she prepares for her second book, she reframes healing as a recursive process rather than a linear journey, uncovering deeper layers of growth and emphasizing the power of listening, connection, and embodiment.

The Body Remembers
Exploring the Invisible Wounds Left by Serious Illness. 
When someone experiences a serious medical event, the immediate focus is on survival — often followed by a mission to “get back to normal” in whatever way possible. We applaud those who bravely journey from illness to wellness, the patients who inspire and uplift others. But, for a lot of people, physical recovery isn’t the final chapter in this story. On this episode, we explore the lingering effects of medical crises, and what true healing really means. 

Dr. Rana Awdish Almost Died as a Fellow. Now She's Teaching Doctors How to Heal

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, 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.

Dr. Rana Awdish: When Doctors Become Patients - Lessons in Humanity & Healing

Dr. Rana Awdish is one of Detroit’s most remarkable medical voices, helping redefine what compassionate care looks like at Henry Ford Health and beyond. In this episode, she shares with Bob Riney how her experiences are helping transform the way clinicians interact with and provide care for patients.

Connection is the Best Medicine

Ever wonder what doctors say about their patients when they think no one can hear? Dr. Rana Awdish doesn’t have to wonder - as a patient, she overheard a lot of distressing things. Her experience led her to change how medical providers speak about - and to - their patients, spreading compassion through communication (which we know is a mission dear to my heart). Listen in to hear Dr. Awdish’s take on the pressure on healthcare workers, too. 

The Clumsy Pulmonologist 
​The critical care and author extraordinaire regales us with stories of fire alarms, severed fingers, and penises

Cultivating Compassion
No Barriers Alchemy Series hosts Erik and Dave interview Dr. Rana Awdish. Rana is a critical care physician operating on the front lines during COVID-19 at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, MI. Her own serious illness in 2008 has informed her belief in the power of compassion, sacred listening, and community. As medical director of the Care Experience for the Henry Ford Healthcare System, she is training staff to practice empathy in critical care. 

Darkness & Light
In this discussion we go into the darkness and make our way back towards the light while discussing her lived experience and this extraordinary book. Rana is tough, brilliant, and amazing to speak with, this is important stuff.

A Doctor's Journey from the Edge of Death
Navigating the medical profession while confronting suffering and not burning out.

The Reprieve
Michigan has passed its Covid-19 peak, and the state has started opening up. But it’s still been intensely difficult for the staff in the ICU at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit. We've embedded with them over the past few months, and tracked how this pandemic has changed them and their city.

AFTER SHOCK with Rana Awdish
After Dr. Rana Awdish published her bestselling medical memoir In Shock, she became a leading voice in medicine and the patient experience. But Rana's healing journey was far from over. In the aftermath of her prolonged hospitalizations, she found herself oddly estranged from her own body. She'd been conditioned by medicine to view sick bodies as broken objects, and so she turned outward for all her healing. But she soon realized this would not be enough. And when her own body warned her that she would be dead in five years, she was unsure whether to trust it.

Healing is a Process with Dr. Rana Awdish

In our conversation, we talk about who we are when we strip away all of our accomplishments and titles, her first book, In Shock, the cost of self-suppression and self-sacrifice, how medical training is "kind of" like a cult, and learning to listen to your body and your inner knowing.

After Shock: Re-Inhabiting Your Body After Illness

In this episode of the Visible Voices Podcast, Resa sits down with Rana who takes us from a keynote stage in Houston where she realized she had been telling a cleaned-up version of her own story, through a decade of chronic illness, stroke, autoimmune disease, and pain — and into the embodiment practices, art, yin yoga, and hard-won self-awareness that brought her back to herself. We talk about what medicine gets wrong about sick bodies, how self-sacrifice gets weaponized against clinicians, and why doubt might just be the way forward.
 

Conversation is More Than Nodding Your Head
Is it possible we’ve been going about conversation the wrong way our entire lives? All too often, when we chat with a friend or colleague, we walk away feeling unheard, misunderstood, or confused. Luckily, research offers some clues about why we’re so prone to missteps – and how we can all get better. Dr. Sanjay Gupta speaks to Dr. Rana Awdish, who heads up a program to help doctors lead with empathy when talking with their patients. 

Choosing Not To Die
Dr. Rana Awdish wanted to be a doctor from her earliest memories, and worked to become an ICU physician. But, when she found herself 7-months pregnant, being admitted to the hospital spiraling into multiple organ failure, the near-death experience, followed by a two-year medical odyssey would forever change her.

What death can teach us about living well
Nataly and Rana talk about:
The power of compassion in medicine and as a way to heal ourselvesWhat coming close to death teaches us about what’s truly importantHow Rana’s illness made her a better doctorAnd much, much more!

Episode 32: Dr. Rana Awdish
Join hosts Drs. Lisa Meeks, Peter Poullos and guest hosts as they take a deeper dive into the experiences of health care providers with disabilities through critical conversations with the doctors, researchers, administrators, faculty and policy makers that work to ensure medicine remains an equal opportunity profession.

From In Shock to True Connection
In this episode Rana discusses the value of community in unburdening ourselves as health practitioners, and her belief that showing compassion will make you more efficient and effective as well as the benefits of self-care (and what Rana does herself).