Healing from the Inside Out: How Medicine Must Learn to Share Its Power

What happens when a physician becomes a patient — and discovers that medicine can heal the body but leave the person behind? In this episode of SoundPractice, host Mike Sacopulos sits down with Rana Awdish, MD, medical director of care experience at Henry Ford Health and bestselling author of In Shock: My Journey from Death to Recovery and the Redemptive Power of Hope.

Awdish's path to physician leadership is unlike most. As a pulmonary and critical care fellow at Henry Ford, she nearly died — and that experience cracked open a new understanding of what physicians actually need to do their jobs well. She began building a communications curriculum, quietly and without a formal title, until the work proved so effective that the institution asked her to lead it systemwide. Today she oversees care experience, runs the Pulmonary Hypertension Program, and helps shape Henry Ford's physician onboarding and Leadership Institute.

The conversation is equal parts practical and profound. Awdish describes Henry Ford's "senior peer partner" model — a social mentoring program that pairs new hires with seasoned clinicians not to teach clinical skills but to transmit culture.

And she shares what comes next. Her forthcoming book, Aftershock: Learning to Reinhabit My Body After Illness, goes deeper than In Shock did, tracing a second journey — through somatic healing, art, and what she calls "re-embodiment" — that ultimately led her to discover her own undetected cancer. The book is a challenge to medicine's assumptions about where healing begins and ends.

This transcript of the discussion has been edited for clarity and length.

Mike Sacopulos: Dr. Rana Awdish serves as the Medical Director of Care Experience at Henry Ford Health. She is a nationally known author. Her book, In Shock: My Journey from Death to Recovery and the Redemptive Power of Hope, was a bestseller. Dr. Awdish speaks nationally and is widely regarded as a leading thinker on the moral and emotional dimensions of caregiving and healing. Dr. Awdish, welcome to SoundPractice.

Rana Awdish, MD: Thank you so much for having me.

Sacopulos: Could you please describe your path to becoming a physician leader?

Awdish: I did my pulmonary and critical care fellowship here at Henry Ford Health, and I had the experience at the end of my fellowship of becoming critically ill, which really changed my sense of what physicians needed to know in order to do their job well. I worked with other physicians here to start a communications curriculum in a very organic, grassroots kind of way. We were doing that without any formal leadership role for a number of years. When it started to work and the institution wanted to scale it, I was offered the role of Medical Director of Care Experience for the system. That really is a testament to my organization — they saw the errors I had pointed out in the way we work, saw that I was working toward a solution, and built me a bigger platform to do that work. It's been organic in the sense that I wouldn't have named the space I was working in as culture change or professional development necessarily. But as I've added different aspects to my work, they've all fallen at the intersection of communication, culture change, joy in work, and longevity — all of the things I really care about.

Sacopulos: You wear a number of hats at Henry Ford Health — Director of the Pulmonary Hypertension Program, leading care experience, overseeing physician onboarding in the Leadership Institute. How do the roles connect for you? Is there a through line?

Awdish: The clinical part of my role is very important to me because it informs the day-to-day practice that I know my colleagues share. When I get too far away from that, I start to have ideas in the non-clinical space that aren't really operationalizable. I need that grounding in why it's hard to care for other humans, what is difficult about a medical practice. So I keep that leadership role in pulmonary hypertension.

The onboarding piece at Henry Ford is really interesting. From day one, there is a sense of: you are joining a place with a really special culture and we want to help you thrive here. We pair new hires with what we call senior peer partners — clinicians in the system who exemplify the attributes and vision of who we are on our best day. They meet once a month over the course of the first year. They're not meant to be mentors within the same department or research mentors. They're really social mentors — how does a Henry Ford physician handle it when they get into a situation like this? Are we a pick-up-the-phone culture? That acculturation piece is really special. We also have a foundational curriculum in communication called Fundamentals of Communication that everyone takes. It's a way of saying: to be here means to care about how we communicate with patients, and we're going to invest in your professional development right from the outset.

The Physician Leadership Institute is something I became involved with in the last few years. I get to meet the emerging leaders. We look at topics ranging from the role of AI in healthcare to emotional intelligence, and everything in between. It's a one-year curriculum with a robust business project as a capstone at the end. All of these things are at that intersection of professional development, culture change, joy, and work longevity. That is the space I think is the most nourishing — and what makes Henry Ford special.

Sacopulos: Your first book, In Shock, came out of nearly dying. That experience revealed something about how healthcare treats patients. How did writing that book change the way you lead?

Awdish: Writing that book was a very vulnerable and brave act. I was naming mistakes that had happened in my own organization — our failures, our lapses in communication, our culture viewed through the lens of a patient. I felt very grounded in that, and I felt that if I shared it, we would have a common starting point to talk about solutions.

I live with an attorney who, when he read it, said, "You're probably going to get fired. Most institutions don't take kindly to people sharing mistakes in a public forum. You need to be settled with that as a family, because you can't make that risk go away." Because I knew that risk, I didn't let anyone at the health system see it until it was bound. I didn't want it to be polished. I didn't want anyone to say, we'll let you do it, but only if we add in these stories.

What I saw instead was that we embraced this idea that these things happen everywhere. We are not unique. This is the culture of medicine. And if we can work to change it, we should lead that. That's why I'm still here 20 years later — because in no way was it suppressed or polished. It was embraced. I was given a longer rope to do the work.

I didn't know how it would be met by my colleagues, and I was really surprised how much self-recognition they found in it. The lesson to me truly was: our vulnerability is often met with vulnerability, and that can be a starting point for real change, if we can be brave enough to take that risk.

Sacopulos: You have a new book coming out in June 2026 — Aftershock: Learning to Re-inhabit My Body After Illness. The title is striking. Re-inhabiting your body suggests something deeper than recovery. What were you trying to capture, and what do you hope readers take away?

Awdish: I came out of my first critical illness awed by what medicine could do. I survived something that was unsurvivable. And I so esteemed medicine that I ceded my healing to it. I thought: however far medicine can get me, that's how healed I'll be. I didn't take personal responsibility for the adjacent aspects of healing beyond the medical part.

What happened was that all of my sense-making, all of the writing — I had healed in a very cognitive way. But the healing simply hadn't reached my body. I still felt like a balloon suspended above a ticking time bomb. Anxious. Any pain, I thought was another catastrophe.

I realized I had more healing to do, and that this was healing medicine probably couldn't help me with. I went on a reembodiment quest — trying to learn how to value sick bodies differently, how to have reverence for the healing they're able to affect, and to redistribute credit for healing away from medicine and back to the body. The body is an owner of healing.

That process of reaffiliation was astonishing. I started to tune in to messages that we all get from our bodies. And ultimately, I received a message that said I would be dead in five years. I didn't know how I received it, but it was undeniable. I knew it was true. I followed it and found that indeed I had cancer I didn't know I had. My body really saved my life.

I couldn't have had that relationship without first acknowledging the gaps that medicine leaves behind — the emotional and spiritual and bodily aspects of healing that we don't know how to attend to. I hope readers gain a new trust for the wisdom and sacredness of their own bodies, and an understanding that medicine can't be power over bodies. It has to be healing with.

Sacopulos: It seems to me that you're speaking of the art of medicine — so much time and energy is devoted to the science, and it sounds like you're focusing here on the art. Am I correct?

Awdish: You are very wise, because the book actually anchors on art as a different way of knowing. We overvalue the science so much that I wanted to demonstrate there are different ways we can receive wisdom — whether it's from a child who just has these insights that are so pure, or through art, or through interoception, really tapping into what our body knows on a very cellular level.

Sacopulos: Were there things that surprised you in your journey writing this book?

Awdish: Lots of surprises. I wrote In Shock and thought I was healed. I thought I had done the work. And it's incredible to me how recursive the process of healing is. In the first book, there was a little bit of a hero's journey — I was well, I got sick, I got better, redemption. There's even "redemptive" in the title. What this book taught me is that healing is much more of a spiral. We revisit our injuries with new tools each time and new perspective. In that circling, we can get a little bit closer to ourselves and to a healed state. But it's a process, and it never ends.

Sacopulos: For a physician leader who wants to transform culture from the inside of an organization but feels like they're working against the current, where would you recommend they start?

Awdish: There's a great book called New Power by Jeremy Heimans and Henry Timms. Henry Timms was the CEO of the 92nd Street Y in New York and innovated the Giving Tuesday campaign, which was meant to counterbalance some of the rampant consumerism of Black Friday and Cyber Monday. They talk about how you can lead and create change within institutions — not from a place of having a title, but from a collective. Finding people who want to be activated and engaged in accomplishing a shared goal, and how just naming the action — for my projects, it's often communication work; for Giving Tuesday, it's donating to a cause — makes you feel connected and part of something with people who share your values. If that action can then be extensible in other ways, that's how culture change happens.

We sometimes have this idea that you can only lead from a certain position, or that if you just had a team, then you could really affect change. The truth is, the only way things ever change is a few committed people giving everything they have to something they care deeply about and growing closer as they do it. My advice is truly: don't wait. Don't wait to be anointed or tapped on the shoulder. If you see something, you have the power to create something different.

Sacopulos: There's often a gap between what an institution says its values are and what people actually experience day-to-day. How do you close that gap? Who's responsible for closing it?

Awdish: I think it's not just true for institutions — it's true for us as people. Institutions are nothing more than the people they're made of. Every day, I have a sense of how I want to respond in a situation, and how I actually respond when I'm stressed, or don't have enough time, or feel competing pressures. My work as a human is to close that gap, to notice the stimulus, take a beat, and respond closer to the version of myself I hope to be.

Institutions are doing that all the time. They're operating under tremendous stress with competing priorities, often on the brink of financial ruin in today's healthcare economy, having to make choices that align with their priorities. All they can do is take a beat, check on their values, and work closer to their idealized vision — just like we do as individuals.

Sacopulos: Most organizations treat onboarding as just some paperwork and a compliance checklist. Clearly, you see it as something different. What should the onboarding experience actually accomplish?

Awdish: I don't want to misrepresent — there's plenty of paperwork and compliance here too. But there is also this idea of who we are as a culture. Ideally, onboarding should be welcoming. These are people who, by and large, are going to devote not only their energy but their social capital and their work to your mission. The idea that we have to show that we value that, we support it, and we want them to have all the tools they can to succeed — because their success is our success. We lose when people leave. That loss is tremendous. We want people to come here and want to stay. We want it to feel like a home.

Sacopulos: Beyond retention and staff happiness, are there benefits to the patients that you see and care for?

Awdish: Everything I believe helps patient experience helps providers experience long before it reaches the patients. Activated, engaged providers who are willing to put in discretionary effort — that they don't have to — in service of the patients are the only way we get an experience of care that feels special. I will only get behind initiatives that help providers and patients. It cannot be one without the other. It is meaningless and it won't affect change.

Sacopulos: If you could change one thing about how medicine trains physicians to lead and communicate, what would that be?

Awdish: What I've found since I went to medical school is that we've gotten really good, actually, at training physicians how to communicate. We've gotten really good at training them in interdisciplinary team care models. We've gotten really good at understanding the structural determinants of health that we didn't have a language for when I trained.

Where it comes into friction, I think, is with corporatized medicine. These people come out ready to change the world and armed with all the skills they need to do it. But there's friction because it's very difficult to run a health system profitably in today's economy. What we really need to figure out is how we can unleash that power in the system that we have.

Sacopulos: As our time together draws to an end, I'd like to return to your new book, Aftershock. What are your hopes for how that book will impact your profession?

Awdish: My hope for Aftershock is that we can start to see that we need to redistribute some of our power to our patients. Medicine for a very long time has been a model of old power — consolidation, not really sharing resources, very closed door. It's got to change. Our patients have changed. They have communities, they run their own research, they have everything at the tip of their fingers. The future of medicine is collaborative. It is relational care. It is understanding that you're meeting someone who, while they're sick, is still whole and competent and able to heal in partnership.

Listen to this episode of SoundPractice .