When Dr. Shanda McManus was a first-year medical student in Philadelphia, her younger brother was murdered near her family home in North Philly.
She went to the hospital to identify his body. She grieved with her family. And then a few weeks later, she went back to medical school to study anatomy and physiology.
“It happened on Christmas Eve,” Dr. McManus told me. “And January 3rd, I was back at school. I just kind of put a tourniquet on it and just went on.”
Dr. McManus graduated from a top medical school. She went on to become a family physician. She became a wife, a mom, and a medical school professor. She kept the loss of her brother compartmentalized from her busy, fast-paced life.
Until one day, she passed a sign in her neighborhood advertising a creative writing class. On a whim, she signed up. Through writing, she said, she started to reconnect with her brother Monir — and with the young woman she had been at that difficult time.
“I just wanted to talk to my brother,” she said. “He was the only one there through all this stuff I went through as a kid and as a teen. So I just started writing and then I couldn’t stop.”
It was such a pleasure to talk with Dr. McManus about:
How writing makes Dr. McManus a better doctor
Why medical education teaches doctors they should keep working through difficult times — and how Dr. McManus role-models otherwise to her medical students
How writing letters to Monir helped her access her “O.V.” — her “original voice” — and why she tucked that voice away for so many years
Why community-based programs are effective, evidence-based tools to reduce gun violence
Her favorite memory of taking the subway in Philly with Monir
Please check out her beautiful, devastating memoir wherever you like to buy books.
I went on the podcast Playing God? to talk about the promise and the peril of GLP1 medications. This is a podcast put out by the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics.
I think a bioethics framework is critical for thinking about the risks and benefits — for both individual patients and for society as a whole — of GLP1s. The piece also featured a beautiful, personal story from Rebecca Morrison.
Please give it a listen, if you’d like.
And please let me know what you think! What are the ethical issues we should all be considering in the Ozempic era? Is the personal calculus different from our collective calculus?
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