Healing from the Inside Out: How Medicine Must Learn to Share Its Power with Dr. Rana Awdish

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.

Learn more about the American Association for Physician Leadership .