Our Story

A few months ago, I got off a Zoom call with a friend in medical school. He was entering his third year clinical rotations and wanted to talk about how to best prepare clinically, how to navigate difficult scenarios, and how to maintain a sense of self throughout the whole process. As we were talking, I realized that these were some of the same themes I had had a week prior with another friend, and a month prior with another, all starting their clinical years of medical school or residency. At the same time, Dr. Daniel Lage (Danny) had been mentoring pre-medical students for many years, and encountering similar questions and themes. He had started a medical humanities reading group through the Abigail Adams Institute in order to address some of those questions in a more systematic way.

Knowing that Danny had an interest in this area, and given we have been friends for many years, I approached him and Dr. Kevin Majeres, the co-founder of OptimalWork, to talk about a systemic way in which we could help medical students and residents maintain their sense of ideals in medicine. The idea was that, by helping medical trainees rediscover their sense of ideals, which erodes quickly even during medical school, we could play a small role in the larger problem of the growing legal and financial focus in medicine and the move away from fostering the physician-patient bond through increasing paperwork, insurance pre-approvals, and limited time allowed per patient. By helping my colleagues reflect on what drew them to medicine in the first place, including a desire to serve others and a desire to help relieve suffering and accompany patients along their most difficult moments in their lives, we felt we could also address this growing burden of physician burnout and physician suicide. These principles were drawn from the neuroscience and cognitive-behavioral therapy approach that Dr. Majeres’s program OptimalWork provides, and we applied those principles to the medical field.

We, therefore, decided to apply for a small grant through the Abigail Adams Institute, and through it, we were able to start The Hippocratic Forum, whose mission is helping doctors grow in resilience by challenging themselves according to their highest ideals. We have since devoted our time to fleshing out topics that we felt medical trainees need to help them stay focused on their ideals, hiring a great intern, putting together a website and logo, and recording podcasts as a means of reaching a larger audience. The Hippocratic Forum will also have a small class of Fellows, who will go through more intensive mentoring with Danny and myself, to put some of the advice that we propose in the podcasts into action, with the idea that they will also mentor medical trainees in their respective communities. These Fellows will also help us build up a cohort of mentors, so that we can expand the program in the future.

We thank you for your interest in The Hippocratic Forum. As we start off, we really look forward to hearing from all of you, to help us best meet the needs of medical trainees. We want to be as flexible as possible, and we understand that the way we realize our mission may change over time based on the feedback we get. Please email us at contact@hippocraticforum.org. We look forward to hearing from you.