One podcast episode at time, Margaret Duncan, MD ’21, is striking a balance between creative pursuits and her medical practice.
A child and adolescent psychiatry fellow at Massachusetts General Hospital and McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts, Duncan uses her day-to-day training as the inspiration to explore the practice of medicine — from the clinician’s side as well as the patient’s — and to question the systems surrounding it all. As co-host of the podcast How to Be Patient, Duncan explores a more comprehensive approach to mental health.
I wouldn’t have taken on podcasting if I hadn’t been pushed by my friend and co-host, Preston Roche. Two years ago, he was approached to do a podcast by Dr. Glaucomflecken [the stage name of Will Flanary, an ophthalmologist with a knack for medical comedy], and Preston immediately asked me to co-host. I was in my third year of residency at Harvard and thought, “I’m not ready — I’m not an expert!” But I was raised by a father who saw systems change throughout his decades of medical practice as a primary care physician. I was scared to do it, but if you’re going to complain about systems in healthcare and an opportunity comes along to have an impact, you have to accept — or else stop complaining.
When the lay public seeks medical information, that information may come from those who are more than happy to sell a product or protocol that isn’t evidence-based. On How to Be Patient, we welcome researchers who spend their lives on their studies, many of which get either blown out of proportion or ignored by the media. We ask questions like, “What do you, the person who spent the last decade or more studying this, want people to understand about your paper?”
Transparency is so important. We want to be real about what it’s like to actually practice and be in medical training. Destigmatizing mental health is one thing, but we also talk openly on the podcast about what makes it frustrating to be in these systems and how to better support the longevity of healthcare workers. For us, discovering how we can all learn, build and think about the systems we’re in with more nuance is both a source of inspiration and an affirmation.
The internet has opened up a Pandora’s box in a wild, sometimes bad, sometimes wonderful way. When I was in medical school at WashU, I thought this creative part of me that now makes the podcast would exist outside the margins of my life in medicine. But the very thing that I wished I could turn off then — my desire to write and create — has proven very, very important not only in my life, but in my career. If I can reiterate anything to anyone in medicine or in any demanding career where you feel as if you have to constantly be in the “now,” it is as the poet Mary Oliver wrote: “Keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable.” These other parts of you don’t need to be truncated away from a career that you also find meaningful.
