You Can Have It All, Just Not All at Once with Dr. Joan Chan

This week on Surgeon, Interrupted, Frances Mei sits down with family physician and educator Dr. Joan Chan for a conversation about ambition, burnout, identity, and the myth of “having it all.”

Together, they unpack the pressure many physicians feel to optimize every area of life at once — career, relationships, creativity, wellness, leadership — and why that mindset so often leads to exhaustion and loss of self. Joan shares what she’s learning while helping build a new residency training site from the ground up, including the tension between preserving institutions and protecting the humans inside them.

The conversation explores medical education, agency, tradeoffs, focus, seasons of life, and the difference between suffering for something aligned versus suffering inside deep misalignment.

Topics include:

Why “you can have it all” is incomplete advice
The hidden cost of trying to do everything simultaneously
Burnout in medicine and academic systems
Building residency programs differently
Institutional culture vs. human sustainability
Creativity, fulfillment, and feeling “alive” again
Why protecting people matters more than preserving systems

A thoughtful, funny, and deeply honest conversation about building a life intentionally — and what medicine gets wrong about success.

Host: Frances Mei Hardin, MD

Guest: Joan Chan, MD

Connect with Joan: https://www.hippocratic-collective.com/members/joan-chan-md

Presented by: The Hippocratic Collective

Follow Frances Mei on Instagram & Tiktok @francesmeimd

And subscribe to ⁨@HippocraticCollective⁩ on Youtube for all of the other shows the Hippocratic Collective has to offer.

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