Medicine, womanhood, and the cost of carrying both.
Fem MD brings intimate, plainspoken conversations to the parts of professional life that usually stay private. Its episodes move from operating rooms and contracts to grief, GLP-1s, narcissism, divorce, and the emotional cost of high-responsibility work.
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Fem MD is a warm, candid interview show about women living inside demanding careers and complicated bodies. Medicine is the home base, but the conversations rarely stay confined to clinical life. Episodes follow surgeons, physicians, authors, producers, advocates, and women with hard-earned stories through the pressures that shape work, identity, health, family, and survival. The show has a steady, personal rhythm. A guest usually brings the emotional weight, while the conversation makes space for clarification, context, and the details that are easy to miss from the outside. One episode looks at narcissism, gaslighting, cult abuse, and why manipulative people can thrive in positions of power. Another turns the microphone toward Dr. Lauren Umstead, tracing facial plastic surgery, business ownership, confidence, and the decision to build a practice. The GLP-1 conversation with Marta Raven sits in the tension between medical benefit and social pressure, especially for women who have spent years negotiating weight, appearance, and self-worth. Surgical training appears as both calling and wound, with burnout, sleep deprivation, neurodivergence, memoir, and anger treated as serious subjects. The show also reaches beyond medicine. Dylan Cade Bates brings the pressures of law enforcement and first responder mental health into conversation with the emotional habits of hospital work. Brooke Martin speaks about grief, faith, pregnancy, diagnosis, and the impossible decisions families may be asked to make too quickly. Dr. Stephanie Pearson’s story turns a career-ending injury into a practical warning about contracts, disability coverage, debt, and life outside a white coat. Fem MD is not tidy self-improvement. It is more like a private conversation made public with care. The appeal is in its willingness to sit with contradiction: ambition and exhaustion, competence and vulnerability, professional status and personal cost. It suits listeners who want honesty about medicine, womanhood, and leadership without losing the human voice underneath.
Made for: For women in medicine, healthcare-adjacent professionals, ambitious working parents, and listeners drawn to frank conversations about bodies, careers, grief, and reinvention. It especially suits people who prefer lived experience beside expert context.
What sets it apart: Fem MD connects clinical realities to private consequences, letting guests tell the long version before drawing lessons. Its strongest episodes make professional risk, emotional survival, and personal identity feel inseparable.
Where we talk about what it’s actually like to be a woman in medicine. Hosted by a facial plastic surgeon who’s not afraid to ask bold questions, this show dives into the messy, beautiful, complicated lives we all live: careers, kids, IVF, burnout, marriage, divorce, ambition, and all the expectations we’re supposed to meet. Nothing is off-limits. These are the conversations we’ve all had behind closed doors - now we’re having them out loud. Find more info about Fem, MD and other shows on the Hippocratic Collective at hippocratic-collective.com
Based on 5 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Fem MD makes the financial structure of a medical career legible through candid interviews about ownership, contracts, debt, disability, and professional autonomy.
Fem MD follows the points where a medical career becomes a business problem, a financial risk, or a question of personal autonomy. Dr. Lauren Umstead conducts guest interviews with a practitioner's eye for consequences.
Fem MD puts career-ending injuries and gaslighting under one microscope, so you can spot the stakes.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A practical look at narcissism, gaslighting, and the value of staying in your autonomy.
Fem MD uses narcissism as a lens for control, manipulation, and the ways abuse can surface in work, dating, and family life. Vanessa Reiser gives the discussion shape, and the host keeps returning to how gaslighting can make someone doubt what is real.
A candid look at career, private practice, and learning to trust your own judgment.
Fem MD centers Dr. Lauren Umstead as she talks with Brooke Martin about the road from training into facial plastic surgery and then into owning a private practice.
A candid look at GLP-1 relief, body pressure, and what changes when weight stops being a daily worry.
The episode treats GLP-1s as more than a passing trend, using Marta Raven's experience to connect divorce, parenting, work, and body image as pressures that do not stay neatly separate.
A blunt reminder that a physician's career can end before the debt does.
Dr. Stephanie Pearson's story lands hard because it is not dressed up as a triumph narrative. A career-ending shoulder injury, the termination that followed, and the pressure of contract language, student debt, and thin protection all sit in the same frame.
An intimate grief story about fear, faith, and the strain of impossible choices.
Brooke Martin's story keeps its focus on fear, faith, and the pressure of making fast decisions when a parent has no time to think. It is strongest in the uneasy stretch around the hospital moment, where shock and frustration sit right next to each other and the emotions do not…
Eat enough. Lift well. Stop shrinking.
Eat smarter, stay full, change habits.
Weight loss, after the headline moment.
The host treats narcissism and related traits as a spectrum, then brings Vanessa Reiser into a blunt, careful conversation about narcissistic abuse, gaslighting, and why troubling traits can still help people get ahead at work.
Brooke Martin takes the hosting seat and turns the questions toward Dr.
She starts with a personal account of the last two years.
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A female surgeon interviews a law enforcement officer about mental health challenges and peer support for first responders.
A shoulder injury changed everything.
Lauren welcomes Brooke Martin.
Audrey Bellezza, a romance author and former TV producer, shares her shocking diagnosis of stage four lung cancer despite never smoking, and discusses her nonprofit Love for Lungs.
Elite happiness coach Dannie De Novo discusses rewiring the brain for happiness through habits, self-honesty, and bravery.
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