Ep 236 Lessons from 1001 Cuts, part 1
Dr. Amy Vertrees reflects on the weekend screening of the documentary A Thousand and One Cuts and the coaching call that followed it, unpacking why women surgeons' careers are rarely derailed by one dramatic event but by an accumulation of small, repeated moments.
She backs this up with hard data: female physicians and surgeons consistently produce lower mortality and complication rates than their male counterparts across multiple large studies, including a JAMA Internal Medicine analysis of 1.5 million Medicare hospitalizations and a 2025 meta-analysis spanning 13.4 million patients — yet women retire from medicine at 49 versus 62 for men.
Amy then teaches the core coaching framework from that call: the difference between a fact (something everyone would agree happened) and a thought (your interpretation of it) — including why "microaggression" is a thought, not a fact, and why that distinction actually gives you more power, not less. She closes with tactical empathy, the "mythical white male" trap, and the idea that forcing yourself to be falsely polite is its own kind of self-inflicted harm.
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