The Truth About Healing I Didn’t Learn in Med School

Want more posts like this in your life? Join the Tiny Buddha list for daily or weekly insights.

“The wound is the place where the Light enters you.” ~Rumi

I’ve spent most of my adult life helping people heal.

I’m a podiatrist, a foot and ankle surgeon, and I’ve seen pain in many forms. Torn ligaments. Crushed bones. Wounds that just won’t close. But if I’m being honest, the deepest wounds I’ve encountered weren’t the ones I treated in my clinic. They were the invisible ones, the ones that patients carried silently, and the ones I had unknowingly been carrying myself.

I used to think healing was straightforward. Diagnose. Treat. Follow up. Recover.

That made sense to me. That’s how I was trained. But life and people are rarely that neat.

Years ago, I was treating a woman in her mid-sixties with chronic foot ulcers from diabetes. Medically, we were doing everything right. The right dressings, offloading, antibiotics, regular check-ups. But her wounds weren’t healing. I couldn’t understand why. I grew frustrated. I started questioning my treatment plan. I blamed myself.

Then one day, she said softly, “Sometimes I don’t even want them to heal.”

She wasn’t being difficult. She was being honest.

Her husband had passed, she lived alone, and these appointments were one of the few times someone checked in on her, looked her in the eye, and asked how she was. Her wounds gave her a reason to be seen.

That stopped me in my tracks.

I realized I had been treating her foot, but I wasn’t seeing her, not fully. I was missing the emotional story behind the physical wound. And in doing so, I was also missing something in myself.

I had always prided myself on being composed, efficient, capable. Residency had trained me to push through fatigue, stress, and long hours. It rewarded perfectionism and punished vulnerability. So I wore my resilience like armor.

But under that armor, I was tired. I was emotionally dry. I felt disconnected from the very thing that made me want to become a doctor in the first place: the human connection.

It wasn’t until I saw the pain beneath my patients’ stories—grief, loneliness, shame, fear—that I started to acknowledge the pain I was carrying too.

Not physical pain. Not burnout in the textbook sense. But something softer and harder to name: an unspoken ache to feel more whole.

I’ve had patients apologize to me through tears for “wasting my time,” as if their suffering wasn’t worth attention. I’ve had patients tell me stories of trauma that had nothing to do with their feet but everything to do with why they weren’t healing.

I started listening more. I stopped rushing. I began asking, “How are you, really?” And slowly, as I created space for others to be vulnerable, I began to offer that space to myself too.

I started journaling again. I made peace with taking time off. I reconnected with friends I had been “too busy” to call. I spoke to a therapist, not because I was in a crisis, but because I was curious about the parts of myself I had ignored for too long.

Healing, I learned, isn’t always about fixing what’s broken. Sometimes, it’s about acknowledging what hurts, even if there’s no clear diagnosis.

In medical school, we’re trained to be experts. To have answers. To guide.

But healing, real healing, doesn’t always happen in the exam room. Sometimes it happens in a quiet moment of shared understanding, when two human beings drop their roles and just see each other.

I’ve stopped pretending I have it all together. I’ve started being more honest with myself and with others. My patients sense that, and I think they trust me more because of it. Not because I’m perfect, but because I’m real.

What Have I’ve Learned?

Healing isn’t linear. Neither is growth. People don’t just want to be fixed. They want to be seen.

Pain isn’t always physical. And sometimes the deepest wounds are the quietest.

Presence heals more than performance.

I don’t think I’ll ever stop learning how to be human. But I’m grateful my patients have given me the space to try, not just as their doctor but as a fellow traveler on the road to healing.