02/17/2026
Dr Steelman was privileged to be on the Self Funded with Spencer podcast. His episode drops today!
https://youtu.be/DrOopjZtatU
"My wife would come back to check on me late at night, asleep at the keyboard, and she would be like, 'Is he dead?' The burnout, what we call moral injury, is more real than anybody knows." - Will Steelman
The American healthcare system is crushing its doctors. Faced with "assembly line" quotas of 25+ patients a day, hours of unpaid administrative work ("pajama time"), and a su***de rate higher than that of veterans, physicians are fleeing the profession in droves.
My guest this week is Dr. Will Steelman, a board-certified internal medicine physician who lived through this crisis firsthand. After 12 years as a hospitalist, Dr. Steelman reached his breaking point during the pandemic and realized the only way to save his career, and his life, was to exit the system entirely.
In this episode, we explore why Direct Primary Care (DPC) is the only viable path forward for the future of medicine. Will explains how DPC restores the doctor-patient relationship by reducing patient panels from 3,000 to 600, allowing for 90-minute visits, true price transparency, and a focus on root-cause resolution.
We also discuss the clinical benefits of having time to care, including using ketogenic therapies to treat mental illness and reversing chronic metabolic disease, rather than just managing it with pills.
If you want to understand why your doctor is exhausted, why your premiums are going up, and why DPC is the solution we can't afford to ignore, listen to this episode.
Why Direct Primary Care Is The Only Way Forward | The Physician Burnout Crisis"My wife would come back to check on me late at night, asleep at the keyboard, ...
