This Harvard-Trained Doctor Is Done With ‘McMedicine’ and Her New Podcast Is the Healthcare Revolution We Need

We’ve been there: Sitting in the doctor’s office for all of seven minutes, being told to “eat less, exercise more,” and walking out with a prescription that addresses exactly none of our actual problems. It’s what Dr. Sara Szal Gottfried bluntly calls “McMedicine”—and she’s had enough.

The Harvard-educated physician and researcher has just launched a new show, Treated with Dr. Sara, with Dear Media, and it might just be the healthcare intervention we’ve all been waiting for.

When Your Doctor Is Just as Burnt Out as You Are

In her debut episode, Dr. Sara doesn’t sugarcoat her own medical journey: “I was burning the candle at both ends. I was in couples therapy. I was overweight. I was suffering with premenstrual syndrome,” she reveals. Despite her Harvard education and position in mainstream medicine, she was, in her own words, “a hot mess.”

Like many women juggling careers, children, and households, Dr. Sara found herself giving everything away. “I felt like Shel Silverstein’s giving tree. Giving all of my shade, all of my leaves, all of myself to everyone around me. I had become an expert at optimizing what I had in order to give it to others, depleting my own self in the process,” Dr. Sara explains.

Sound familiar? The burnout cycle is real, and it turns out even doctors aren’t immune.

When Dr. Sara ‘Scienced Herself’ (Because No One Else Would)

When Dr. Sara sought medical help, her doctor’s solution was peak healthcare-as-usual: Prozac, birth control pills, and the tired advice to “eat less and exercise more.” The approach, she recalls, “left me cold because he made me feel shame. He made me feel like it was all my fault.”

Instead of accepting this half-baked solution, Dr. Sara decided to “science herself”—applying her medical training to her own health problems. The results were shocking: “Advanced testing at the time showed that I was aging more than a decade faster than my chronological age.” Her cortisol levels were three times normal levels, something her doctors dismissed as “not a big deal.”

It was, in fact, a big deal.

Welcome to the United States of Dysregulation

“Sometimes I joke that we live in the United States of dysregulation,” Dr. Sara says of our collective state. It’s a brilliant encapsulation of what so many of us feel—constantly teetering between anxiety, burnout, and that vague sense that something’s just…off.

Her podcast aims to address this epidemic of dysregulation with what she calls “Medicine 3.0,” a revolutionary approach that is “relationship based care. It’s participatory, where people own their own health data. They do N-of-1 experiments, where they serve as their own control.”

If that sounds refreshingly different from your last doctor’s appointment, that’s exactly the point.

Your Body Is Not a Car, and Your Doctor Is Not a Mechanic

The current healthcare system treats your body like it’s a car with a broken part: “I would refer patients to the gastroenterologist if they had gut issues, the rheumatologist if they had autoimmune disease, the endocrinologist if they had blood sugar problems… Everybody had their silo of what I think of as sick care.”

The result? “No one was happy. Not the patients and not the doctors.”

But what if healthcare could be different? What if it could actually be about, well, health?

That’s the premise behind Treated with Dr. Sara, where Dr. Sara plans to share evidence-based protocols for everything from hormone balance to blood sugar management to nervous system regulation.

Yes, Being a Woman Is Literally a Health Hazard

One of the most striking moments in Dr. Sara’s introduction is her blunt assessment: “Being a woman is a health hazard.” The statistics she rattles off are sobering: Women are at double the risk of depression, insomnia, and Alzheimer’s, four times the risk of autoimmune disease, and nine times the risk of thyroid disease.

“We constitute 51 percent of the population, yet our health outcomes have not improved,” she notes. In fact, despite women’s health ranking as the number one health trend in the latest McKinsey report, women’s health continues to decline.

But Dr. Sara isn’t here to depress you—we promise—she’s here with solutions. And not the generic, one-size-fits-all kind that have failed us for decades.

This Is Not Your Mother’s Self-Care Podcast

If you’re imagining gentle suggestions about bubble baths and scented candles, think again. Dr. Sara comes armed with serious credentials: She’s the Director of Precision Medicine at the Marcus Institute of Integrative Health at Thomas Jefferson University, has provided functional medicine to professional athletes like the Philadelphia 76ers, and is certified in psychedelic medicine with ketamine, psilocybin, and MDMA.

Her approach is scientific yet deeply personalized: “I practice medicine, but I don’t treat problems. I don’t even treat symptoms. I specialize in root cause analysis because I know, and the evidence shows, that the greatest health transformations occur when you address the upstream root cause, not simply the downstream symptoms.”

The Seven-Minute Doctor Visit Is Dead

Perhaps the most revolutionary aspect of Dr. Sara’s approach is her insistence that we all become experts on our own health: “No one will know your body better than you. You only see a doctor once every 6 to 12 months. On average, that appointment is about 7 to 15 minutes. The other 99.9 percent of the time, you’re on your own.”

Each week, Dr. Sara promises to bring listeners tools to become “your most effective health advocate”—sharing what she’s seeing in her medical practice, what she’s learning, and most importantly, “what works.”

For those feeling overwhelmed by health challenges, she offers this reassurance: “If you’re feeling dysregulated, please keep listening to our show, because I’ve designed it to help you get out of survival mode and into solutions.”

And perhaps most importantly: “I discovered that my dysregulation wasn’t my fault, and it’s not your fault either. You’re not doing anything wrong.”

In a healthcare landscape that often leaves women feeling blamed, dismissed, and hopeless, Dr. Sara Szal Gottfried’s voice—and her new podcast—might just be the revolution we’ve been waiting for.

Have a question for Dr. Sara? Send a voice message to her at speakpipe.com/treated.