The annual Power of Women In Medicine Summit brought together hundreds of physicians from across the country
Above photo: Marcia Faustin, MD, on day two of The Power of Women in Medicine Summit at the Drake Hotel in Chicago, Illinois on September 19, 2025. Photo by Kuma Content, courtesy of Women In Medicine
The annual Power of Women in Medicine Summit brought together hundreds of physicians from across the country this past week. The summit ran from Sept. 18 to 21 at the Drake Hotel, 140 E. Walton Place.
Many sessions focused on, or at least touched on, moral injury and burnout among physicians, who are increasingly vocal about being stretched to their limits — between seeing more patients in less time, battling insurance companies for coverage they say their patients need, and educating against rampant misinformation.
“You’re not broken; you’re just responding to abnormal conditions,” said obstetrician-gynecologist Dympna Weil, MD, during a session on reviving joy in medicine. “We’re all morally injured if we’re practicing medicine right now.”
Weil went on to list the over/unders that many physicians say they feel: overworked, overwhelmed, overregulated; underappreciated, undersupported, and understaffed.
During a Friday morning session, pediatrician Annie Andrews, MD; primary care physician Alice Chen, MD; and emergency medicine physician Halleh Akbarnia, MD, energized the crowd with calls for physicians to use their place in society to advocate for public health in the United States.
“There are very real risks to speaking up in this moment,” Andrews said, stressing that when physicians speak up, they’re speaking for their patients, families, institutions, and communities. “It’s important for us to do these big, scary things and to take risks, even if the outcome isn’t what we hoped the outcome would be.”
Andrews is running for Congress again in South Carolina’s first congressional district. She joked that as a red-state Democrat, she’s used to “raising hell and losing elections.”
“That might be the path that I’m on, and that’s okay,” Andrews said. “Because my patients see me fighting for them, my kids see me fighting for them, all of you see me fighting.”
Yet speaking up doesn’t have to be as big a move as running for office. Chen said she has gravitated toward involvement where she can immediately see the impact. Her child’s back-to-school night, for example, didn’t offer childcare — so Chen stepped up. “It doesn’t change the Senate, it doesn’t change the White House, but there were 40 families that got to meet their teachers,” she said. “Choose things that you feel are going to build your confidence and your sense of agency, and that are speaking to this moment.”
This moment requires a great deal of bravery, Andrews added. “We have to force ourselves to be braver than we expect a child in this country to be,” she said. “Every child in this country goes to school, learns how to read, write, and hide from a bad man with a gun. We expect our 4-year-olds to do that. We can expect ourselves to speak up in a way that feels uncomfortable to us.”
Andrews ended her talk by encouraging physicians to think about their role in society. “I learned very quickly the value and power of the degrees we all have behind our names and the platform that that gives us. If we’re not using it, we’re wasting it,” she said.
Other summit sessions covered reproductive healthcare, research gaps in women’s health, leadership navigation, climate action, and more.
Shikha Jain, MD, a hematologist-oncologist at the University of Illinois Chicago, founded the Women in Medicine Summit in 2019. Next year’s summit is scheduled for the same location, Sept. 24-26, 2026.
An award-winning journalist, Katie has written for Chicago Health since 2016 and currently serves as Editor-in-Chief.
