On her drives to work, Mount Pleasant family medicine resident Nayeli Fuentes, MD, opens the Texas Medical Association’s Instagram feed, taps a post highlighting the latest Let Doctors Be Doctors episode, and listens as physicians she may never meet share the lessons of a career she’s just beginning.
“It’s pretty easy,” Dr. Fuentes told Texas Medicine. “I just click on the link.”
Let Doctors Be Doctors features candid conversations between TMA Immediate Past President Jayesh “Jay” Shah, MD, and Texas physicians about their career journeys, challenges, and personal experiences. The podcast tackles burnout, work-life balance, and systemic pressures while amplifying diverse voices across medicine and championing physician well-being.
The podcast is just one of many ways Dr. Fuentes keeps up with payment and regulatory shifts, public health concerns, and the work of her fellow physicians. Whether the news arrives in print, pixels, or audio, she taps into a full suite of TMA products designed to keep members apprised of the latest developments.
That accessibility is by design.
“We want to produce content for Texas physicians that is relevant, informative, and helps them feel supported,” said Pam Udall, TMA vice president of marketing and communications. The association also works with local and national media to amplify its voice on key health issues affecting the public.
Among those channels is Texas Medicine Today, TMA’s daily e-newsletter, which arrives in inboxes each weekday at 6:45 am with fresh dispatches on health workforce trends, legislative momentum at the state and federal levels, and other news members need.
Manvel family physician Suhani Bhakta, MD, says the newsletter has been incredibly valuable in helping her stay up to date on the latest news, including “new laws, changes from [the Texas Medical Board], and coding updates. It’s beneficial to know what’s changing, especially because it can be hard to keep track of everything on your own. The newsletter does that for me.”
For a deeper look at the business and practice of medicine, Texas Medicine magazine takes up medical economics and education, policy affairs that affect physicians, and science and clinical topics.
And for bite-sized ways to track headlines and TMA’s advocacy work in real time, members can connect with the association across its social channels: X, LinkedIn, Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram.
Beyond Let Doctors Be Doctors, TMA continues to produce other podcasts. Come August, Health Beat – which spotlighted health care topics of interest to both physicians and patients – will transition to a new format focused on combating health care misinformation and encouraging patients to turn to their physicians as a trusted source of information.
For Dr. Fuentes, TMA communications like the Let Doctors Be Doctors podcast have done more than fill a commute; they’ve helped her shape what kind of physician she wants to be.
“Being a new physician and listening to physicians with years of experience that I would otherwise never have been able to get insight from has been so invaluable,” she said. “The podcast episodes have helped me tailor the direction of my career.”