Medicine in Motion with Nina Shevzov-Zebrun, MD
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What inspired the conversation about movement and medicine at the start of the episode?
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You're listening to the Nocturinous Conversations. I'm Emily Silverman. When was the last time you thought about how you move your body? How do you sit? How do you stand? How do you walk? How do you interact with others? And what kind of information is transmitted in those movements? Today's guest is here to talk all about this. Her name is Nina Shevzov Zeprin, and she's a Massachusetts native who grew up training pre-professionally for a career in ballet. She earned her bachelor's in chemistry at Harvard, where she also served as the director of the Harvard Ballet Company, and carried her passion for movement into medical school at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine. At NYU, she spearheaded multiple projects, including the Ten Tensions Project, which lives at the intersection of medicine, dance, and other humanistic disciplines.
Currently, she's a resident in pediatrics at Stanford. I was blown away by Nina, by her intelligence, her creativity, and the skill with which she executed the Ten Tensions project, which was a super interdisciplinary project, where she basically identified these 10 tensions that exist in medicine and used dance and photography to create an image and a description for each one. I have no doubt she's a rising star in the medical humanities world, and I can't wait to see how she impacts the field, particularly how she raises awareness of how physicians are embodied or aren't embodied, and how bringing attention to our bodies and to our movements can impact our well-being and impact our relationships with our patients.
Before we sat down to chat, I asked Nina to read an excerpt from her artist's statement. Here's Nina.
I entered my Manhattan apartment around midnight, roughly an hour after observing a transplant team recover kidneys and a liver from a young patient newly pronounced dead. Still wearing scrubs, I sat down on my bed and, like a ghostly twin or guardian angel, watched myself spill tears. The scene I witnessed in the operating room that evening as a second year medical student was at once grotesque and hallowed, shocking and valiant in its intensity. Surgeons fought time for organs capable of saving life while a life bled free before them. A body turned cold to my touch. In its rawness and severity. This experience served, among other things, as an initiation. An initiation into the inner emotional world of medical providers.
Over the next several years, my familiarity with this world grew. I explore its depths and shallows in the capacity of student doctor. Quickly I recognized how significantly this world shapes physicians' day to day existence and, by extension, patient care. Though diversely lived, certain internal struggles seemed ubiquitous among trainees and clinicians. A set of emotional experiences appear to bind providers in a mutual but muted understanding. Indeed, it was rare for me to hear physicians openly discuss the emotional experience of medical practice. The weekly debrief sessions required on my internal medicine clerkship, however, were designed for precisely such conversation. I was grateful to hear choruses of same here and me too following Pierre's anecdotes and reflections.
The stories my classmates told unveiled a range of emotional conflicts and frustrations encountered in the clinical setting, from unrelenting pressures of limited time to feelings of helplessness in the face of bureaucratic legal obstacles. Their experiences were consistently recognizable and relatable. I felt heard, safe, and unload. But I wondered, were we alone in this unloininess? Did other trainees and clinicians have sufficient opportunities to unpack whatever internal tensions rattled their day, week, year? Could they name those tensions aloud, tease them apart with trusted others?
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What inspired the conversation about movement and medicine at the start of the episode?
0:00–4:24
2
How did Nina’s early ballet training shape her journey into medicine?
4:24–9:29
3
What is the Ten Tensions Project and why was it created?
9:29–22:47
4
How does “movement medicine” link physical self‑awareness to clinical practice?
22:47–43:49