Welcome to the My Buddy Green podcast. I'm Jason Wackeb, founder and co-CEO of My Buddy Green,

and your host. Dr. Steven Treesyak is a physician scientist, professor and share medicine at

Cooper Medical School of Rowan University, the Chief of Medicine at Cooper University Health Care,

and a National Institutes of Health NIH funded clinical researcher with more than 100 publications

in the scientific literature. And today, we're here to chat about a book I'm very excited about,

Wonder Drug. Seven scientifically proven ways that serving others is the best medicine for yourself.

Steven Wackeb. Jason, thanks so much for the invitation to be here. Let's start with the why

behind the book. You're a pretty serious person in terms of what you do in your day-to-day,

being a chief medicine. You're putting out research papers, and I wouldn't have expected a book

about the power of serving others to give in your credentials and what you do. So let's start there.

What inspired you to write this book? Dr. Steven Treesyak. Sure. So for the first 15 years of my

research career, I was studying resuscitation science. I'm an intensivist, a specialist in intensive

care medicine, which has been a really interesting job over the last couple years, to say the least.

And everything was going as planned with the research career. We were publishing in some of the

best journals, getting research grants to support our work. And then I got hit by something that

many people have been hit by, and the term is burnout, which is a bonafide. There are now

diagnostic criteria in the DSM manual for burnout. And it's a syndrome of emotional exhaustion,

depersonalization, so difficulty making a personal connection, but also this overwhelming

feeling that you're not really making a difference. And burnout has been studied in healthcare

workers. That's the population that's been studied in, but I want to be crystal clear with your

listeners and viewers that you don't have to be a healthcare worker to be burned out, especially

after two years of a pandemic. That just happens to be the people in which it's been studied

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