Nancy Pando, LICSW

Board Member
Canton, MA

My role as Producer of The Vanishing Oath was a leap into the wide unknown for me. I am a social worker and specialize in the “hard-wiring” of our personalities. As Director of Social Work at a major Boston Hospital, I thought I knew all parts to the whole of medicine. That is, until one day when a young doctor turned to me and said, “I (expletive deleted) hate being a doctor.” From that moment forward, I had to understand why. The answers would unfold in a documentary. By aiming the lens into the darkness that lies behind the white curtain, the broken and fragmented parts of medicine were exposed. It is a stark truth that has left me forever changed.

To practice medicine is to feel isolated in sterile, windowless rooms. Not until I attended the groundbreaking 2011 & 2012 Osler Symposia did I observe the walls of isolation come crashing down. Bearing witness to the impact on physicians and nurses to this phenomenon is likened to Dorothy landing in Oz: The world went from black and white to Technicolor. Every day, countless physicians are successfully reconfiguring their lives. In terms of hope and a life yet unimagined, there’s no better place to start than here and now.