Merry Jennifer Markham, MD, didn’t realize it until COVID hit, but she had been relying on travel to help shield her from burnout.

Getting away several times a year had kept the Moffitt Cancer Center oncologist in Tampa, Florida, going. Then, in 2020, that option was suddenly gone.

As June 2021 rolled around, she and her husband were almost ready to leave on their first trip since the pandemic. But instead of excitement, she felt a looming disappointment. The planning and daydreaming part of her trip was over.

That night at dinner, she mused to her husband, “How amazing would it be to have a job to plan people’s travel?”

Then it dawned on her — that was a job.

Within 2 months, she started her limited liability company for a travel agency. 

“Here we are, four plus years later, and I am still doing it. I’m in love with it, and it doesn’t feel like work,” she told Medscape Medical News.

Markham is one of many oncologists filling their evenings and weekends with side gigs and part-time hustles. A 2025 Medscape survey reported that, on top of day-to-day patient care, a whopping 39% of doctors take on a side hustle. For oncologists, the side gig may be an extension of their cancer care, working as a medical consultant or an expert witness. Others, like Markham, branch out into something totally different, such as real estate, farming, or writing. These endeavors bring in some extra income — earning $32,000, on average — but perhaps more importantly, these gigs can provide opportunities for creativity, fun, and stress relief.

Although these gigs often mean packing even more into a single day, the four doctors Medscape Medical News spoke to found relief and pleasure in their side hustles.

For Markham, planning trips for other people — even though she wasn’t doing the actual traveling — proved to be a release valve of sorts. The joy and anticipation of travel were a welcome balance to the sobering elements of cancer care. Time spent daydreaming and planning trips for others even made the clinic work more enjoyable. 

“As soon as I got this thing started, that’s when I realized I was kind of burned out,” Markham recalled. With this new gig, “I was feeding a part of my brain I didn’t know needed to be fed.” 

At first, Markham was just planning trips for her friends and colleagues. She’d come home from a day in the clinic and put together a vacation to South Africa or the South of France. 

But then things took off. Reviews of her business spread by word of mouth, and pretty soon she had a swelling customer base of doctors and other busy professionals who wanted to travel but didn’t have the time — or desire — to plan it all out. 

Markman had to expand her business. “The only way I could maintain serving our travel clients was to hire a team,” she said. And today, the side-gig revenue comfortably pays for Markham’s personal travels.

In many ways, Markham’s two jobs seem like total opposites, but they overlap in one important way: a reminder to live life to the fullest.

Because of oncology, “I am so aware of how limited our time is,” she said. Patients regularly turn up in her exam room 6 months after they retire, and cancer cuts their long-held travel plans short.

For Markman, it makes perfect sense for an oncologist to plan exciting vacations. “It ties into that urgency of making memories while you can,” she said. 

The Call of the Stage

Pallav Mehta, MD, sees a similar through-line from his clinic work at MD Anderson Cancer Center at Cooper, Meadowbrook, Pennsylvania, to his side hustle. 

The 51-year-old breast cancer specialist spends some of his late-night hours reviewing cases as an expert medical witness. He pores over thousands of pages of records for every case, typically breast cancer-related, and leverages his expertise to help defense and plaintiff attorneys understand what happened — and sometimes what should have happened. 

Mehta started the expert witness gig for the extra income, but about a year after he began working cases, he did his first deposition and trial. That was a game changer.

“It was an adrenaline rush,” he told Medscape Medical News. “The patient’s family is there. They are staring at you. The 12 jury members are staring at you,” he said. “There’s this feeling of being on an elevated stage.”

The stage has always been a draw for Mehta. He has been writing jokes for his children and toying with a comedy bit for nearly 20 years. But it wasn’t until he saw his children start performing that he recognized the same draw in himself.

Even “as an oncologist, when you open the door [to a patient room], you’re on stage,” he said. “When you walk in, they are watching your face, staring at your expression. There’s a performative aspect to it — in a truthful way — but still a performance.”

His medical-legal work offered a seamless way to transition his clinical expertise to a bigger stage. Each time he takes the stand, he relies on a skill set refined by decades of oncology work.

Although oncology-focused, the legal work still offers a departure from the intensity of the clinic. Over the years, Mehta began seeing a growing volume of patients. These patients were getting more treatments and experiencing greater side effects. He eventually became one of the busiest breast oncologists in the MD Anderson network.

The heaviness and volume of it all began to weigh on Mehta, and he felt a growing sense of agitation and depersonalization in the clinic and at home. He knew it was time to take a step back.

In early 2023, Mehta added a second side gig that allowed him to move to part-time clinic work. He joined a startup called Reimagine Care as the medical director. The startup, which offers patients artificial intelligence-based virtual support, digital monitoring, and 24/7 access to oncology experts, allowed him to help patients with cancer outside the bustle of daily care, which was a welcome reprieve. “It just helps me so much to enjoy my patient care.”

Writing a New Chapter

Tiffany Troso-Sandoval, MD, an oncologist specializing in breast and gynecologic cancers, was doing 3-5 second opinions a week at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. For nearly every patient, she was shocked at how little they understood about their condition and care plan.

“I observed thousands and thousands of women not understanding what was going on, which caused extreme overwhelm and anxiety and distrust,” Troso-Sandoval said. 

In 2023, she decided she needed to reach more than one patient at a time. She started writing her first book — a complete blueprint of the cancer process, educating the reader about every test and step from diagnosis to treatment. 

Then, in 2024, her own health started creating obstacles. 

A genetic eye condition made her clinic work — and sometimes 18 hours a day on a computer screen — untenable. She made the choice to retire from Memorial Sloan Kettering after 25 years and go all in on patient education.

Troso-Sandoval’s side hustles soon became her main jobs.

She built an educational module to help patients understand their diagnosis, their tests, and their procedures. And she started a virtual second-opinion company, Second Look Oncology, where she spends 90 minutes with patients to help them understand every scan, pathology test, and diagnosis.

Juggling two businesses and multiple writing projects offers her autonomy and diversity she didn’t have in the clinic. But these new ventures also help her stay connected to the field. 

“I’m not leaving oncology,” she said. But she is using her clinical skillset to creatively fill a chasm she’s been passionate about for a long time.

Care on the Range

For Monique Gary, MD, her side hustle arose from her patient care. The Pennsylvania-based breast surgical oncologist kept getting similar questions from patients about food, lifestyle, and natural remedies: What should I be eating? What can I do to fight this naturally?

But she couldn’t answer them.

“The separation between medicine and nature is palpable to patients,” Gary said. In 2018, at a time when doctors were unable to engage and answer questions about integrative therapies and diet, “I really set out to learn and to create a space to learn.”

That space was Still Rise Farms — a 40-acre farm Gary bought in 2020 that serves as a wellness destination for people battling cancer.

Gary and her staff offer quarterly workshops, yoga, fishing, meditation, cooking demonstrations, gardening, and therapy-related natural discussions. There’s chair yoga for the patients who aren’t able to stand for the whole class, and waist-high raised gardening beds so patients don’t have to bend over so far. There’s even a community-supported agriculture program to help with food insecurity among patients with cancer.

“Having a farm is not for the faint of heart,” Gary said. 

The Philadelphia-born doctor had no experience with tractors, pond algae, or agriculture of any kind. The learning curve has been huge, and at times, managing a fully functioning farm on top of surgical oncology has been “a heavy lift.”

But as stressful as it can be, “it provides me with great satisfaction,” Gary said.

Still Rise Farms is a way for her to offer more than surgery, a way to support patients emotionally and spiritually, and restore their trust. “Because people have lost so much trust in healthcare providers,” she said. “And some of that has to do with our attitudes and our approach to the questions they are asking.”

On the farm, Gary embraces wellness options that can help sustain patients through their medical treatment and even help them stay on treatments that may have challenging side effects.

“I think it does help patients understand that [they] can continue on this medication,” Gary said. Even if it’s causing joint pain or insomnia, there are options to deal with those side effects that don’t involve taking another pill.

At the end of the day, it’s that kind of patient empowerment she’s after. Seeing the same patients that start out sleepless and afraid feel seen, equipped, and empowered, “That’s what makes it worth it; that is a gift to me that I get to watch it,” she said.