Episode 038: Changing the World Outside the Clinic

Doctors enjoy, for better or worse, and elevated social status.  How can they use that high regard, as well as their knowledge, to change the world when they're not in the clinic?
In this episode, Alison Pletch, Zeynep Demir, Eric Wilson, and Alison Seline brainstorm some avenues from politics to journalism that docs explore when they have the itch to change the world.

Listen to Episode 038: Changing the World Outside the Clinic.

• Working Mom Arrested for Letting Her 9-Year-Old Play Alone at Park and This Widow's 4 Kids Were Taken After She Left Them Home Alone
• Israel-Gaza conflict: Doctor Mads Gilbert evokes conditions in a Gaza hospital
• A Day in the Life of a Successful Nurse Writer
• Four Ways Katie Couric Stacked The Deck Against Gardasil
• Agriculture and Health Policies Intro
• Physicians of the 113th Congress
• UIHC spinout seeks to reduce blindness

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Episode 037: Junk Science

Junk science dominates our thoughts in this episode, our first recording in front of a live studio audience (the Introduction to Medical Education at Iowa students who were kind enough to join us).  Cole Cheney, Alison Pletch, Keenan Laraway, and Eric Wilson talked about Dr. Mehmet Oz's recent troubles, including a New York M3 who asked the AMA and the NY Medical Association to step in.  Also, Cole drops some new research knowledge on us about why pot makes people paranoid (hint--having a researcher stand over you asking you if you're paranoid might be another known cause of paranoia), and The Egyptian Army says it has cured HIV and hepatitis, or so they claim, using a simple point and shoot device that detects AND purifies the blood.   But it needs a leeeeetle more testing...

• AIDS-curing device needs more testing, Egypt's army says
• Meet the medical student who wants to bring down Dr. Oz
• Physician Sounds Alarm On Illegal Drugs Sold On Amazon

Listen to Episode 037: Junk Science.
Listen to more great shows for medical students on The Vocalis Podcast Network.

Episode 032: Medicine and the Arts? They get along just fine.

This week, a bit of a departure from our usual format.  M2 Eric Wilson files a report on how medicine and the humanities, and specifically writing, are interacting with each other in ways that not long go would have seemed unlikely.  Medical schools either have or are beginning to embrace the humanities as a way to build empathy and reflect on how medicine is practiced.  Our own Carver College of Medicine, part of 'The Writing University', was naturally among the first to celebrate the fit between writing and medicine by establishing a Writing and Humanities Program for its students.  

Serena Fox, Louise Aronson, and Rachel Hammer

If you’re pre-med, a medical student, or a doc yourself, and you’ve been trying to reconcile a love for writing and art with a love for medicine and science, Eric’s interviews with poet and critical care doc Serena Fox, geriatrician and fiction writer Louise Aronson, and Mayo Clinic med student Rachel Hammer will give you some comfort.  As they each prepared to visit Iowa for the eighth annual Examined Life Conference, they talked about what writing offers them in their practice of medicine.

Listen to Episode 032: Medicine and the Arts? They get along just fine..

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Episode 031: Andrew Solomon, and Parents Raising Unexpectedly Different Children

The Carver College of Medicine's conference on the intersection's between the humanities and medicine was fortunate to book author and psychologist Andrew Solomon as its featured presenter this year. Solomon is an activist and philanthropist in LGBT rights, mental health, education and the arts.

Andrew Solomon, PhD

His latest book, Far From the Tree, is an exploration of families coping with the differences between the parents and their extraordinary children: deafness, dwarfism, Down syndrome, autism, schizophrenia, multiple severe disabilities, with children who are prodigies, who are conceived in rape, who become criminals, who are transgender.

These stories are courageous in their telling, as are the families who opened themselves up to Dr. Solomon over the eleven-year course of writing the book. Ultimately, they led Dr. Solomon to understand his own identity, and helped him with his decision to have his own children.

Students Rachel Press-Goosen, Eric Wilson, and Dwiju Kumar sat down with Dr. Solomon to discuss the book and find out more about the struggles and triumphs these families experienced.

Listen to Episode 031: Andrew Solomon, and Parents Raising Unexpectedly Different Children.

Listen to more great shows for medical students on The Vocalis Podcast Network.

Episode 027 - A real life Dr. House: Gurpreet Dhaliwal

All our listeners are familiar with the archetype of the master diagnostician, probably best represented in pop culture by Dr. Greg House, the irascible, pill-popping doctor of the eponymous television series.  Every week, House put together the clues and discarded the red herrings to come up with a diagnosis that only he could have thought of.  It’s a great trick, and there are people out there who can really do it.  Some even do it for their peers, at grand rounds that are akin to displays of medical prestidigitation.

But it’s about more than tricks.  For instance, in April of this year, a Hopkins review of 25 years of malpractice claim payouts found that diagnostic errors—not surgical mistakes or medication errors—made up the largest fraction of claims, the greatest harm to patients, and the highest total payouts: almost $39 billion during that time.  All this despite the common practice of defensive testing, in which tens of billions are spent each year on unnecessary tests in the hope of protecting doctors from the possibility of lawsuits.

Our guest on this episode is Dr. Gurpreet Dhaliwal, Associate Professor of Clinical Medicine at the University of California San Francisco School of Medicine.  Among Dr. Dhaliwal’s professional interests are clinical reasoning, diagnosis and diagnostic errors, and how physicians can improve in those areas.  He is also much less angry, and students Eric Wilson, Dwiju Kumar, and Alison Pletch found him a lot more fun to talk to, than Greg House.

Listen to Episode 027 - A real life Dr. House: Gurpreet Dhaliwal.