Tag Archives: covid-19

MUSICIANS TAKE A STAND ON SPOTIFY/ROGAN. WILL that FIGHT HEALTH MISINFO?

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Standing up against health misinformation is great, but will it help people understand?

TL;DR

  • Folk rock god Neil Young and others have removed their music from Spotify, which hosts Joe Rogan’s controversial podcast over his COVID and vaccine discussions with deniers.
  • Does that actually accomplish anything, or is it too late to win over the hesitant?
  • We play Kiss, Marry, Kill: Medical Specialties Edition.
reject photo

Some very famous musicians have told their labels to pull their catalogs from Spotify over it’s hosting of Joe Rogan’s podcast, which often includes discussions with vaccine and COVID deniers. This has renewed the discussion over Internet media’s role in shaping public discourse on important life-and-death topics. But M2 Eric Boeshart, M1 Mallory Kallish, M3 Ananya Munjal, and MD/PhD student Riley Behan-Bush aren’t convinced that it’ll persuade many to adopt a more expert-influenced approach to their health. (Note: we discussed this prior to Rogan’s response, in which he promised to include more experts on his show).

The crew also plays a game of Kiss, Marry, Kill: Medical Specialties edition.

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How’d we do on this week’s show? Did we miss anything in our conversation? Did we anger you? Did we make you smile? Call us at 347-SHORTCT anytime  or email theshortcoats@gmail.com.  It’s always a pleasure to hear from you!

Continue reading MUSICIANS TAKE A STAND ON SPOTIFY/ROGAN. WILL that FIGHT HEALTH MISINFO?

Did Match Day Implode?

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How did COVID affect the 2021 Match?

This week’s sponsor, Panacea Financial (Member FDIC) is giving away $500 to five students participating in the 2021 Match. Check it out!

Match Week is huge for senior medical students. It’s the week they find out if they will continue their training (yikes!), and where in the country they will go to complete it…and this year’s match was even more-than-usually anxiety provoking due to COVID.

Were our fears–of large numbers of unmatched applicants, programs with many unfilled positions, and students unfairly penalized by virtual interviews–realized? We try to figure it out with the stats available to us just an hour before recording.

This Week in Medical News

Some Grand Rapids, Michigan residents were very bad on Instagram. Hey, future and current students–keep other peoples resected organs off social media, and while you’re at it, you really aren’t supposed to take pictures in the OR without consent. M’kay?

We Want to Hear From You

How’d we do on this week’s show? Did we miss anything in our conversation? Did we anger you? Did we make you smile? Call us at 347-SHORTCT anytime  or email theshortcoats@gmail.com.  It’s always a pleasure to hear from you!

Vaccine Fever

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Happy Holidays!

celebrate photo

As we recorded this show, vaccine doses were beginning to spread across the world–well, across the rich countries of the world, anyway. The poorer countries were left with the WHO’s risky donation-funded program to distribute doses, causing concern that the program might just collapse because some countries we could mention decided not to contribute. We’re looking at you, United States of America and China.

We discuss ‘the right to be forgotten,’ a right which many in the USA and elsewhere might not meaningfully have. And Dave pretends to be a medical educator with a pop quiz on historical medical practices.

We Want to Hear From You

How’d we do on this week’s show? Did we miss anything in our conversation? Did we anger you? Did we make you smile? Call us at 347-SHORTCT anytime  or email theshortcoats@gmail.com.  It’s always a pleasure to hear from you!

Recess Rehash: When Doctors Do Harm ft. Danielle Ofri, MD

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Hippocrates set a high bar.

A portrait of Dr. Danielle Ofri, Author of When We Do Harm: A Doctor Confronts Medical Error

[Hope your Thanksgiving was excellent, safe, and happy! We didn’t record anything this week, so here’s a rerun for you.]

Dr. Danielle Ofri–NYU professor of medicine, Bellevue Hospital internist, and author of great renown–joined us this time to talk about her new book, When We Do Harm: A Doctor Confronts Medical Error.  Examining medical errors is a something all good physicians do–sometimes on a stage in front of their colleagues but often surreptitiously. However, “mistakes were made” simply isn’t acceptable to most patients and lawyers. Meanwhile, the shame felt by practitioners who make mistakes is not only unhelpful but hinders their development and can contribute to burnout and depression.   Because of the consequences of shame are so dire, Dr. Ofri argues in her book that confronting mistakes in a humane, understanding, and open fashion is vital. 

Not many years ago, a headline grabbed her attention:  medical errors are the third-leading cause of death in the United States.  How can that be? she wondered.  If people were dying at that rate, wouldn’t physicians have noticed this earlier?  Of course, it turns out that the story of medical error is much more complicated than that headline would lead one to believe, and set Dr. Ofri on the path to this latest book.  Join MD/PhD student Aline Sandouk, M4 Marisa Evers, M2 Jessica De Haan, and M4 Anne Nora for this discussion on the sources of error, the causes, and the ways to understand and learn from the inevitable.

We also discuss her and her colleagues’ experiences fighting COVID-19 in New York City and learning about the disease in real time.

We Want to Hear From You

How’d we do on this week’s show? Did we miss anything in our conversation? Did we anger you? Did we make you smile? Call us at 347-SHORTCT anytime  or email theshortcoats@gmail.com.  It’s always a pleasure to hear from you!

To Leave or Not To Leave

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Should Jenna broaden her horizons by moving away for medical school?

[This episode is sponsored by Panacea Financial, a Division of Sonabank, Member FDIC. Please support our sponsor by visiting https://panaceafinancial.com/]

Listener Jenna got into Carver College of Medicine! But she’s worried–should she go to a new place to study medicine instead, or should she stay in comfy, cozy Iowa City where she’s been the last few years? Sit tight, Jenna, because M1 Lola Lozano (Texas), M1 Albert Pedroza (Nebraska), MD/PhD student Aline Sandouk (lots of places) and M1 Nicole Hines (Iowa) are here to look at the options with you!

Bun Bun writes in to complain about what they saw as our unfair treatment of Ivy League schools…although, if they’d listened verrrrry carefully, they’d see that’s not something we actually did.

Dave loses his cool about the pandemic complainers. Yes, it’s frustrating to have to stay home and avoid family over the holidays. But this is war.

And yet…he immediately proves the point by forgetting you can’t play the Whisper Challenge without a mask on. So the crew braces themselves against the disappointment–damn you, COVID!–and soldier on. Brave podcasters, all.

We Want to Hear From You

How’d we do on this week’s show? Did we miss anything in our conversation? Did we anger you? Did we make you smile? Call us at 347-SHORTCT anytime  or email theshortcoats@gmail.com.  It’s always a pleasure to hear from you!

“Preference Signaling” –the Future of Applications?

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Preference Signaling Tokens may be a way to combat over-applying for residencies, but the schemes have a ways to go yet before they’re ready for prime time.

Dear Residency Program: I love you. Do you love me? Check YES or NO!!!

Dave noticed something he’d never heard of before: a company offering ‘tokens’ (for a fee) that could be used by residency program applicants to signal their love for particular programs.  The general idea is to combat the common applicant strategy of applying to as many residency programs as possible to be sure  the applicant gets a match.  While this strategy is quite reasonable from the individual applicant’s perspective, it causes problems for both programs and the general body of applicants because those extra applications flood programs with candidates that may not actually be interested. 

Then he found out that the Otolaryngology Program
Directors Organization will be doing something similar, and Aline Sandouk, Eric Boeshart, Emma Barr, and Nicole Lacina explore a analysis of who wins and who looses in such a scheme.  

Plus Dave creates an educational game to help students plan how they’ll react to common odd situations.  And by educational, he clearly meant “educational.”

We Want to Hear From You

Do you think Preference Signalling is a good idea? What if medical schools adopts the idea?  Did we miss anything in our conversation? Did we anger you? Did we make you smile? Call us at 347-SHORTCT anytime  or email theshortcoats@gmail.com.  It’s always a kick to hear from you!

A COVID Puzzle in a Rural Iowa Community

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Why was the Hispanic population in Clarion, Iowa seeing so many more infections?

Wright County Courthouse, Clarion, Iowa. Photo by Brandonrush (Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication)

Dr. Michael McLoughlin, internist at Clarion Clinic, was puzzled. Why were 95% of the patients who showed up with novel coronavirus infections Hispanic? And what interventions would best help his community?

Meanwhile, M2 Abby Walling was looking for a summer project centering on health disparities after her overseas global health experience was cancelled.

Global Health Programs Director Robin Paetzold knew them both (Dr. McLoughlin graduated from CCOM in 2013), and helped get them together to find answers and develop solutions. M4 Sophie Williams-Perez, M2 Ananya Munjal, and M4 Marisa Evers sat down to talk to Abby and Dr. McLoughlin to discuss what they found.

As a bonus, Dr. McLoughlin discusses his life as a rural medicine practitioner in his town of 3,000.

We Want to Hear From You

How’d we do on this week’s show? Did we miss anything in our conversation? Did we anger you? Did we make you smile? Call us at 347-SHORTCT anytime  or email theshortcoats@gmail.com.  It’s always a pleasure to hear from you!

When Doctors Do Harm ft. Danielle Ofri, MD

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Hippocrates set a high bar.

A portrait of Dr. Danielle Ofri, Author of When We Do Harm: A Doctor Confronts Medical Error

Dr. Danielle Ofri–NYU professor of medicine, Bellevue Hospital internist, and author of great renown–joined us this time to talk about her new book, When We Do Harm: A Doctor Confronts Medical Error.  Examining medical errors is a something all good physicians do–sometimes on a stage in front of their colleagues but often surreptitiously. However, “mistakes were made” simply isn’t acceptable to most patients and lawyers. Meanwhile, the shame felt by practitioners who make mistakes is not only unhelpful but hinders their development and can contribute to burnout and depression.   Because of the consequences of shame are so dire, Dr. Ofri argues in her book that confronting mistakes in a humane, understanding, and open fashion is vital. 

Not many years ago, a headline grabbed her attention:  medical errors are the third-leading cause of death in the United States.  How can that be? she wondered.  If people were dying at that rate, wouldn’t physicians have noticed this earlier?  Of course, it turns out that the story of medical error is much more complicated than that headline would lead one to believe, and set Dr. Ofri on the path to this latest book.  Join MD/PhD student Aline Sandouk, M4 Marisa Evers, M2 Jessica De Haan, and M4 Anne Nora for this discussion on the sources of error, the causes, and the ways to understand and learn from the inevitable.

We also discuss her and her colleagues’ experiences fighting COVID-19 in New York City and learning about the disease in real time.

We Want to Hear From You

How’d we do on this week’s show? Did we miss anything in our conversation? Did we anger you? Did we make you smile? Call us at 347-SHORTCT anytime  or email theshortcoats@gmail.com.  It’s always a pleasure to hear from you!

Recess Rehash: Is Academic Medicine Right For You?

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Photo by simpleinsomnia

[SCP has been given a week off–thanks, pandemic/economic collapse!  We’ll be back next week, but here’s a pre-pandemic rerun to enjoy.]

Academic medicine–in which a physician works at a university and may have research and/or teaching duties in addition to patient care–is but one of the fulfilling options available to medical students.  What’s that lifestyle like?  That’s the question an anonymous listener (who we’ll call Dr. Piledhigh Erandeeper) wanted our help answering. Fortunately we have Miranda Schene and Sahaana Arumugam (both in our Medical Scientist Training Program, so they know a thing or two about academic medicine) on hand to tell us–including co-hosts M1 Brandon Bacalzo and M2 Mason LaMarche–what they know about this career option.

Plus Dave puts his co-hosts through a game of Doctor Forehead, featuring some of the more interesting oddball medical stories he ran across prepping for this week’s show (see the next section for those links).

This Week in Medical News

The President’s new budget could be another nail in the coffin for the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program.  Mayo applicants get acceptance letters that the institution later had to rescind, causing one of the disgruntled victims to create a crowdfunding campaign.  And if you’re in the market for “global elite” DNA, then…well, you’ve already missed your chance.  And from our game:

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Is there a MD career niche you want to know more about? Call us at 347-SHORTCT anytime, or email theshortcoats@gmail.com.

Continue reading Recess Rehash: Is Academic Medicine Right For You?

AAMC ‘s VITA interview tool…is it Really Vital?

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Listener Soma let us know that the AAMC has released an interview app for medical schools to collect videos of applicants answers to some standard questions. Their website says the tool addresses the needs expressed by its member schools during the upcoming interview season. Soma wondered, what do we think?

Of course, that no matter what we think, it seems like applicants will probably have to do it anyway. But M2s Mariam Mansour, Greta Becker, Kayla Kruse and Nikitha Pothireddy are on hand to consider. Hmm…what DO we think of a new item for applicants to put on their to-do list in order to apply to medical school? What DO we think of a set of what appear to be screening questions that could be asked in some other interview format, such as a live virtual interview? What DO we think of a tool which seems to add another item to med schools’ to-do list? What DO we think of a tool which seems at a glance to be similar to another tool that was tried and cancelled for Emergency Medicine residency applications due to lack of interest from programs and applicants?

Also, in light of a surge of COVID-19 cases that seem to be driven by young people eager to discard social distancing and masks to hang out with their buds in bars, we discuss the fairness of asking a screening question during interviews about whether the applicant has been doing the right thing to protect others.

This Week in Medical News

The first person to be treated for sickle cell disease with CRISPR in the US has gotten great news. On the other hand, investigators using fMRI to look at brain function have gotten some bad news.

We Want to Hear From You

Obviously, our discussion on questioning applicants on their bar-hopping habits might have other viewpoints we didn’t cover. What did we miss? Call us at 347-SHORTCT anytime or email theshortcoats@gmail.com.