Tag Archives: patient stories

The Unexpected Power of Student Doctors

Audio May 22, 2025 Dave Etler

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:10:07 — 96.6MB)

Clinical students are sometimes the only ones who have time to listen

In the clinic, med students can feel like bystanders, but they can make all the difference for patients. M3 Jeff Goddard, M3 Tracy Chen, M2 Alex Nigg, and M4 Matt Engelken recount stories of the patients that stuck with them—some painful, some beautiful, and some just plain awkward. From OB-GYN to peds to the ER, they share how student doctors—who can often feel like tagalongs—can often be the ones offering emotional support, catching critical miscommunications, or just being the one person with time to care. We reflect on the pressure to look competent, the sting of lukewarm evaluations, and how one med student realized a patient wasn’t constipated—just heartbroken.

Also in this episode: talking to dying patients, babies are scary, and what not to say when to overwhelmed family.

A med student comforts a patient. Concerned family are dimly seen in the background. Text: "No One Else Noticed:

Episode credits:

Producer: Dave Etler
Co-hosts: Matt Engelken, M4; Jeff Goddard, M3; Tracy Chen, M3; Alex Nigg, M2

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Short Coat Podcast

Hacks to Build Patient Rapport In An Instant

Audio May 26, 2022 Dave Etler

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 58:31 — 53.6MB)

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How medical students learn to start off patient interactions on the right foot

Short Coat Listener Josh wrote in to share some hacks he uses to get grumpy patients on his side the moment he walks into the exam room.
Co-hosts Jessica, Aline, Hannah, and Riley share their own techniques on managing those first few seconds of the patient visit.
Plus, many tangents along those lines, such as when not to use ‘quips’ and humor with patients and bosses.

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Short Coat Podcast

Your patients’ stories will sustain you in your darkest hours (bonus ft. Dr. John Mrachek)

Audio December 17, 2019 Dave Etler

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 52:07 — 71.6MB)

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On this bonus episode of The Short Coat, we hear from Dr. John Mrachek, an anesthesiologist of 17 years who reached out to us at Iowa because he’d long felt a wedge being driven between doctors and their patients. He said that wedge, made of mouse clicks, political meddling, insurance middlemen, patient satisfaction surveys, and annoying electronic health records–was disconnecting physicians from their purpose. And that missing sense of purpose, he fears, is leading them to burn out. It’s contributing to a frightening problem: physician suicide. Modern medicine, he says, is in peril.

Among the solutions, Dr. Mrachek feels, is to encourage physicians and students to take inventory of their most memorable patient stories. He argues that this will return to them that lost connection to their work. This talk, given to our first- and second-year medical students and the first he’d given on the topic, is the the beginning of his mission to spread that idea.

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