Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 52:07 — 71.6MB)
Subscribe: Spotify | RSS | More
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.
Buy Our Merch and Give At The Same Time
We Want to Hear From You
Call us at 347-SHORTCT anytime, visit our Facebook group, or email theshortcoats@gmail.com. Do all three.
A question from listener Blake–do we use Anki or Brainscape for studying–led to a discussion of the various tools and techniques Aline Sandouk (MD/PhD student), Nick Lind, Madeline Cusimano, and Mason LaMarche (all M2s) use to shove medical knowledge into their brains.
Short Coat Scribbleson Wordsonpaper (not his real name) wrote a paper for one of his classes, and was told it’d be worth putting it out there for publication. But where, and how? So we asked Writing and Humanities Program Director (and SCP exec producer) Cate Dicharry to give some guidance. Scribbleson’s second question, about the lifestyle factors that medical students weigh when making a specialty choice, was a great one for co-hosts Mackenzie Walhof, Miranda Schene, and Abby Fyfe to dig into.
Two questions this week from Short Coats! Listener Luis wrote in to ask what books co-hosts Hillary O’Brien, Kylie Miller, Emma Barr and newbie Sahaana Arumugam consulted to find their paths. And Mia wrote to