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Short Coat Podcast

Questions Abound.

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Don’t Panic, but It’s Interview Season!

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Photo by David Blackwell.

Interview season begins soon, which means it’s time to worry about the weird questions you’ll be asked during med school interviews.  Kayla joined our new Facebook Group, The Short Coat Student Lounge, and asked what strange or difficult questions Lisa Wehr, Liza Mann, Irisa Mahaparn, and new co-host Mackenzie Walhof had been asked when it was their turn.  Kayla’s question, of course, inspires Dave to have them try to play a game of Questions, at which all the co-hosts fail miserably.

This Week in Medical News

The FDA announced that it’s seeking public comment on plans to reduce nicotine in cigarettes to sub-addictive levels.  Interesting idea…but we have questions.   Google is trying to give US mobile users who search for info about depression a link to a screening tool for the disease…but we have questions.  One thing we don’t question: our old friend Martin Shkreli’s securities fraud trial jury selection transcripts were released, and let’s just say the jury of his peers don’t give a rat’s butt about what he’s actually on trial for…they hate him for the drug thing.

We want to hear from you.

What questions do you have for us?  We’d love to hear your thoughts.  Call us at 347-SHORTCT any time, visit our Facbook group, and email theshortcoats@gmail.com.

Continue reading Questions Abound. →

Short Coat Podcast

Open on Applications about New-Found Sobriety?

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Should a Medical School Applicant Open Up About a Successful Journey to Sobriety?

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Photo by _BuBBy_

Our recent episode on mental illness in medical school generated some listener feedback.  K wrote to say thanks for the honest discussion (our pleasure!), and wondered how open she should be on her medical school application about her journey to sobriety and how it led her to find a love for community service.  Dave’s six (!) co-hosts this week–Kalyn Campbell, Kylie Miller, Levi Endelman, Irene Morcuende, Kaci McCleary, and Laura Quast–agree that it’s a tough question with two answers…the one we’d like to be able to give, and the perhaps more realistic one that acknowledges human nature.

Listener Erica called in wondering how students cope with the challenges of medical school and residency, especially in the context of a mental illness.  And Terel dropped us a line to ask the differences between a hospitalist and an internist.

This Week in Medical News

Groundbreaking research from the Journal of the National Cancer Institute shows that alternative medicine is a crappy option for cancer patients‘ survival rates…except for prostate cancer.  And a Chinese startup publishes a study in which CRISPR knocks out pig PERVs.  That’s Porcine Endogenous Retroviruses, silly, and it means if you need an organ transplant one day, you might have to thank a pig for that heart.

We want to hear from you.

Are you ready for your future pig heart?  Who would win in an alpha-gal fight, Kylie or Kalyn? We’d love to hear your thoughts.  Call us at 347-SHORTCT any time, and email theshortcoats@gmail.com.

Continue reading Open on Applications about New-Found Sobriety? →

Short Coat Podcast

Future Summer Health Professionals, Revisited

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CCOM’s Summer Program for Future Health Professionals Was a Success.

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Photo by Ryan Somma

While Dave was on vacation, Teneme Konne got together with some folks we talked to back in July, pre-health students in UI’s Summer Health Professions Education Program (SHPEP), a program that offers minority students and others access to mentorship and insight into future health careers. Yasmine Rose, Kristine Pham, Gil Osuna-Leon and Martin Rosenfeld came back, along with program administrator Nicole Keating, and shared with us the progress they made, what they learned, and where they’re going to take their newfound confidence in their health career choices.  Also, are Iowans really the rudest drivers?  And Yasmine is passionate about her rant on the hypocrisy of  environmentalists that eat meat.

In Medical News…

Last year, the United Nations admitted–after five years of denials–that it did play a role in Haiti’s cholera outbreak following the 2010 earthquake there.  Epidemiologists believe that the outbreak originated in a UN peacekeeping camp with poor sanitation,  and probably from a UN soldier who’d brought the disease from Nepal.  The UN has a lot at stake here, and the gang looks at the situation and what they feel the UN has as its responsibilities and risks in dealing with an outbreak that has sickened 770,000 Haitians and killed 9,200.

We want to hear from you.

Continue reading Future Summer Health Professionals, Revisited →

Short Coat Podcast

Crushing It with Mental Illness During Med School

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[We’re re-releasing this episode because when it was first posted the file was screwed up.  Enjoy!]

Much like America, doctors are afraid of mental illness.

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Photo by darcyadelaide

Physicians are no better than the rest of us at dealing with mental illness, even as they work valiantly to get their patients to recognize and get treatment for their conditions. As society becomes more open about ‘mood disorders,’  it is still common for MDs to reject treatment for depression, substance abuse disorders, anxiety, and more…and physicians and medical students are literally killing themselves–America loses 300 to 400 doctors every year to suicide.  Our co-hosts this week, Zeynep Demir, Innie Kim, Jason Lewis, and Kaci McCleary all have experienced their own disorders, and have formed a CCOM chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness.  Still in it’s infancy, they’ll be working to destigmatize mental illness among physicians, residents, and medical students in the hope that those who suffer can be saved and become what they always wanted to be: effective, compassionate, and healthy physicians.

We want to hear from you.

Do you suffer from a mental illness, and worry about your future as a physician? We’d love to hear your story, anonymously if that’s what you’d prefer.  Call us at 347-SHORTCT any time, and email theshortcoats@gmail.com.

Continue reading Crushing It with Mental Illness During Med School →

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Recess Rehash: Medical School Secondary Applications: What Do They Want?

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How to Think About Medical School Secondary Applications

Photo of a cosplayer's big bird costume
Good lord, she wore him out. Photo by Doug Kline

A listener wants to know more about how best to approach medical school secondary applications.  Given the the turnaround time often recommended (a week), how important are they? Do they need to be as well crafted as your personal statement?  What do schools get out of them?  And are they just a way for schools to extract more money from applicants?  We asked our medical school’s admissions staff for answers to these questions so you can get on with crafting your best possible application.  And JC writes in to say nice things, including that he wants to start his own show when he matriculates this fall.  Go, JC, GO!

This week in science and medicine news

One major destination for patients’ medical dollars is the emergency room visit.  One recent study asks what do docs know about the costs of caring for some common complaints they see in the ER?  Turns out, not much…but when doctors are in charge of knowing the costs of care, is the patient really helped?

Meanwhile, a startup in (where else) California wants to charge $8000 to give old people young blood, because we need more dystopian sci-fi concepts.

And a discussion on the problems people can experience surrounding orgasms reveals something about Kylie that would have made Jim Henson blush.

We want to hear from you

We LOVE hearing from you, and we really try to  answer your questions.  If you have something to say or a question to ask, call us at 347-SHORTCT any time, and email theshortcoats@gmail.com.

Continue reading Recess Rehash: Medical School Secondary Applications: What Do They Want? →

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Recess Rehash: You can buy that on Amazon?

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[Dave’s on vacation, so enjoy this re-run while he eats seafood and catches some rays on the beach]

All work and no play…is not what we do.

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If you’re buying this on the internet, you have a job planning for disasters, or there is something wrong with you. There are no in-betweens. Photo by CocteauBoy

Sometimes you’re having so much fun that the time flies by and you forget that you have other important things to do.  That’s what happened on this week’s show, in which Dave brings Aditi Patel, Aline Sandouk, Kylie Miller and Irene Morcuende along for a trip through the medical supplies section of Amazon.  Can they guess what the medical device is based on the reviews alone?

This week in science and medicine news

We did get to talk about one bit of medical news, pointed out to us on twitter by AJtha808Scientist: the fact that Iowa made national news by forcing the closure of 1/4 of its Planned Parenthood clinics.  Thanks for the tip!

We want to hear from you

We also heard from Hannah of Jackson Hole, Wyoming.  She wrote in to let us know why, according to the study we discussed in our last show about longevity in US counties, her beautiful corner of the country is so damn healthy.  Spoiler: it doesn’t involve sitting on the couch and eating chips like Dave was hoping.  Listeners, share your suggestions with us each week.  Call us at 347-SHORTCT any time, and email theshortcoats@gmail.com.

Continue reading Recess Rehash: You can buy that on Amazon? →

Short Coat Podcast

Sacrifice It All to be A Med Student? Don’t Do It!

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Med School Requires Sacrifice…but not of everything.

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Photo by Andrew Turner

Listener Arman  is starting school this fall, and is feeling something many do at the start of this journey: that in order to succeed, he’ll have to do nothing but study.  Will he’ll have to sacrifice his outside interests to succeed? Kylie Miller, Matt Wilson, Teneme Konne and Patrick Brau admit that medical students love to talk about how hard it is and how much time they give to their new lives.  To be sure, sacrifice is a part of learning to be a doctor.  But they do have reassuring words for those who worry their identities are about to be ransacked.  Plus, Yahoo! Answers leave us with more questions than we started with…like, did the fruit fly regain consciousness?

This Week’s Medical News…

We also discuss a study from Sweden that looks at whether drones can deliver life-saving automatic emergency defibrillators to heart attack victims faster than EMS can get to them.  And we explore the power of names to get you to eat your vegetables.

We want to hear from you.

If you have fears to be assuaged, and think we are the best people to do so, give us a call! Call us at 347-SHORTCT any time, and email theshortcoats@gmail.com.

Continue reading Sacrifice It All to be A Med Student? Don’t Do It! →

Short Coat Podcast

Harry Potter and the Suddenly Bald Litigant

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What do you do when you’re pulled in too many directions?

Yer a wizard, ‘arry!

The world of work, and medical school, is often about adjusting for a number of “top” priorities.   Dave’s been having one of those weeks where his work is pulling him in several directions at once, and thought to ask his co-hosts Erin Pasaski, Patrick Brau, Elizabeth Shirazi, and Kaci McCleary what techniques they use when they, inevitably, find themselves struggling to manage all of the important tasks med school throws at them.

Also, since the CCOM Writing and Humanities Program exists to bring art into the lives of busy med students, Dave went out and bought playdough so his co-hosts could flex their sculpting skills on common patient complaints.  Visit our Facebook page for the gallery!

This Week’s Medical News…

Speaking of priorities, Ars Technica takes note of the FDA’s somewhat lackadaisical interest in surveilling the cosmetics and hair care industry, and why that should probably change.  Will flu shots (and other vaccination injections) soon be replaced by a tiny bed of nails?  And Dave warns medical students not to study with their phones in the same room.

We want to hear from you.

If you have something to say or a question to ask, and think we are the best people to do so, who are we to question your judgement? Call us at 347-SHORTCT any time, and email theshortcoats@gmail.com.

Continue reading Harry Potter and the Suddenly Bald Litigant →

Short Coat Podcast

Medical Education’s Underrepresented Minorities Challenge

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Most Med Schools Prize Minorities…but they can be hard to find.

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Photo by creativedc

This week, Teneme Konne introduced Dave to some students participating in the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation/AAMC venture, the Summer Health Professions Education Program, which has as it’s aim to strengthen the academic proficiency and career development of minorities and prepare them to apply, matriculate, and succeed in healthcare professional education.  Yasmine Rose, Kristine Pham, Gil Osuna-Leon and Martin Rosenfeld talk about how students of ethnicities underrepresented in medicine need this kind of mentorship from people who have faced, fought, and vanquished the same challenges they’ll face on their path to medical school.

This Week’s Medical News

Of particular relevance to this week’s topic: even in Canada, some folks just can’t wrap their tiny heads around the existence of black doctors.  And while it’s tempting to take heart in the outrage expressed by many after a woman refused to have her child looked at by a black physician, our guests point out why that would be a mistake.

We want to hear from you

If you have something to say or a question to ask, and think we are the best people to do so, who are we to question your judgement? Call us at 347-SHORTCT any time, and email theshortcoats@gmail.com.

Continue reading Medical Education’s Underrepresented Minorities Challenge →

Short Coat Podcast

Which is More Important: the MCAT or Your Job?

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Should you put your life on hold for the MCAT?

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Photo by Gene Hunt

As a planned parenthood sex educator, listener T’keyah wants to know what medical schools teach about meeting the needs of LGBTQIA+ patients.  Amy Young, Patrick Brau, Liza Mann, and Teneme Konne can’t, of course speak for all medical schools, but they can speak about what they are learning: quite a lot, not least because we have an LGBTQ clinic they can rotate on!  T’keyah snuck a second question in, too: she loves her job, and it’s important work.  So, is the advice she’s gotten to stop working while studying for the MCAT valid?

This Week’s Medical News

A study out of the UK says that men of advanced paternal age (ahem, forty or older) tend to father geekier boys: smart, focused, and unconcerned about what people think of them.  And we took note of an column this week on why doctors swear so much.  Hint: it’s not all sunshine and roses, being a physician.  With this in mind it is only logical that, in the name of science, Dave has his co-hosts stick their hands in ice water and recite Dr. Seuss.  Will they be able to withstand the ethically induced pain?

We want to hear from you

Thank you, T’keyah for your question!  If you have something to say or a question to ask, call us at 347-SHORTCT any time, and email theshortcoats@gmail.com.

Continue reading Which is More Important: the MCAT or Your Job? →