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Today we're joined by one of my past professors, Dr. Jamie Dewitt, a toxicologist who has a focus on a particular group of environmental contaminants called PFAS. Consisting of more than 5,000 substances, per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances are found in all kinds of commercial products, including nonstick cookware, waterproof jackets, firefighting foams, food packaging, and more. However, studies have shown that PFAS is considered a "forever chemical" meaning it can take thousands of years to breakdown. This can cause it to buildup in the body, and there are studies that show that these substances are associated with reproductive harm, developmental effects, increased risk of certain cancers, and decreased immune function. Dr. DeWitt's research focuses on studying the effects of PFAS on the immune system. Dr. DeWitt also has extensive experience in increasing public awareness about PFAS. She's testified to Congress multiple times, and she even provided guidance in the creation of the PFAS episode of the John Oliver's Last Week Tonight. Dr. DeWitt truly is an expert in the field, and she talks about the fascinating history of PFAS, what it's like to testify in front of Congress as a scientist, and what we can do on an individual level to address PFAS contamination.
You can find more information about PFAS and what you can do to stay safe here: https://pfas-exchange.org/
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I know it's been about a month since our last episode, but we're back with a super interesting talk about one of the biggest problems in medicine right now: the opioid crisis. Opioids, like hydrocodone and oxycodone, are used to treat patients with severe pain, whether it be post-surgery, cancer-related pain, and other similar instances. However, they trigger the release of endorphins, the brain's way of making you feel good, and this sensation can be highly addictive, leading to abuse of these drugs. Opioid abuse affects countless people across the world and costs the US hundreds of billions of dollars in costs associated with healthcare, criminal justice, and the foster system. One particularly dangerous type of abuse is consuming alcohol with opioids, which can cause respiratory distress, and ultimately death relatively quickly. While patients are advised not to take alcohol with opioids, 30-80 percent of them still do, and it is this issue that our guest Dr. Mike Presti hopes to address. Dr. Presti is a Mayo-clinic trained neurologist and CEO of SafeRx, a company using its unique alcohol-resistant opioids platform to reduce the risk of prescription opioid overdose. I don't want to give away too much in this intro, but I think this simple drug concept has the potential to revolutionize the field and prevent alcohol-related opioid abuse. It is currently in its early stages, and if you'd like to learn more or potentially be a part of the company, check it out at investinsaferx.com
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In today's podcast, Tyler and I share stories from our short yet eventful time in medicine over the last couple of years.
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Today we're joined by Dr. Luke Shapiro, an Orthodontist in New York. Dr. Luke has always been fascinated by languages, and this led him to major in Spanish in college. He shares insight into how his skill in Spanish and other languages has enabled him to form deeper connections with his patients. Additionally Dr. Luke talks about some awesome innovations in dental technology, such as the smart mirror. We close out with some questions from you guys, and all in all, this was a great conversation. I hope you enjoy!
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Today we switch it up a bit and I have a casual conversation with my friend Tyler about how the premed life is going right now for the both of us. We're both in the middle of applying to medical school, and we talk about how that's going, as well as reflect and give tips that we wish we knew in the past couple of years on our journeys.
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Today we're joined by Dr. Dheeban, a general surgeon in India. This conversation means a lot to me, as Dr. Dheeban is the physician who really sparked my passion for medicine. About 4 years ago, I shadowed him in his rural clinic in India for a couple of months. I watched him perform all kinds of different procedures including endoscopies, Cesarian sections, diabetic foot debridements, cyst removals, and even more. I was fascinated by the problem-solving aspect and uniqueness of each case and how each required its own strategy for treatment. I remember I was dead set on becoming a surgeon after shadowing him because of how much he impacted me, and while I'm not so sure about that resolve now, I know that there is nothing else I would want to pursue other than medicine. In this conversation, we talk about his journey through medicine, how he used to play with syringes in stethoscopes in his grandfather's hospital as a kid, and how he became a general surgeon. We also talk about diabetes, and the widespread complications he sees in his patient populations. We close out talking about some of his most impactful cases, and all in all, I really enjoyed having this conversation to catch up with one of my mentors. I hope you enjoy it too.
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Today we're joined by Dr. Sarma Velamuri, the CEO and co-founder of Luminaire, a medical software company shedding light on dark data. During his time as a physician, he remembers seeing multiple inefficiencies in hospitals, primarily in sepsis. He describes sepsis through an interesting metaphor during our talk: think of a bull in a china shop. Now poke that bull with a stick, and watch the bull blow this tiny stimulus out of proportion and destroy everything in the China shop. Essentially that's what happens in the body - a compromised immune system enables even a small infection to be fatal. He wanted to make a solution to this issue and turned to software to develop a program that can predict when patients are at risk for sepsis, effectively preventing the issue from even happening. Sarma and I also talk about the increased digitization of medicine, and how much potential technology has in revolutionizing how healthcare can be provided. I learned a lot from Sarma during our talk, and I hope you enjoy.
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Dr. Parisis talks about just how many subspecialties there are in radiology. We also talked about one of my greatest fascinations: tech in healthcare! Dr. Parisis talks about his experience as a premed working with a medical scribing startup that used Google Glass - the smart glasses with a camera and microphone built in - to enable physicians to focus more on the patient and allow remote scribes to take care of the documentation. He also discusses how radiology enables him to integrate tech into patient care. Going into the future, he shares how artificial intelligence will develop in radiology, but that misconceptions that AI will take over the field are unwarranted. I honestly didn't know much about radiology before this, and this was a really eye-opening conversation! I hope you enjoy!
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Today we're joined by Josh Morrison, the co-founder and President of 1DaySooner. 1DaySooner is an organization that advocates for people who want to participate in high-impact medical trials, and their work with COVID-19 challenge trials really came into the limelight this past year. In essence, a challenge trial is a clinical trial in which the participant is not only exposed to a treatment ie vaccine or placebo but is also directly exposed to the condition that is being tested - in this case, COVID-19. To some, the idea of voluntarily being exposed to COVID can sound absolutely insane, but about 40,000 people, myself included, volunteered to be participants in these challenge trials before we had our initial vaccines. The truth is, albeit risky, this kind of study can greatly speed up the time required for a clinical trial, and ultimately save countless lives. Josh talks about his reasons for founding the organization, as well as the amazing progress they've made in pushing the frontier of challenge trials. With challenge trials already taking place in the UK, the future of them is exciting, and as Josh says, if they can speed up the development of future vaccines even 1 day sooner, it would all be worth it.
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Today we're joined by Dr. Mittal, a family medicine physician in Southern California. I talked with Dr. Mittal about diabetes - and being a family medicine doc it is a condition he knows all too well. A diabetes diagnosis is never happy news, and Dr. Mittal runs us through how exactly he explains diabetes to his patients, to not only ensure they understand it but also to ensure that they will follow through with a treatment plan. He talks about how nuanced this process can be - and how important it is to be aware of a person's background and culture when making a treatment plan for them. I think diabetes is a truly fascinating disease, and I hope you enjoy.
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Today, we're joined by my friend Tyler Owens and we decided to take it back to talk about healthcare professionals from history that have revolutionized the field in some way. I'm not a big history person, but in this conversation with Tyler, I realized just how crazy it is to understand how far we've come in medicine over 1000s of years. We go back in time all the way to the 1st century AD to look at Galen who provided a MASSIVE amount of knowledge into medicine. Apparently, Galen's procedure to treat cataracts is actually similar to how it is done in modern-day, 2000 years later which is insane. We then move into the 1800s to look at Clara Barton, who is often called the Florence Nightingale of the US for saving countless lives on the battlefield and is also known for founding the Red Cross. I don't want to spoil too much of the episode, but we also talked about the famous epidemiologist John Snow, as well as talked about Alexander Fleming and how he saved hundreds of millions of lives from his accidental discovery. I hope you enjoy!
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Today we're joined by Mr. Christian Essman, the senior director of admissions at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine and host of the All Access: Med School Admissions podcast where he interviews admissions faculty from across the nation. With med school applications right around the corner for a lot of us, I think this conversation with Mr. Essman was really needed to try to understand how admissions are affected by the pandemic. As he notes, this year of applicants will be the first to have been affected by COVID for over a year, and these effects will be reflected in the applications. Mr. Essman shares a lot of really valuable insight in this episode - including details on what exactly happens to your application when you submit it, tips to writing your personal statement, advice on getting recommendations even if you've only met the person virtually, how med school applications increased 17% this past year, and much much more. At the end of the day, Mr. Essman urges us to just trust the process, and that everything will be okay.
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Today we're joined by Ahmad Shahin, a first-year medical student at the Mayo Clinic with over 30,000 subscribers on YouTube. I've been watching Ahmad's videos for almost a year now and reached out to him on a whim because he's a really inspiring guy and I'm sure anyone familiar with him would say the same. He immediately said he was down and that he actually remembered me from my comments on his videos! We talk for about an hour about what it's like being a med school YouTuber as well as how medical school is going during a pandemic, and Ahmad also shares tips for anyone aspiring to become a doctor. He shares his struggles and failures with full transparency, and I really learned a lot from talking with Ahmad. In the spirit of YouTube, you can also find this conversation with exact timestamps of everything we talked about on my YouTube channel - just look up Arvind Rajan on YouTube and you should see it!
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Today we're joined by Dr. Carling Matejka, a veterinarian in Canada. I want Medspectives to capture all facets of medicine and veterinary medicine is something that I knew nothing about before I talked to Dr. Carling. While in human medicine you just need to focus on humans, for veterinary medicine you need to be able to understand all kinds of different animals, from dogs to cows to snakes to tarantulas. While there are some similarities, there are also a good number of differences, and Dr. Carling discusses her experience from treating dogs in her clinic to treating cows out on the farm. We talk about the concept of euthanasia and draw parallels in human medicine to physician-assisted suicide, and Dr. Carling shares some interesting stories from her time in practice.
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Today we're joined by Dr. Farhan Alami, a geriatrician in Singapore. Geriatrics is a field that is seeing unprecedented importance with the growing elderly population, however, the number of people that choose to pursue this field is not increasing even close to as much. Dr. Farhan explains how by 2030, there will be 1 million elderly people in Singapore, and as of now, there are only around 100 geriatricians in the country. Even in the US, the elderly aren't given the care they need, especially because of how expensive these costs can be. Dr. Farhan talks about the issues facing geriatrics, and the growing importance of it. She also shares some interesting stories - my favorite of which is a 90-year-old dementia patient that climbs a tree whenever it bears fruit. I hope you enjoy!
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Today we're joined by Dr. Arjun Aggarwal! Dr. Aggarwal is a second-year internal medicine resident in Austin, Texas, who aspires to become a cardiologist. I actually talked to him the day Texas lifted the mask mandate, and he clearly was not a big fan of the decision. We also talk about his time as an internal medicine resident, his interest in cardiology, and his thoughts on social media as free-open-access medical education. He discusses the concept of risk-and-benefit when it comes to treatment - and how physicians need to be able to make difficult decisions. While medication could present some degree of risk, it could also present a large degree of benefit - so how do you decide whether to administer it or not? Dr. Aggarwal illustrates this point through a case of a heart attack during the Texas snowstorm in February.
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Today we're joined by Dr. Ray Boyapati, a gastroenterologist in Australia. As much as I wanted to dedicate this whole episode to asking him for medical advice for my terrible gut problems, I decided it wouldn't be in your best interests. Instead, we talked about how well Australia handled COVID, which, spoiler, actually wearing masks helped a lot! as well as how social media has become a major source of free medical knowledge for everyone, especially during the pandemic. Dr. Ray also advises premeds/medical students and shares priceless advice in the episode.
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Today we're joined by Dr. Damaris Raymondi, an optometrist in New York City. She is extremely passionate about her field, and during our conversation, she shares her story into optometry, the real importance of a yearly eye exam, medical conditions you can see through the eye, and more. Known as @newyorkeyedoc online, Dr. Damaris extends this passion for medical education as she spreads her knowledge about the eye through her platform, and she actually also has a podcast called Eyes Up, where she invites guests from all kind of different backgrounds to discuss the field of optometry. This was a really fun conversation, and I hope you enjoy it!
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Today I've got my friend Tyler Owens on the podcast again sharing the rather interesting stories of healthcare professionals from history. I don't want to spoil anything, but if you're a fan of medical oddities and rare cases, you're gonna love this episode. Just a brief overview, we talk about a man who gets very intoxicated every time he has a meal, a railroad worker who survived an iron pole through the skull, and a young researcher who seems to have somehow gotten his member downstairs stuck in a bottle. Odd stories indeed, but what's medicine without at least a little bit of craziness?
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Wanted to try something new on the show, so I reached out to my friend Tyler who is also a fellow pre-med I went to school with. I remember we met volunteering at a science fair and just started talking about surgery and medicine so I was like he'd be awesome on the podcast. Today we talk about arguably the greatest scientific and medical innovation ever: CRISPR. For those who aren't familiar with it, CRISPR is basically a tool that lets you edit people's genes. You can basically treat any condition from sickle cell to maybe one day diabetes by just cutting out and replacing the right genes. Now it's in its very early stages right now, but one day in the not so distant future we will be able to edit these conditions. Tyler did research with CRISPR and knows way more than I do about it, and he shares the countless applications of it, including self-repairing concrete, ending hunger, making antibiotics, and more. We also talk about the ethical considerations, for which there are many.
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