What Brings You In Today?

The Solidarity Week for Compassionate Patient Care is a nationwide celebration organized by the Gold Humanism Honor Society (GHHS) that promotes clinician-patient relationships based on caring, personalization, and mutual respect. This year, UWSMPH was one of over 50 medical schools to participate in the week-long celebration. As part of the events, GHHS asked medical students to reflect on what they are grateful for in medical school.  From little pleasures like food and music, to the relationships that guide and ground us, we certainly have a lot to be grateful for. We are proud to partner with UWSMPH GHHS to share our classmates’ stories of gratitude!

In this special Valentine’s Day episode, we’re talking about love in medicine! As medical students, we spend so much time and energy focusing on our careers but of equal importance is growing and maintaining relationships outside of the hospital. What is it like to navigate life milestones like getting married or having children while in medical school? In what ways does medicine make relationships more challenging, and in what ways does it make them stronger? What’s it like to have a partner in medical school with you? What’s it like to not? Listen as two UWSMPH couples, Noah and Meghan Trapp and Kasey Wood and Mario Matabele, share their love stories!

In part 2 of our series "Doctors as Patients," we continue to explore how medical students and residents with chronic illness navigate  training within a field that often places value on able-bodiedness. We chat with fourth year medical students and co-founders of the Disability Advocacy Coalition (DAC) student organization at UW SMPH: Wendy Sun, Kimberly Rosenthal, and Athena Wilson. Started in Fall 2021, DAC aims to establish a space for students struggling with medical school to talk about their concerns and offers resources for medical students with disabilities. Listen as Wendy, Kimberly, and Athena describe their individual journeys in medicine so far, frustration with ableism in medicine, and ideas for ways to make medical training more feasible for everyone.

This episode discusses mental health, depression, and suicide. National Suicide Prevention Hotline: 800-273-8255In medical training, we are taught how to provide care for others: we learn to communicate clearly, perfect physical exam skills, elicit a thorough history, and more. Far less discussed, though, is how medical trainees navigate their own medical and psychiatric care in an environment where stigma and limited personal time often make asking for help difficult. In the first episode of our series “Doctors as Patients,'' we chat with Dr. Justin Bullock, MD, a PGY3 Internal Medicine resident at University of California, San Francisco about his journey seeking treatment for bipolar disorder, depression, and suicidality throughout medical training. Listen as he reads excerpts from his 2020 NEJM article, “Suicide–Rewriting My Story,” and shares his journey reconciling his mental health care and career in medicine.Check out Justin’s full article here:https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp1917203 And for future updates from Justin, follow him on Twitter @jbullockruns.

Our ability to grow and learn from error is as human as the errors themselves. For part 3 of our series on Failure in Medicine, we focus on how medical trainees and professionals can better learn from their mistakes. We talk with Dr. Peter Weir, whose work in health system innovation within the departments of Family & Preventive Medicine and Population Health Sciences at the University of Utah inspired his piece entitled “How to Learn from Failure” outlining common types of failure medical trainees experience and what each of these can teach us.Find Dr. Weir's piece here: https://accelerate.uofuhealth.utah.edu/leadership/peter-weir-how-medicine-can-learn-from-failureAnd go check out Dr. Weir's podcast, Communivation: https://accelerate.uofuhealth.utah.edu/connect/communivation

While many medical students struggle academically at some point during their training, open conversations about failing exams or courses are few and far between. For part 2 of our series on failure in medicine, we talk with Percy Takyi, a current third year medical student at Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine, who speaks boldly about not passing one his first year medical school courses. Percy's desire to discuss his academic struggles eventually inspired him to create a podcast entitled "Behind the White Coat: Failure and Percyverance" exploring experiences of failure and adversity in medical training. In this episode, Percy shares with us his outlook on challenges as part of his larger journey, the importance of finding joy outside of academic validation, and his commitment to changing the secrecy and shame that often surround failure in medicine. You can find Percy on instagram at @ipercyvere and can listen to his podcast wherever you get your podcasts. 

Humanity and human interactions make medicine beautiful, but they also make error and failure inevitable parts of the field. Failures in medicine range from struggles on medical school exams and pimp questions to medical error, and in each of these situations, we benefit ourselves and our patients by treating “failures” as opportunities to learn and grow rather than as shameful secrets. Within a three part series on Failure in Medicine, we explore medicine’s deep-seated discomfort with “failure” and ways we can better manage our mistakes. For part 1 of this series, we talk with Dr. Thalia Krakower, an Internal Medicine physician at Massachusetts General Hospital about her piece “To Err is Human, To Apologize is Hard” in which she describes her family’s experience suffering from medical error. Dr. Krakower’s story emphasizes the importance of confronting medical mistakes personally, institutionally, and with patients. Find Dr. Krakower's piece at https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/2782182.

Technology has changed the way we practice medicine—from electronic medical records and virtual video appointments to social media providing online communities for patients and medical professionals alike. Technology has also changed how medical professionals apply for and complete their medical training. In this episode, we speak with Maggie Waters, a first year medical student at the University of Colorado, about social media’s role in her journey to medicine, and how she now uses Instagram and YouTube to counsel premedical students on navigating the medical school admissions process.Check out her material here:Instagram: @itslifebymaggieYouTube: itslifebymaggieYou can sign up for her courses, including “Road to Acceptance”, on her website, itslifebymaggie.com

As part 1 of a series of episodes exploring the complex roles for technology and social media in medicine, we  take a deep dive into a relatively new social media platform: TikTok. TikTok is a video-sharing social media service where users post short videos, either using their own audio or short, popular audio clips. In the last few years, Tik Tok has become an increasingly popular space for medical professionals at various stages of training to share knowledge, humor, and reflections. We wanted to know: what draws physicians and other health professionals to TikTok? How has TikTok changed the ways in which providers communicate with their patients, their colleagues, and people outside of the medical field? In what ways has TikTok encouraged healthcare providers and trainees to process their experiences in this field? In this episode, we discuss these questions and more with Dr. Alex Hua, an internal medicine resident and digital content creator with a niche in medical humor.Find Dr. Hua's videos at @Huachata.md on TikTok and @huachata on instagram!

As an internal medicine resident at the University of California, San Fransisco, Dr. Emily Silverman created the Nocturnists, a narrative medicine podcast and live show that strives to use the power of storytelling to cultivate community and improve the field of medicine. The Nocturnists was one of our biggest influences in starting WBYIT, and we are so grateful to have had the opportunity to speak with Dr. Silverman for this episode. Dr. Silverman tells us about her own inspirations for the Nocturnists—a love for the arts and a need to address the tough, existential questions at the core of what it mean to be a physician. She also shares her experience building the Nocturnists organization from the ground up and the backstory behind one of her published pieces, Comic Relief (link below). Dr. Silverman is an author and Assistant Professor of Medicine at UCSF. Visit www.thenocturnists.com to learn more about Dr. Silverman's work and https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/2738556 to read her piece, Comic Relief.