Raise the Line

“Maybe we think we’re just students and we’re just learning, but you can have an impact as a medical student,” says Dr. Desiree Franco Lugo, who has acted on that insight throughout her recently completed journey at Anáhuac University, Mexico and during her participation in the Osmosis Medical Education Fellowship, where she has served as a Regional Lead for the past two years. Des, as we’ve come...

Promising research, a growing respect for the patient voice and innovative ways of using technology to support patients might be adding up to a new reality of Alzheimer’s and other dementias being experienced as chronic diseases like some cancers are now considered to be. We’re going to learn about that trend and other positive developments in the space on this special episode of Raise the Line wi...

“There is a revolution at hand in which, after years of struggling to locate a new source of organs, there may finally be an answer and to everyone's surprise it is animal organs. Pigs may save the day,” says Dr. Andrew Cameron, chief of the Division of Transplantation at Johns Hopkins Medicine. While he’s encouraged by recent progress in using genetically-modified pig organs in humans, Cameron po...

Today’s Raise the Line guest has a simple but powerful message for medical providers, born of a mother’s heartbreak. “It's going to be rare in your career to meet a zebra but the impact you can have is phenomenal. An early diagnosis could make the difference between life and death for these children,” says Bethan Keall who lost her young daughter Matilda (Tilly) in 2022 to neuroblastoma, a rare ca...

Today, we're continuing our close look at clerkships and residency programs and what students can do to be successful in them with Dr. Sharon Bord and Dr. Amelia Pousson, who are both physicians and assistant professors in emergency medicine at Johns Hopkins University, where, as most listeners know, Osmosis co-founder and Raise the Line host Shiv Gaglani is pursuing his third year of medical scho...

Medical school is so demanding that it’s always impressive to meet students who make time for other activities, and doubly impressive when what they devote their precious free time to is intended to improve healthcare.  That’s why we’re delighted to welcome Drs. Lawsen Parker, Rebecca Wolff and Stephanie Koplitz to Raise the Line today.  As they were wrapping up their terms as leaders of the Stude...

Today’s guest is a trailblazing surgeon who performed the first successful nerve allograft, among other important achievements, but that’s actually not what host Shiv Gaglani wanted to focus on in this interview with Dr. Susan Mackinnon. After seeing her speak recently at a Johns Hopkins Grand Rounds presentation, Shiv immediately asked her to be a guest on Raise the Line because of her passion to...

There are more than 2,600 colleges and universities with nursing degree programs in the United States, offering a mix of options from associate-level degrees to doctorates. Ensuring that those programs deliver high-quality education is the focus of today's guest, Kathy Chappell, PhD, RN, the CEO of the Accreditation Commission for Education in Nursing, also known as ACEN. “We have this regulatory...

When Raise the Line host and third year medical student Shiv Gaglani witnessed the creation of a “heart song” at the bedside of a terminal patient during his recent neurology clerkship, he immediately wanted to know more about the clinical applications of music therapy and realized the Osmosis audience would want to as well.  That’s why we’re happy to bring you this fascinating episode featuring S...

We've had the pleasure of speaking to nursing leaders at a variety of health systems and at nursing schools on past episodes of Raise the Line , but today we're going to zoom out for a big picture perspective on the profession and its current and future challenges and opportunities with Jennifer Mensik Kennedy, PhD, RN, MBA, president of the American Nurses Association, which advocates for the nat...

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After working alongside healthcare providers in under-resourced countries, today’s Raise the Line guest Dr. Rebecca Weintraub came to see that the desire to serve patients and the curiosity to learn how to be the best clinician possible are universal, but the best tools to do so are not.  That’s what led her to launch the Better Evidence program at Ariadne Labs which designs, tests and scales data...

As we’ve learned on previous episodes of Raise the Line , people dealing with rare diseases usually wait 4-7 years before receiving a diagnosis, during which time their condition can deteriorate significantly. Shortening this “diagnostic odyssey” is the mission of today’s guest, Lukas Lange, and in an interesting twist, he’s doing it by involving the patients themselves.  The company he co-founded...

We've devoted quite a bit of time on Raise the Line to learning about persistent workforce shortages in human healthcare and what is being done about them, but as yet have not turned our attention to the fact that veterinary medicine is facing the same headwinds. To find out more about how that challenge is being addressed and to learn about other current issues in veterinary medicine we turn toda...

The question of how generative AI and other recent advances in technology will change medical education is one we're continually seeking answers to on Raise the Line , and today we're turning to a really well-placed expert to weigh in on this issue. He's Dr. Warren Wiechmann, senior associate dean of Clinical Science Education and Educational Technologies at University of California Irvine, a scho...

Most people associate being a physician with achieving financial security, but according to a recent report issued by Medscape, only about half of physicians in the United States report having a net worth over $1 million. That's where today's guest comes in. Brett Riggins founded Physician Wealth Systems in 2022 to help doctors achieve financial security through real estate investments that genera...

On today’s Raise the Line , we continue our Next Gen Journeys series featuring conversations with learners in medical professions around the globe. Our special guest is Omer Rott, a longtime participant in our Osmosis Medical Education Fellowship and Osmosis Health Leadership Initiative programs. Omer will soon be earning his medical degree from Masaryk University in the Czech Republic. In additio...

The importance of understanding the connections between animal and human health reached new heights due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but this has long been a rich area of study and it’s also the foundation of the long and impressive career of today’s Raise the Line guest, Dr. Sue VandeWoude, dean of the College of Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Sciences at Colorado State University.  Before assum...

Raise the Line has been honored to be part of Osmosis from Elsevier’s  Year of the Zebra campaign and we’re happy to share that this successful effort will continue throughout 2024. To mark that commitment and to celebrate Rare Disease Day, we have a very special episode of the podcast for our listeners in which, for the first time, we interview a child faced with the challenge of living with a ra...

“I feel like I'm living a dream in many ways. It's really gratifying to be working in this area,” says  Dr. Peter Hendricks, a clinical psychologist at University of Alabama Birmingham who is pursuing a long-held interest in the therapeutic potential of psychedelics. In addition to being anEndowed Professor of Psychiatry there, he is also a professor in the Center for Addiction and Pain Prevention...

After many months of emotionally wrenching, exhausting work on the frontlines of COVID, and the unexpected death of his mother, Dr. Michael Foti found himself in an emergency room dealing with what he suspected was a heart attack, but it was actually a panic attack caused by untreated anxiety and depression. “As healthcare providers, we're afraid to speak up about our mental health because it's se...

Our guests today have set a big goal to tackle a big problem. Jack Needham and James Naylor co-founded Sanctuary Health to build the largest video library for patient education motivated by the fact that patients forget approximately half of what doctors tell them in appointments. The young British entrepreneurs are aiming to move the healthcare system beyond the practice of handing every patient...

Due to rising awareness of the importance of nutrition to good health and patient demand for alternatives to so-called Western medicine, the number of medical schools offering naturopathic programs has grown in the past two decades in the United States. Today on Raise the Line , we're going to learn more about this approach to medicine, the education and training involved, and where the field is h...

Today we continue our series Next-Gen Journeys , featuring conversations with students, residents, and early career medical professionals around the globe to get their fresh perspectives on education, medicine, and the future of healthcare. We’re delighted to do that today with Dr. Josh Bliss, a third-year internal medicine resident at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medicine, who will continue...

About one-third of Californians live in areas where there's a shortage of primary care providers, and this gap is especially apparent in what's known as the Inland Empire -- a rural region in the southern part of the state. As we’ll learn on today’s episode, the barriers to access this creates might only get worse because population is expected to grow sharply in that area. Our guest, Dr. Timothy...