Dr Tisdall Unfiltered

Interested in joining my community for FREE? I’m now offering a free week trial for Medical School Companion. Inside the community, you’ll find weekly live teaching sessions with me as well as practice questions, video courses, and more:  https://www.drphiliptisdall.com/?utm_medium=social&utm_source=spotify&utm_campaign=spotify_description Why can a medical student earn honors, memorize th...

Interested in joining my community for FREE? I’m now offering a free week trial for Medical School Companion. Inside the community, you’ll find weekly live teaching sessions with me as well as practice questions, video courses, and more:  https://www.drphiliptisdall.com/?utm_medium=social&utm_source=spotify&utm_campaign=spotify_description How do you start learning a new organ system when...

Interested in joining my community for FREE? I’m now offering a free week trial for Medical School Companion. Inside the community, you’ll find weekly live teaching sessions with me as well as practice questions, video courses, and more:  https://www.drphiliptisdall.com/?utm_medium=social&utm_source=spotify&utm_campaign=spotify_description What separates passing a medical school exam from...

Are you learning medicine—or becoming comfortable with material you still can’t explain? In this episode of Dr. Tisdall Unfiltered, I draw on my experience as a pathologist and medical educator to explain why hours of lectures, highlighting, and strong exam scores don’t necessarily translate into clinical understanding. Learning hurts. Knowing is fun. The challenge is making your study time build...

Can a medical school interview really predict who will become a good doctor? In this episode of Dr Tisdall Unfiltered, I draw on my decades as a physician, medical educator, and former admissions committee chair to question what medical schools are selecting students for—and why applicants feel pressured to pretend they’re perfect. I discuss medical school admissions, standardized interviews, and...

Medical students are asked to learn an extraordinary amount of information—but how much of it actually matters when you are standing in front of a patient? In this episode of Dr. Tisdall Unfiltered, I take on one of the biggest problems in medical education: the “data dump.” Too often, students are handed enormous volumes of basic science information and expected to memorize it without ever being...

In this episode of  Dr Tisdall Unfiltered , I’m sharing a crossover conversation with the  Do It Right Podcast , where I sit down with Joshua Leake, co-president of the podcast, along with his classmates Elena and Patricia from William Carey College of Osteopathic Medicine. They bring me the questions medical students are actually wrestling with: how to manage the sheer volume of information in me...

In this episode of  Dr. Tisdall Unfiltered , I sit down with first-year MD student  Shrena Punj  to talk about medical school, clinical reasoning, and what it means to study medicine while living with serious chronic illness. Shrena has been diagnosed with both  GPA vasculitis  and  Takayasu arteritis , giving her an unusual perspective as both a patient and a future physician. We discuss the over...

If you understand why a medical test works, you understand something fundamental about the disease you’re testing for. In this episode of  Dr. Tisdall Unfiltered , I explore one of the most useful ways I know to learn medicine: using diagnostic testing to teach pathophysiology. Rather than memorizing that a particular test “goes with” a particular disease, I want you to ask: What is this test actu...

Why does learning medicine feel so hard, even when you are intelligent, motivated, and putting in hours of work? In this episode of Dr Tisdall Unfiltered, I explain why there are no tricks, shortcuts, or “high-yield” gimmicks that can replace a strong foundation in the basic medical sciences—and why the discomfort of learning is often evidence that real learning is taking place. I break down my fo...

The way you learned before medical school may not be the way you need to learn medicine. In this episode of Dr. Tisdall Unfiltered, I break down what I believe medical students need to change when they enter medical school—and why the goal can no longer simply be passing the next exam. You are training to care for patients, which means you need a way of learning that builds understanding, recall,...

One of the most common questions I'm asked is why so many capable medical students struggle despite studying harder than ever. In this episode of Dr. Tisdall Unfiltered, I share my perspective after decades of teaching pathophysiology and clinical reasoning. We explore why memorization alone isn't enough, how to build an understanding of disease from first principles, and what I believe is...

In this episode of Dr. Tisdall Unfiltered, I discuss one of the biggest questions facing medical education today: can artificial intelligence actually help medical students learn medicine, or does it risk making superficial learning even easier? I’m Dr. Philip Tisdall, a physician, pathologist, textbook author, and medical educator with decades of experience teaching students how to understand dis...

In this episode of Dr. Tisdall Unfiltered, I sit down to discuss one of the biggest problems in modern medical education: why so many intelligent, hardworking medical students continue to struggle despite putting in enormous amounts of time and effort. As a pathologist, medical educator, and author of Clinical Pathophysiology, I've spent decades teaching students, residents, and physicians how...

I’m building out our community where I will be teaching live online. For more information, head over to ⁠drphiliptisdall.com⁠ In this episode of Dr. Tisdall Unfiltered, I sit down to discuss one of the biggest problems in modern medical education: why so many intelligent, hardworking medical students still struggle to truly understand medicine. We dive into the growing disconnect between learning...

Most medical students are overwhelmed because they’re trying to learn medicine as if every fact carries the same weight. In this episode of Dr. Tisdall Unfiltered, I break down why that approach fails and explain how I teach students to organize medicine in a clinically meaningful way. I discuss the difference between foundational diseases, major diseases, and minor diseases, and why understanding...

In this episode of Dr. Tisdall Unfiltered, I sit down with Dr. Alyssa Makowski, a newly matched emergency medicine resident whose journey through medical school was anything but straightforward.  Alyssa was one of the strongest students I had ever worked with, yet she repeatedly struggled to cross the exam threshold required to move forward toward Step 1. What followed became one of the most remar...

In this episode of  Dr. Tisdall Unfiltered , I sit down with Dr. Nancy Selfridge and Dr. Eric Neilson to have an honest conversation about what’s really happening in medical education—and why so many capable students struggle when it comes time to apply what they’ve learned. Together, Dr. Selfridge, Dr. Neilson and I worked to build and implement a new approach to teaching medicine—one that moves...

In this episode of Dr Tisdall Unfiltered, I explore one of the most important insights I’ve had in decades of teaching medicine: there is no single “right” way to learn clinical reasoning. I’m joined in conversation with my producer and collaborator, Ali Tisdall, as we unpack a powerful real-world example that challenges traditional medical education. I share the story of a former student with aph...

In this episode of  Dr. Tisdall Unfiltered , I sit down with Dr. Eric Nielson—an experienced medical educator and simulation specialist I’ve worked closely with over the years—to explore a fundamental shift in how medicine should be learned and practiced. Together, we break down why true clinical reasoning doesn’t start with memorization or isolated facts, but with understanding organ system failu...

In this episode of  Dr. Tisdall Unfiltered , I sit down with returning guest  Dr. Nancy Selfridge  for a thoughtful discussion about how physicians actually learn to think clinically. Too often in medical education, students are pushed toward memorization of facts and algorithms rather than developing the deeper reasoning skills required to diagnose and treat real patients. In this conversation, w...

In this episode of Dr. Tisdall Unfiltered , I sit down for a candid conversation about one of the biggest problems in medical education today: the way pathology is taught—and the way students are studying it. I discuss why relying solely on popular resources like Pathoma and Robbins can leave students memorizing facts without truly developing clinical reasoning, and why that disconnect shows up on...

In this solo episode of Dr Tisdall Unfiltered , I explain exactly how to use my textbook the way it was designed to be used — not as a passive reading exercise, but as a structured system for developing real clinical reasoning. I walk through why medical students struggle when they learn anatomy and physiology in isolation, why everything must begin with the chief complaint, and how to build a usa...

In this episode of Dr Tisdall Unfiltered , I sit down for an in-depth conversation about what modern medical education gets wrong—and what it should be doing instead. This is a thoughtful discussion on why content overload isn’t the real problem in medicine, how clinical reasoning has been displaced by rote memorization, and why speed, pattern recognition, and storytelling are essential to thinkin...

In this episode, I unpack one of the most damaging myths in medical education: the idea that success on exams requires memorizing everything. I’m Dr. Philip Tisdall, a medical educator with decades of experience as a practicing pathologist and teaching students how to think clinically rather than chase isolated facts. In this conversation, I explain what medical exams are actually testing, why exc...