Friends of Franz

When I think of the dentist, all I can remember is my countless visits to the office as a child for my endless cavities and root canals. I feel like I can still feel every needle-pinch of anesthesia, the pressure of the drill, and the tantalizing ache of piercing my pulp. That said, I developed a fear of dentists growing up. I only recently realized the beauty behind dental care and the art behind...

Ranked as The Most Trusted Profession for the past 20 years according to the Gallup Poll, one can't really say that the Nursing field is one that is most appreciated. As a nurse myself who has gone through schooling and working within different aspects of the field (inpatient hospital, outpatient, skilled nursing facility, concierge), I can personally say that the profession is one filled with so...

According to a 2022 salary report by Weatherby Healthcare, pediatricians are the second-lowest paid physicians in the United States, just earning a grand higher than public health. As our guest explains, the field of pediatrics is not as esteemed in America relative to other countries where pediatricians are fairly compensated and regarded as specialists. This is an astounding statistic, given the...

Movement is such a crucial part of life. From using our hands to brush our teeth, to using our legs to walk to the car, and even to using our fingertips to punch the digital pins of our credit cards to purchase our groceries, movement is a voluntary part of life that we often take for granted. However, certain undesirable incidents happen in life that remind us of how important movement can be, su...

Beyond the cries, the toys, and the snot, some of the common conversations when it comes to children are asthma, allergies, and their vaccination series. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), around 8% (or over 6 million) of American children have asthma, a chronic inflammatory airway disease. According to the Food Allergy Research and Education, almost 6 million child...

When it comes to the most well-known organs that the general public can name, the lungs would definitely be one of the first in line. As seen in a percentage of the population at a young age, almost everyone can recognize asthma, bronchitis, and pneumonia. As the population ages, more complex lung pathologies become common talk, like COPD and emphysema, cystic fibrosis, pulmonary hypertension, and...

There's a commonly-shared quote online that goes, "A wife who loses a husband is called a widow. A husband who loses a wife is called a widower. A child who loses his parents is called an orphan. But there is no word for a parent who loses a child." Sadly, this is a very true incident in such a grave setting as the intensive care unit for children where, though lives can be truly saved and recover...

May is annually designated to be Mental Health Awareness Month, and this sphere of the mind and the psyche has long been assaulted by stigma, shame, and fear. According to the World Health Organization, approximately 280 million people worldwide have depression, with over 700,000 people dying due to suicide annually. Despite the medical and scientific advancements that have produced so many life-s...

What was hoped to be a unified public health initiative to end an ongoing medical crisis became a divisive and bipartisan issue nationwide. Vaccine mandates were instituted across many states to combat the rise of the novel coronavirus variants and hopefully cease the spread of preexisting viral forms. With the placement of mandates, especially within the spheres of healthcare professions, efforts...

Have you ever felt like you were stuck in someplace that you did not want to be in? Have you ever thought that you needed to escape a situation that you were deep into but afraid of the unknown next steps? Have you ever envisioned a different life than what you are living now? Have you ever felt unhappy with the choices in life that you have made thus far and wanted to start all over again but wer...

The world of emergency medicine is commonly known for its 2 AM chest pain visits, motor vehicle accidents and trauma admissions, and foreign objects that require removal from different orifices. However, there is actually so much more specialization within this specialty in itself! Through additional training from 1 to 2 years of fellowship, one can sub-specialize in realms that expand even beyond...

The past two years have seemed to bring about two "viral" contagions: the pandemic and social media. As the lockdowns allowed people to remain at home and brought cascades of popularity to phone applications like TikTok, workers within the medical field also seemed to join the tides. We have watched it all...new lingos created every day, people in scrubs dancing to the trending audios, and countle...

In the mid-1960s, a shortage of physicians across the United States posed a great predicament to patient safety rooted in the decrease in primary healthcare access. In response to this detrimental period in medicine, pediatrician Dr. Henry Silver created the first formal graduate nursing program that would be the role now known as the nurse practitioner (NP). With the goal of scope expansion of th...

The "Western" world of medicine is said to be infamously known for its churning of prescriptions of pharmacologic modalities to target almost all of the conditions and pathologies that exist. When something is painful, just prop an ibuprofen. When you're having green phlegmatic coughs, you'll probably take an antibiotic. When something goes haywire with an organ, you will most likely require surge...

Have you ever watched videos of cute babies online and then start getting "baby fever"? And I believe that one of the monumental moments in our elementary education years is when we start learning about the actual process of this baby fever: "sexy time." As our guest described: "romantic" and "between sheets." However, there are instances when this activity does not result in the baby that the int...

On December 12, 2019, a group of patients in Wuhan, the capital city of the province of Hubei in China, began experiencing shortness of breath and fever. Little did the world know that these clandestine occurrences of "pneumonia of unknown etiology" in that 3,280 mi² area would affect the whole globe up to this day almost three years later. Having declared this novel coronavirus, "SARS-CoV-2," as...

In our current world of flashy social media and aesthetic ideals, fleeting physical alterations in pictures and videos exist in the presence of Photoshop, filters, and airbrushes. However, there exists a whole dominion in the sciences that seeks to help others achieve these physical ideals. Cosmetic and plastic surgery have successfully allowed people to look the way they want to...and sometimes n...

If "the man who did it all" truly existed, it would be in the form of this episode's guest. Emergency medicine physician, Juris doctor and consultant in health law, serial student, professional pilot, 11x author, keynote speaker, and multidisciplinary entrepreneur (founding and operating several multi-million-dollar businesses): Dr. John Shufeldt from Arizona. Stating that despite not having stell...

One of the most renowned statements of all time may just be to "follow your dreams." It truly is fantastical for one to do what they love for the rest of their lives. Sadly, this is untrue for many as they become shackled in careers that guarantee financial stability but at the expense of an emotional toll. We then land on another infamous discussion: "passion versus career." Coupled with personal...

At the height of the pandemic, anesthesiologists have stood on the front lines with the heightened need for intubations in response to deterioration in patients' oxygenation. What was once thought of as solely the behind-the-scene brain during surgeries to keep patients safely asleep in the operating room, they truly have shown the pertinence of the field in every corner of the hospital during the...

Upcoming early Summertime is known to be medical school application season. Known to many, the journey to becoming a board-certified physician in the United States is the most rigorous educational and training process in the nation: four years of undergraduate college studies to fulfill pre-medicine science and math classes (along with the accumulation of clinical hours, volunteering, and shadowin...

COVID-19 has truly divided the nation into all aspects of society: physically, emotionally, politically, religiously...you name it! This was exacerbated by the roll-out of the mRNA vaccines by Pfizer BioNTech and Moderna at the end of 2020. The virus that was weakening the whole country seemed to become a bipartisan issue muddled by a myriad of misinformation and myths that flooded the internet. B...

Do you believe in serendipity? That things in life just happen, whether for a concrete reason and, if not, just random but feel so mystically intentional? This is the case for our episode guest, whom I have admired for the longest time since I stumbled upon him in a YouTube video way back in nursing school. "The Monsoon Diaries" travel agency founder & CEO, choreographer, photographer, filmmak...

The medical field of dermatology remains to be one of the most competitive specialties to match into for residency. Despite the common misconception that this field of the skin is solely all about the "glitz and glamour" world of botox, fillers, and cosmetic procedures, Dr. Daniel Sugai seeks to show that it is not at all true. Receiving his bachelor's degree in Biology and Art from the University...

The "Vampire Facial" has truly taken the world by storm with the concept of a literally bloody revival of one's skin, so much so that even Kim Kardashian got it. By drawing one's blood and extracting the platelet-rich plasma (PRP) to be re-injected into its source, the hope is to force the body to re-heal its own scars and wounds. Interestingly, this aesthetic procedure falls underneath a new bran...