Knock Knock, Hi! with the Glaucomfleckens

This week, we are talking about the busiest "real estate" in the human body, the neck. Dr. Tali Lando, a pediatric otolaryngologist who spends her days (and many terrifying nights) operating on the tiny, fragile airways of babies and children, joins us to talk about being chased by police while rushing to an emergency to the precision required to remove a peanut from a toddler's lung, Dr. Lando sh...

We need to talk about the "Doomsday Scenario" currently haunting the radiology department. A prominent CEO of a major public health system recently went on record saying he is ready to replace radiologists with AI "at this moment". As someone who spent my pre-med days doom-scrolling on StudentDoctor.net twenty years ago hearing these same rumors, I can tell you the fear is real, but the reality is...

This week, the Glaucomfleckens are feeling a bit "spicy" as they navigate the grogginess of daylight savings and the fallout of their recent trip to New Orleans. Will shares a harrowing story from a recent live show where an ad-libbed joke about sperm banking and "the sisters" nearly cost him the audience, only to be saved by the laughing nuns in the front row. Between beignets and redfish, the co...

Today, I’m putting on my "career counselor" hat to address the latest medical social media drama: a spine surgeon who decided to take a break from clinical practice just six months in to become a full-time content creator. While the internet is full of opinions, I’m sharing why I choose to stay in the game, even when YouTube decides to reclassify my skits and slash my ad revenue. For all you med s...

This week, the Glaucomfleckens connect with a fellow "co-survivor" whose Christmas morning took a harrowing turn from opening presents to performing life-saving chest compressions. Ellie Breach, a D1 goalkeeper for the Pittsburgh Panthers and NC State, shares the intense story of her father’s sudden cardiac arrest and the specific athletic training that kept her calm when "shit hit the fan" in her...

Usually, I’m teaching you about the finer points of ophthalmology, but today we’re looking at a real-world case study in "how to tank a hospital’s morale". We are heading to my home state of Oregon to discuss the PeaceHealth system and their decision to fire a group of 41 local emergency physicians who have served the community for 35 years. I’m breaking down why this isn’t about money or performa...

This week on Knock Knock, Hi, Will and Kristin stumble into one of the more unexpected parenting moments yet: discovering their teenager might want to become an astronaut. That leads to a surprisingly deep dive into what it actually takes to make it to space and the answer is… a lot. Think extreme environments, elite training, and possibly even medical school. Naturally, Will immediately begins re...

Pull up a chair and grab your notebooks, because today I’m talking to you like it’s your first day of medical school. We’re seeing more "med-fluencers" than ever before, but our medical education system hasn’t quite caught up to the reality of TikTok and social media ethics. I’ve seen too many students and residents trip up lately, so I’m laying down the "Glaucomflecken Guidelines" for a successfu...

This week, Will and Kristin sit down with Dr. Jen Lincoln, OB-GYN, educator, advocate, and author of The Birth Book, for a conversation that goes way beyond the usual pregnancy advice. Together, they unpack the internet’s favorite birth myths, from epidurals and exercise in pregnancy to IUD fearmongering and the idea that eating the “right” foods can somehow control how big a baby gets. Dr. Lincol...

I saw a video from a dermatology resident asking people to stop making fun of dermatologists… and it got me thinking. Why do certain specialties get roasted more than others? So in this episode, I present something I’ve been mentally building for years: the medical comedy ladder. A hierarchy that explains who can make fun of who in medicine without accidentally starting a professional civil war. U...

After my recent pepper spray video unexpectedly hit 5–6 million views, we break down what actually happens to your eyes when exposed to pepper spray, what to do immediately, whether baby shampoo is your new best friend, and why milk absolutely does not belong anywhere near your corneas. We also talk contact lenses (don’t wear them into situations where pepper spray is possible), corneal abrasions,...

After reading your very disturbed (and very funny) comments, I briefly explore whether a large “package” might negatively affect figure skating rotational velocity. Then we pivot to the eyeballs. The Pitt keeps delivering ophthalmology cases, so I break down gonorrhea conjunctivitis (yes, that’s a thing), what really happens when someone super-glues their eye shut, and why trimming eyelashes is so...

This week we sit down with Dr. Claire Brandon, one of only a handful of GI psychiatrists in the country, to talk about something most of us learned in med school and then promptly never thought about again: the gut-brain axis. Why does stress wreck your stomach? Why do chronic GI conditions come with anxiety and depression attached? Why does “it’s all in your head” miss the point entirely? We talk...

This episode starts with something that makes me very angry and ends with something that makes me genuinely happy. First, we talk about what’s happening in Eugene, Oregon, where a nonprofit hospital system decided not to renew a 35-year contract with its locally rooted emergency physicians and instead hand the ER over to a large corporate staffing group based thousands of miles away. Wait times we...

This episode starts with TikTok’s updated Terms of Service, specifically the part where apps want to know where you are at all times, and quickly spirals into a much bigger question: did we accidentally sign up for the surveillance state… or was it always inevitable? Kristin and I debate privacy, inevitability, pessimism, preparedness, and whether refusing to participate actually protects you, or...

We start this episode exactly where you’d expect: Olympic penis drama. From pole vault mishaps to ski jumpers allegedly injecting hyaluronic acid for aerodynamic advantage, we briefly explore how far humans will go for gold. Then we pivot to the eyeballs. First, a patient with sudden, painless loss of half their vision walks into the ER. What sounds like a retinal detachment turns out to be someth...

This week, Kristin and I unpack what really happened after Step 1 went pass/fail and why medical students are now under more pressure, not less. We talk about how Step 2 quietly became the new make-or-break test, why students are leaving clinical rotations early just to study, and why calling this generation “less dedicated” completely misses the point. We also zoom way out and ask a bigger questi...

Let’s talk about something deeply unsexy but incredibly important: pre-op clearance for cataract surgery. After watching a colleague get sent to their own primary care doctor for a seven-minute procedure under minimal sedation, I realized how far we’ve drifted from common sense. Cataract surgery is one of the safest, most routine operations in medicine, yet we’re still funneling millions of patien...

This episode opens with an extremely serious debate about whether buying a $5,000 air hockey table is financially irresponsible… or medically necessary for eye-hand coordination. From there, we read listener feedback from our EMS episode, including why dispatchers are absolute heroes, how CPR instructions actually work over the phone, and the big difference between fire-based and non-fire-based EM...

This episode is a tough one. I start by talking about the killing of Alex Preti and Renee Good in Minneapolis and why it’s been sitting so heavily with me as a physician, a parent, and a human being trying to make sense of what’s happening in this country. Then I focus on something concrete I can do: explain what pepper spray and tear gas actually do to your eyes and how to protect yourself if you...

It’s Heart Month, so we went straight to the top and invited Dr. Stacy Rosen, Volunteer President of the American Heart Association, to help us answer one simple question: What actually keeps your heart healthy… and what’s just noise? We talk about why 80% of heart attacks and strokes are preventable, what the AHA’s Life’s Essential 8 really looks like in real life (spoiler: you’re still allowed t...

This episode we get into a new JAMA Ophthalmology study takes a hard look at pickleball-related eye injuries, and the numbers are… not great. Retinal detachments, hyphemas, orbital fractures, and even open globes are showing up more and more, especially as the sport explodes in popularity among older adults. I break down exactly how these injuries happen, which ones are true emergencies, and why I...

Kristin and I read through listener comments, including theories about how I can create characters without an inner monologue, and real-world ophthalmology stories that lead me to beg you, once again, to call your eye doctor before going to the ER. We also talk about scrubs, fashion, and the fact that someone published a real scientific paper about what patients think doctors should wear. Then we...

This episode we tackle something a lot of people are quietly worried about: virtual residency interviews. Are they here to stay? Are they fair? And how exactly are programs supposed to deal with applicants using AI to help answer questions in real time? Then we get into the eyeballs. A young woman with hair growing where hair absolutely should not exist. A 78-year-old with “sudden vision loss” tha...

This episode we head to North Dakota, a place that is extremely flat, very windy, and filled with some of the kindest humans I’ve ever met, including Dr. Erik Heitkamp, a hospitalist in Fargo, and Courtney Koebele, the Executive Director of the North Dakota Medical Association. Together, we dig into what physician advocacy actually looks like at the state level, not the cable-news chaos, but the r...