Raise the Line

This episode of Raise the Line is special for a couple of reasons. Our guest, Toh Hong Keng recently graduated from medical school at the age of seventy, making him one of the oldest medical students in the world; and Shiv Gaglani is taking a break from his 3rd year of medical school -- which he is completing at the age of 35 -- to make a rare appearance hosting the show so he can compare notes wi...

Leaning into the ancient wisdom that ‘practice makes perfect’ nursing educators are increasingly embracing approaches such as simulation and competency based education that provide students with low-risk opportunities to practice skills. You might even say that the  ‘see one, do one, teach one’ framework has evolved into ‘see one, do one, debrief, get assessed and do it again.’ But while research...

2024 is the year today’s Raise the Line guest, Michelle Hughes, is supposed to die. That’s according to the diagnosis she received three years ago from an oncologist who told her she had a rare, incurable form of cancer that had already caused innumerable tumors throughout her body.   As a mother of three – with her youngest child being just a few weeks old at the time of her diagnosis – this was...

What good are dazzling advancements in science – such as the rapid development of an effective COVID vaccine – if public distrust of science and medicine leads people to reject them?  That’s the sort of question animating the work of today’s Raise the Line guest Dr. Kathy Reeves, president and CEO of the Arnold P. Gold Foundation. A key part of the answer, Reeves believes, is to increase the level...

We've learned quite a bit on Raise the Line about the growing trend of providing medical care in the home, particularly as it relates to services enabled by advances in remote monitoring technologies. In this episode, we’re adding to that base of knowledge by focusing on what's happening with in-home physical therapy services. Our guide will be Palak Shah, PT, the co-founder and head of clinical s...

Over a long and very active career as a researcher, clinician and educator, Dr. Nicholas Talley has witnessed the traditional mind/body dichotomy fade in relevance as science has determined just how integrated they really are. “The body talks to the mind, the mind talks to the body, and we're exploring how this happens and what we can do to interfere, if you like, to make a difference and perhaps...

Today’s Raise the Line guest provides a great example of how to embrace the range of career options that are available to medical practitioners. In the dozen years since earning his medical degree, Dr. Andres Acevedo-Melo has been a medical liaison and advisor for two of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world, provided recruitment support for clinical trials, and been an editor with a p...

“I thought that education and medicine was a pathway for me to not only get out of my small town but to also make a huge impact somewhere in the world,” says Jermaine Blakely, a third-year medical student at Howard University College of Medicine. But Blakely didn’t wait for medical school to start making a difference. While an undergrad at Morehouse College, he created a program that paired studen...

One way to look at today's guest is that if he were a zebra, he would have extra stripes because, unfortunately, he has more than one rare condition, which is a first for a guest in our Year of the Zebra series. After struggling with various GI issues most of his life, Brian Kennedy, an Elsevier colleague, was diagnosed several years ago with exocrine pancreatic insufficiency (EPI), a rare disorde...

“If you really want to build a relationship with your patients, a model based on insurance doesn't enable you to spend enough time with them to build that connection,” says Dr. Ginamarie Papia, a practitioner of integrative medicine based in New York. That explains why the 30-something entrepreneur has just launched her own virtual “direct-to-patient” medical practice that she describes as a more...

As we continue our Year of the Zebra focus on rare disorders, we’re going to focus on the productive relationships that can develop between the families of children with rare diseases and the researchers who are trying to develop treatments and cures.  Join Raise the Line host Lindsey Smith as she explores the various dimensions involved with Jennifer Wells, whose young son has a neurodevelopmenta...

In 2010, our guest, Rob Long, was on the cusp of an NFL career after being a star punter at Syracuse University. But that bright future was sidelined when Rob was diagnosed with a rare and aggressive brain tumor just five days after his final college game. Fortunately, emergency surgery and treatment gave him a second chance. As you’ll learn in this fascinating episode of Raise the Line, a new pur...

Given Osmosis from Elsevier’s mission to educate the next generation of healthcare providers, it’s fitting that our 500th episode of the Raise the Line podcast features a conversation with Parsa Mohri, a medical student at Acibadem University in Turkey.    As you’ll learn in this thoughtful interview with host Hillary Acer, Parsa applied a “Monday morning” test in choosing medicine as a career: wh...

“When I make a diagnosis of cancer, that's changing the landscape of that patient's life forever. Their trajectory is being set by the words I write down on my report. So, that’s why I say pathologists are the most important doctors you’ll never meet,” explains Dr. Jennifer Hunt, interim dean at the  University of Florida College of Medicine. As she tells host Michael Carrese, it was the intervent...

“Nurses have a lot of answers. We're problem solvers. We're innovators,” says Dr. Sarah Szanton, who is a case in point for using her experience doing home visits as a nurse practitioner to help pioneer an innovative model of elder care called CAPABLE. It’s a four-month long program in which a nurse, occupational therapist and handy worker address difficulties an older adult may have in daily livi...

You might think training for and completing ultramarathons while managing the long hours and other demands of a medical residency would be too much to handle, but in the case of Dr. Estello Hill, athletics have fueled his success on the job. “It's really taught me what I'm capable of, how I can push myself and when I should dial back. I think it's given me an intense sense of balance with everythi...

For our NextGen Journeys series, host Hillary Acer sat down with Dr. Brian Le at a major moment of transition as he was just finishing up his residency in family medicine at Adventist Health in Glendale, California. As he embarks on his next chapter, Dr. Le reflects on the highlights of his medical education journey and takes stock of the key lessons he will bring forward with him. “I think the bi...

In this installment of in our Next Gen Journeys series featuring conversations with learners and early career practitioners in medical professions around the globe, we introduce you to Dr. Bradley Max Segal, a physician in the Department of Health, South Africa with a self-described passion for technology and innovation. Although he’s only a few years out of medical school, Dr. Segal has worked ex...

Today on Raise the Line , we make a stop in Northern Europe on our ongoing tour of medical education around the globe and bring  you the perspective of Dr. Povilas Ignatavicius, a hepato-pancreato-biliary and liver transplant surgeon and vice dean at Lithuanian University of Health Sciences, which is the largest institution of higher education for biomedical sciences in that country. In particular...

Last year’s declaration by the U.S Surgeon General that loneliness and isolation are a public health crisis was based on research showing that they have a negative impact on mental health, blood pressure, cognitive performance and, most relevant to our discussion today on Raise the Line , immune system function. That’s why it’s important for people dealing with chronic illnesses to stay socially c...

Medical school and residency are daunting enough without dealing with a chronic illness on top of it, but that has been the reality for our guest today, Dr. Kyle Dymanus. In this candid interview with Raise the Line host Hillary Acer, Dymanus shares a wealth of wisdom about balancing studies, work and wellbeing gained during her years as a med student at Medical College of Georgia and her current...

Having a child with a complex illness can be especially challenging for parents because of differing opinions among providers about causes, symptoms and treatments for disorders such as long COVID and chronic Lyme. “A common theme I would hear from parents is that they really had to push their providers to consider Lyme. Sometimes they even had to beg for testing to be done because it just wasn't...

“Helping patients with complex illnesses is a lot like rock climbing. You're looking for toe holds and finger grips that you can use to get from where you are to where this patient wants to be,” says Dr. Leo Galland, an internist and author who specializes in undiagnosed or difficult to treat illnesses. His fellow guest on this episode of Raise the Line , co-founder of the California Center for Fu...

One key theme in this episode of Raise the Line is that attention to details matters for both patients with post-acute infection syndromes and the clinicians helping them as they grapple with often debilitating symptoms caused by dysautonomia, cardiac complications and other disorders. For patients, it’s about paying close attention to their bodies and diet, and being intentional about their use o...

We continue our Year of the Zebra  focus on rare diseases today by exploring the ability of AI technology to aid in the diagnosis of rare and other conditions by analyzing the voice and speech of the patient. This approach is promising enough that the National Institutes of Health has invested in research projects to test its effectiveness, and the private sector is pursuing it as well, including...