Raise the Line

We've been careful on Raise the Line  to use the term psychedelic-assisted therapy because, as we've heard from previous guests, these compounds are best administered in the context of a therapeutic relationship in a safe, controlled setting. Today, we're going to focus on the therapy part of the equation with Dr. Mary “Bit” Yaden, an assistant professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Jo...

“I really have challenged the students that have graduated from Duke the last couple of years to consider being ambassadors for science and for communication of what is good science,” says Dr. Mary Klotman, executive vice president for Health Affairs and dean of the School of Medicine at Duke University.  She notes that the stakes of disinformation are too high to do otherwise, as up to 300,000 CO...

Instead of fretting about AI replacing jobs humans currently do, Dr. Nigam Shah is urging people to adopt a perspective about the technology that echoes President John Kennedy’s famous charge in his inaugural address: ‘ask not what this technology can do to you, ask what you can do with this technology.’ “If medicine simply automated everything we were doing 200 years ago, we’d have a machine that...

“What's really exciting and scary in medical education right now is we're seeing large language models enter the scene,” says today’s Raise the Line guest Dr. Adam Rodman, who is well-placed to make such an assessment. As co-director of the Innovations in Media and Education Delivery Initiative (iMED) at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Rodman is witnessing, and influencing, how new techn...

When Munjal Shah and his colleagues chose to use Hippocratic in the name of their new AI-based company, it wasn’t just about signaling their product was involved with healthcare, it was also intended to leverage the ‘do no harm’ philosophy associated with the term. After all, formerly fanciful fears of ‘robots’ replacing doctors have become more realistic since the advent of generative AI last yea...

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“I have coaching involved in all of my programs. It's just done wonders not only for the work I do, but for me personally,” says Dr. Rachel Salas, a professor of Neurology at Johns Hopkins University and certified strength and life coach. It wasn’t always this way. Salas was well into her career as a sleep specialist and clerkship director before being introduced to a strengths-based approach to p...

You’re going to hear something in this episode of Raise the Line  that you most likely have never heard before: what DNA sounds like.  Our guests today all had an interest in musically representing DNA for different reasons, and have come together to pursue this theme as a way to raise awareness for rare diseases. Dr. Aditi Kantipuly had used the arts once before to achieve that goal by writing th...

“I see health systems being systematically disintermediated by certain payers and some tech companies who are eager to take the easy stuff and leave health systems with really complex, sick and often very poor patients,” says veteran healthcare executive Dr. Marc Harrison. “I need a speedboat to change that.” He’s building that speedboat in partnership with venture capital firm General Catalyst, a...

While it’s encouraging that efforts to provide culturally competent care have gained a foothold in the wake of COVID, today’s Raise the Line guest says it is time to expand the conversation to encompass the concepts of cultural safety - which involves awareness of historical power dynamics -- and cultural humility -- which requires an inward look. “Are you reflecting on your own values, beliefs, a...

Our focus on the renaissance in research into psychedelics continues on this episode of Raise the Line , but instead of looking at their potential therapeutic applications, we're going to hear about using them as a tool for learning how the brain works. “We don't have a great idea about the neural basis of self-conception, and psychedelics make us question so many of our fundamental assumptions ab...

“I'm betting it's going to be more good than bad, but I have some big concerns about where things are headed,” warns Dr. Matthew Johnson of Johns Hopkins University when prognosticating about what impact the use of psychedelics in mental health treatment will have on society at large. As he tells host Shiv Gaglani, once these compounds are more widely available, there is real potential for unscrup...

For our 400th episode we’re happy to be diving into one of our favorite topics -- direct-to-consumer healthcare -- with a leading force in the space, Dr. Kapil Parakh. In his role as senior medical lead at Google, Dr. Parakh has led projects to expand access to health information and help people achieve their fitness goals using Fitbit and other means. He’s also helped launch products that reach a...

“We don't have a shortage of nurses in this country. We have a shortage of nurses willing to practice in the healthcare environments as they are today,” says Rebecca Love, an educator, innovator and leader who has devoted her career to improving the profession of nursing from multiple angles. She’s currently pursuing one of those efforts as chief clinical officer at IntelyCare, an app which smooth...

Twenty years ago, health outcomes in Eastern North Carolina lagged behind state averages but those deficits have largely been erased, and Dr. Mike Waldrum, Dean of the Brody School of Medicine at East Carolina University, thinks he knows why. “We’ve done it primarily with a community-based focus and taking students only from North Carolina that we know have a propensity to want to practice medicin...

If you were to make a word cloud based on this episode of Raise the Line , community would be the most prominent term.  For starters, Dr. Allison Brashear was attracted to Buffalo for its reputation as a welcoming community -- a city of good neighbors, as she puts it -- which reminded her of her roots in the Midwest.  She was also encouraged that the University at Buffalo Jacobs School of Medicine...

“We thought it was the end of psychedelic research, and the great dreams we had were for some future generation,” says Dr. Bill Richards, referring to the 1970s when the Nixon administration criminalized psychedelic compounds.  At that point, he could not have imagined there would once again be the thriving interest in psychedelics for both therapeutic and non-clinical purposes that we see today....

“After an hour in this machine, I learned more about my health than the health system had told me my entire life.” That’s our Raise the Line guest Andrew Lacy describing a full body MRI scan he underwent several years ago in Canada that sparked the idea for the company he subsequently founded, Prenuvo, which uses advanced MRI technology for preventive screenings. Growing curiosity about the state...

When Tracy Dixon-Salazar was a young mother of two she described herself as a mediocre high school student with no real academic or career ambitions. Today, she has a PhD in Neurobiology and Neurosciences, is credited with uncovering the genetic driver of a rare form of childhood-onset epilepsy, and she also identified the first precision therapy for it. Unfortunately, the spark for this remarkabl...

“There's never been a better time to do what we do in our fields and the future of life sciences is so incredibly bright,” says Dr. Lloyd Minor. From his perch as dean of Stanford University School of Medicine, Minor sees the convergence of biomedicine, information science and technology dramatically increasing the pace of discovery-driven science and translational science. As a result of observin...

Educating someone to be a nurse, physician or allied health professional is obviously a complex process for learners, faculty and administrators. Today, our new Raise the Line co-host (and Osmosis COO) Derek Apanovitch takes a look at tools that help all of those stakeholders visualize the overall curriculum, where a student is on their learning path, and how they are performing. Our guide is Andr...

The failure of patients to take their medications as prescribed costs the U.S. healthcare system more than $500 billion a year, not to mention the adverse health outcomes it causes. Today’s Raise the Line guest, Sebastian Seiguer, co-founded and leads a company called Scene Health that is tackling this problem with a system that combines video technology, clinical coaching and validated interventi...

To the uninitiated, interoperability may sound like a surgical term, but it actually refers to how IT systems and other technologies communicate with each other. The goal, of course, is seamless communication to improve efficiency and quality of care, but that's obviously a big challenge. Today on Raise the Line , we dive into this important issue with two people who come at it from different prof...

Dr. David Yaden’s interest in studying spiritual experiences started with one of his own. As he describes it, it was a totally spontaneous experience involving an intensely altered state of consciousness that left him with an enhanced, positive perspective on life. “This became an obsession, really, to understand this. I learned that these experiences have been studied throughout history by schola...

“I think we're doing something really special here to change the way healthcare is delivered in South Florida, so keep an eye on us,” says Dr. Julie Pilitsis, dean of the Charles E. Schmidt College of Medicine and Vice President of Medical Affairs at Florida Atlantic University. For one thing, class sizes in the medical and nursing programs are both increasing to tackle less than ideal access to h...