Vital Times: The CSA Podcast

if you have any feedback, please send us a text! Thank you! When Congress celebrated July 4 by enacting House Resolution 1 (known as H.R. 1 or the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act”), experts warned of massive impacts on Medicaid programs nationwide and the more than 70 million people who rely on them. H.R. 1 cut nearly $1 trillion from Medicaid, the largest funding reduction in the program’s 60-year hi...

if you have any feedback, please send us a text! Thank you! Dr. Ludwig Lin (@LudwigLin) of CSA’s Vital Times Podcast catches up with one of the Match 2026 viral stars - Shay Taylor Allen (@Shayy. Taylor), a MS4 at Howard University School of Medicine, whose clip of herself jumping up and down in celebration when she matched to her first choice of Yale Anesthesiology Residency. As the first episode...

if you have any feedback, please send us a text! Thank you! Welcome to another episode of Vital Times. In January 2026 the American Society of Anesthesiologists (ASA) and the Society for Pediatric Anesthesia (SPA) issued an updated joint communication regarding severe neurologic complications, including stroke and death, in healthy young adult (oldest reported so far is 36) and pediatric patients...

if you have any feedback, please send us a text! Thank you! This episode of Vital Times features a conversation with clinician-scientists Dr. Jamie Sleigh and Dr. Elizabeth Whitlock, whose work focuses on delirium and perioperative brain health. They explore the emerging role of intraoperative processed EEG monitoring and its potential to improve postoperative neurological outcomes. This discussio...

if you have any feedback, please send us a text! Thank you! Today’s episode features a truly special conversation with Dr. Diana Ramos , California Surgeon General, and Dr. Calvin Johnson , Professor of Anesthesiology—both dedicated advocates for improving maternal health. Dr. Ramos is a distinguished public health leader who earned her medical degree from the Keck School of Medicine at USC and co...

if you have any feedback, please send us a text! Thank you! Welcome to another episode of the CSA’s Podcast Vital Times  In September 2025, a landmark ruling by a California judge stated that nonphysicians could not use the term “Doctor” in a clinical setting. This was a ruling in response to a lawsuit filed by Three California-based nurse practitioners. They challenged California Business and Pro...

if you have any feedback, please send us a text! Thank you! Dr. J.W. Beard, a UCSF-trained anesthesiologist and Chief Medical Officer of GE Healthcare’s Patient Care Solutions division, joins the Vital Times podcast to discuss his remarkable career journey. As a member of the Board of the Anesthesia Patient Safety Foundation, Dr. Beard shares how his background in anesthesiology uniquely prepared...

if you have any feedback, please send us a text! Thank you! The CSA and the Vital Times podcast are proud to recognize Dr. Ana Maria Crawford of Stanford University, recipient of the 2025 ASA Nicholas Greene, MD Award for Outstanding Humanitarian Contribution. In this episode, host Dr. Ludwig Lin speaks with Dr. Crawford about her decades-long commitment to advancing global health. To learn more a...

if you have any feedback, please send us a text! Thank you! Dr. Ludwig Lin of the CSA Vital Times Podcast sits down with Dr. Adjoa Boateng Evans , a former Stanford ICU and anesthesia attending and now faculty at Duke University School of Medicine to discuss her pioneering work in bringing Humanities and personal expression into academic anesthesiology. She shares how this approach can help health...

if you have any feedback, please send us a text! Thank you! Dr. Jason Leong began his career as a night-shift nurse in the emergency department, quickly advancing to the role of charge nurse. Determined to further his impact in patient care, he went on to attend medical school at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York. He then completed a combined Internal Medicine and Anesthesiology resi...

if you have any feedback, please send us a text! Thank you! Welcome to another episode of Vital Times , the CSA podcast! I'm your host, Dr. Rita Agarwal, and today we’re revisiting an important topic: mentorship . We've discussed mentoring before, but its significance in the lives and careers of anesthesiologists makes it worth exploring again. Strong mentorship can have a transformative...

if you have any feedback, please send us a text! Thank you! In this episode of the CSA Vital Times podcast, host Dr. Ludwig Lin explores the role of Certified Anesthesiologist Assistants (CAAs). He speaks with anesthesiologists who have experience working alongside CAAs and navigating the legislative efforts to establish a CAA system in clinical practice. The episode also features a CAA who is a l...

if you have any feedback, please send us a text! Thank you! Catch this episode where *both* of the Vital Times podcast hosts, Drs. Rita Agarwal and Ludwig Lin, show up, and discuss how they fell in love with Anesthesiology, and podcasting.

if you have any feedback, please send us a text! Thank you! We were all shocked by the murder of Brian Thompson the United Health Care CEO in early December. What was just as surprising was the comments deny, delay and depose written on the bullets. Once the alleged shooter was arrested, information started to trickle out that he suffered from low back pain and spondylisthesis. Speculation ran ram...

if you have any feedback, please send us a text! Thank you! For Black History Month, Dr. Ludwig Lin is honored to speak with someone who’s been through all of it. Dr. Marilyn Hill Harper, raised in the South, educated at a HBCU and then training in the Midwest, joined the prestigious UCSF faculty in the 1970s, at a time when both women and Black physicians were rare. Her story is ever relevant. To...

if you have any feedback, please send us a text! Thank you! Host: Rita Agarwal, MD, FAAP, FASA Guests: Rakhi Dayal, MD, and Amber Borucki, MD Welcome to another episode of Vital Times, the California Society of Anesthesiologists’ Podcast with your host Dr. Rita Agarwal. Pain is the most common reason that people seek medical care and since the beginning of time, we have searched for better ways to...

if you have any feedback, please send us a text! Thank you! There have been a lot of questions recently regarding the appropriateness of patients scheduled for care in an ambulatory surgical center (ASCs). It appears that sicker and more complex patients are being scheduled for care in an ASC, and many anesthesiologists are increasingly concerned about the safety of anesthetizing these patients in...

if you have any feedback, please send us a text! Thank you! Drs. Charles Hummel and Jason Cheng explain the origin story behind their involvement in founding the drive toward collegiality for a major healthcare system in California, Kaiser Permanente.  Take a listen and be inspired by the immense possibilities when physicians join forces in the name of empathy and humanity.

if you have any feedback, please send us a text! Thank you! Your host Dr. Rita Agarwal is joined today by two outstanding guests who have an interest in preventing and treating women’s pain. Drs. Anita Gupta and Stephanie Cizek.  At the California Society of Anesthesiologists’ Annual Meeting in Anaheim, in April 2024, there were several posters authored by Dr. Anita Gupta looking at the literature...

if you have any feedback, please send us a text! Thank you! Your host Dr. Rita Agarwal is joined by two wonderful guests to talk about climate change and what anesthesiologists can do about it. Climate change is one of the defining challenges of our time with far reaching implications. There is evidence of the increasing numbers of deaths directly related to heat in the USA, but even more across t...

if you have any feedback, please send us a text! Thank you! With ketamine being very prominent in the news recently, lots of questions arise about its use. Is it safe enough to be used the way it is? Why are patients being prescribed it? What are the safety guidelines, and are they being met? The California Society of Anesthesiologists’ Vital Times Podcast talks with anesthesiologists and pain spe...

if you have any feedback, please send us a text! Thank you! Cryoneurolysis has rapidly evolved and refined itself as a viable technology for postoperative and chronic pain. Its specifications mean greater efficacy for certain scenarios, and active research means its application is about to enter warp-speed. In this episode of Vital Times, we speak with Dr. John Finneran, of UCSD, who is actively c...

if you have any feedback, please send us a text! Thank you! Welcome to another episode of Vital Times the CSA Podcast. I am your host, Rita Agarwal. For this episode we went back to the basics and talked about something that all anesthesiologists care deeply about – managing the challenging airway. Joining me is a former colleague and friend who is an attending anesthesiologist at one of the busie...

if you have any feedback, please send us a text! Thank you! Dr. Ludwig Lin has a blast discussing LGBTQ and its impact on various anesthesiologist leaders within academia and politics; drop in and listen to them discuss how this one element of their lives adds meaning and purpose to all of their pursuits. This episode features Travis Reece-Nguyen, MD, Arthur Chyan, DO, and Maricela Sanchez, MD. 

if you have any feedback, please send us a text! Thank you! There has been much noise about famous scientists reckoning with past publications with data integrity issues. The pressures of “publish or perish”, and the need for oversight of a busy lab, are tricky. Dr. Lin talks with Harriet Hopf, MD, FASA, and Elizabeth Whitlock, MD - two lauded NIH-funded anesthesiologists-scientists to get the sco...