Unsatisfied Just Learning Medicine, These Students Became Journalists, Too

The case for the physician-journalist The Takeaways: * One important responsibility that doctors can and should take on is to educate their communities on health issues. * Learning how to do this in medical school can be as easy as collaborating with your university news paper.* Plus, our advice for a young mother and wife whose med student husband will be away during third year: plan, iterate and empathize. In 2018, CCOM M4 Pavane Gorrepati launched The Doctor Is In, a recurring column in The Daily Iowan, the University of Iowa’s newspaper. The goals were to give all healthcare students an opportunity to publish science and opinion pieces, to bridge the divide between our undergrad and grad campuses by focusing on health-related issues that are relevant to the undergraduate population, and to give students experience on how they might convey complex topics to the general public through the popular press. Pavane and her successor M2 Vijay Kamalumpundi join us for a discussion on this very successful endeavor and what they’ve learned. Among the things COVID has taught us is the importance of understanding complex topics! But first, offer some advice to a nervous med student’s wife who will be spending a significant time apart from her spouse during his third year. MD/PhD student Aline Sandouk, and M2s Nicole Hines, Sarah Costello, and AJ Chowdhury offer some ideas on how they might cope with the separation and make sure their very young children don’t miss their dad too much. We Want to Hear From You How’d we do on this week’s show? Did we miss anything in our conversation? Did we anger you?