Common Sense Medicine

Robin O. Winter, MD, MMM has been Director of the JFK Family Medicine Residency Program since 1989. Board certified in both Family
Medicine and Geriatric Medicine, Dr. Winter earned a Master of Medical Management degree at Carnegie Mellon University. He is Medical Director of JFK Hartwyck Nursing, Convalescent and Rehabilitation
Centers, and sits on their Board. Dr. Winter is Professor and Founding Chair of the Department of Family Medicine for Hackensack Meridian School of Medicine at Seton Hall University. He is also a Clinical Professor in the Department of Family Medicine and Community Health at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School and an Associate Professor at St. George’s University School of Medicine.

Wendell Cole, M.D. is a current Orthopaedic Surgery resident. He graduated from Morehouse School of Medicine in 2018 at the age of 24, and graduated from Georgia State University with a B.S in Biology in 2014. 

Rashi Aggarwal, MD, is an Associate Professor and Program Director of Residency Training, and a Consultation Liaison Psychiatrist in the Department of Psychiatry at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School in Newark, New Jersey. Dr. Aggarwal is an active researcher in the fields of stigma, resident empathy and wellness, IMG education, training and acculturation and addiction disorders in consult-liaison setting and has published extensively in these fields. 

Vishal Khetpal is a third-year medical student from Oklahoma attending the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University. Before coming to Brown, Vishal earned a bachelor’s degree in anthropology from Washington University in St. Louis in 2015, and a master’s degree in global health from the London School of Economics in 2016. He is also a freelance writer, dissecting topics related to culture, politics, and health. He regularly contributes essays to Slate Magazine, and has also written for outlets such as TONIC (VICE’s health vertical), STAT News, and the Huffington Post in the past. He hopes to pursue a career involving medical practice, public policy, and writing for general audiences about meaningful health issues.

Biju Parekkadan is a Professor of Biomedical Engineering with a laboratory that specializes in cell, gene, and tissue engineering.

In which Shree talks to Dr. G. Keith Smith, an anesthesiologist who likes to think about mutually beneficial transfers, free market medicine, and accessibility to care. He runs a Surgery Center in Oklahoma which has revolutionized price transparency in healthcare.

In which Shree talks to Kim Sertich, a filmmaker who owns a production company in Phoenix, Arizona. She recently made a documentary about how the current healthcare system had failed her, called “Healthcare Unmasked” streaming on amazon.com. Her website is healthcareunmasked.com

Questions Covered:

• What is the documentary about and how did you get insured beforehand?
• Why did you choose the faith based program and what are the different options if you didn’t want to do a faith based program?
• Why did you choose the documentary form to convince people and do you think it worked/benefits out of the process itself?
• As a medical/college student, how do you balance the time between work and filming?
• What makes a good questions and how do you elicit a good response?
• Taking me through a day of documentary research, and thought process through each thing?
• Did you feel that you arrived at journalism or did you want to go into journalism from the get go?
• How was meeting the president?
• What are your next plans?
• How does this conversation relate to younger audiences?
• How do hospital mergers affect the career of physicians? Should they become entrepreneurs?
• What was the best/worst thing of the whole process and why was it so good/bad?
• How long did it take to complete the documentary?
• What exactly was the timeline between when you started and ended?
• How long did you think it was going to take to film the documentary?
• Before you started the interviews, how long did you research the interviews?
• What did you learn at the end of the process?
• What gets you up out of bed in the morning?
• What would be her three wishes?

In which Shree talks to Dr. Molly Rutherford, a Direct Primary Care Physician and Addiction Treatment Specialist 

Questions Covered:

• What is Direct Primary Care? Why did you choose Direct Primary Care?
• What is different between direct primary care and the system which requires an ICD code?
• What was your breaking point when you realized that this system didn’t work for you?
• How does insurance play into your practice?
• Why aren’t more doctors aware of how the system works and how can we spread the word?
• What bad recommendations do you hear on rounds?
• In this climate, when there are a lot of hospital mergers, how difficult is it to stat your own practice?
• How do you manage your work-life balance as a busy doctor?
• How did it feel when you first got started in the business?
• How can you communicate with patients via email?

In which Shree talks to Dr. Christopher Sonnenday, a very accomplished transplant surgeon. We talk about books, his interest in surgery, and surgical research.

Questions covered:

• Why did you like surgery?
• What are the new hot topics in transplant surgery?
• Where is your role in the research that you had mentioned?
• What is quality and what are outcomes in transplant surgery?
• How was your training at Hopkins like?
• How did you deal with patient distrust?
• Are there any regrets that you have when you went through your medical school experience?
• Is medicine an art or a science? How much uncertainty is there in medicine?
• Who were your medical mentors?
• What gets you out of bed in the morning?

In which Shree talks to Dr. Abraham Nussbaum, a physician and a writer. We talk about his experience in AmeriCorps, reading, and knowing how he wanted to become a doctor.

Questions Covered:

• Why did you write your book and what is it about
• What books have had the most impact on your life?
• What made you change your mind and choose being a physician when you were with Americorps?
• What is slow medicine and how can we get back to it?
• How should we adopt the holistic model of medicine?
• What advice would you give to a medical student at the start of their career?
• What was your eureka moment when you knew you had to do medicine? Isn’t it a catch 22 that you have to know that you want to do nothing else but you have to go through the process to love it?
• How to cultivate love of writing?
• What is his “reading cure” (Reading books for 6 min per day)?
• Why did he choose psychiatry?
• How can we let physicians be physicians?
• Why do you get up in the morning?
• How to choose specialty when we have so much looming debt