Critical Care

Host: Jennifer Caudle, DO

Guest: Todd Askew

What’s being done to address the range of issues like the PPE shortage, lack of testing, and financial shortfalls encountered during the COVID-19 pandemic? Here to share his team’s advocacy efforts to help tackle these and other challenges is Todd Askew, the American Medical Association's Senior Vice President of Advocacy.

Host: Tom Corbridge, MD, FCCP

Guest: Gary T. Ferguson, MD, F.C.C.P

Listen in as Dr. Tom Corbridge and Dr. Gary Ferguson discuss the challenges physicians and patients face when there is an underreporting of COPD symptoms. Together, they’ll also explore the ways physicians can overcome these obstacles and give their patients the appropriate treatment.

This episode is supported in part by an unrestricted/independent medical educational grant from GlaxoSmithKline.

Host: Mario R. Nacinovich, Jr., MSc

Guest: Randy Young, MD

Here to give us a firsthand look into how ICUs across the country are confronting the COVID-19 pandemic head-on is Dr. Randy Young, a critical care doctor who’s treating COVID-19 patients in the mid-Atlantic area. Dr. Young joins Mario Nacinovich to discuss what he has seen during the pandemic and how the ICU is responding to both expected and unexpected challenges.

Published May 13, 2020

Host: Matt Birnholz, MD

Guest: Wes Ely, MD, MPH

After surviving a critical illness, many patients look forward to their lives returning to normal, but unfortunately, that’s not always possible.

To uncover the far-reaching impacts of delirium, Dr. Matt Birnholz is joined by Dr. Wes Ely, Professor of Medicine and Co-Director of the Center for Critical Illness, Brain Dysfunction and Survivorship Center at Vanderbilt University’s School of Medicine which focuses on improving the lives and care of patients in the intensive care unit to ensure both physical and cognitive rehabilitation.

Host: Jennifer Caudle, DO

Tune in as Dr. Jennifer Caudle provides an update on suicide rates in the United States.

Host: Brian P. McDonough, MD, FAAFP

Palliative and hospice care both have very important roles in healthcare, but unfortunately, they are often overlooked as resources.

Dr. Brian McDonough is joined by Chief Medical Officer of Samaritan Healthcare & Hospice Dr. Stephen Goldfine, who offers his perspective on the stigma surrounding these two areas of healthcare and recommendations on how to make the conversation easier for you and your patients.

Host: Maurice Pickard, MD

Guest: Bob Mitchell

Quite suddenly, Bob Mitchell became very sick. He would endure three near-fatal episodes of ventricular tachycardia due to a heart muscle comprised of 54% scar tissue, as well as heart surgeries, two harrowing months of waiting on the transplant list for a new heart on life-supporting IV drips (during which time a malignant tumor was detected in his kidney), partial nephrectomy surgery to remove the cancer, another month of waiting, a 12-hour heart and kidney transplant surgery, and 100 days on life support in four different hospitals.

Host Dr. Maurice Pickard talks with novelist Bob Mitchell, author of Time for a Heart-to-Heart: Reflections on Life in the Face of Death about his inspiring story of the triumph of hope in the face of the direst of circumstances.

Host: John Russell, MD

As a young critical care physician, Dr. Rana Awdish was transfigured from a doctor into a critically ill patient in an instant. This transposition, coincidentally timed at the end of her medical training, instantly laid bare the vast chasm between the conventional practice of medicine and the stark reality of the prostrate patient.

Host Dr. John Russell chats with Dr. Rana Awdish about this transformation and how she came to understand the fatal flaws in her profession, from her own past actions as a physician to the perils of navigating her own illness. She presents a new paradigm and rationale for embracing the emotional bond between doctor and patient and outlines the redemptive possibilities of dismantling the barriers to connection in all relationships.

Dr. Awdish is the author of In Shock: My Journey from Death to Recovery and the Redemptive Power of Hope and Director of the Pulmonary Hypertension Program at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit.

Host: John Russell, MD

Host Dr. Russell sits down with Dr. Steven Hatch, an infectious disease specialist and author of the book, Inferno: a Doctor's Ebola Story, about his experience in Liberia during the heart of the Ebola crisis.

Dr. Steven Hatch first came to Liberia in November 2013, to work at a hospital in Monrovia. Six months later, several of the physicians Dr. Hatch had mentored and served with were dead or barely clinging to life, and Ebola had become a world health emergency. Hundreds of victims perished each week; whole families were destroyed in a matter of days; so many died so quickly that the culturally taboo practice of cremation had to be instituted to dispose of the bodies. With little help from the international community and a population ravaged by disease and fear, the war-torn African nation was simply unprepared to deal with the catastrophe.

A physician’s memoir about the ravages of a terrible disease and the small hospital that fought to contain it, Inferno is also an explanation of the science and biology of Ebola: how it is transmitted and spreads with such ferocity. And as Dr. Hatch notes, while Ebola is temporarily under control, it will inevitably re-emerge―as will …

Host: John Russell, MD

What if Americans put aside their differences and worked together to fix America's broken healthcare system? What changes need to be made in order to make health care both accessible and affordable without compromising excellent quality of care standards for patients? These and other crucial questions form premise behind the book We CAN Fix Healthcare: The Future is NOW.

Host Dr. John Russell sits down with Dr. Stephen Klasko, President and CEO of Jefferson University and Jefferson Health and author of We CAN Fix Healthcare: The Future is NOW.