Southern Medicine

Prior to the COVID-19 (SARS-CoV2) pandemic, vaping-related illness was the prevailing public health concern. The incidence of vaping related illnesses mainly e-cigarette, or vaping, product use–associated lung injury (EVALI) declined with the arrival of COVID 19 but EVALI should still be considered as a differential diagnosis for people with COVID-19 for reasons outlined in this review.

This narrative review describes vaping devices, summarizes the adverse health effects of vaping on the lungs and other systems, considers the potential interplay between vaping and COVID-19, and highlights gaps in knowledge about vaping that warrant further research.

Renal disease affects 15% of the US adult population and is considered an under-recognized health crisis with significant morbidity and mortality. In this introduction to a multipart podcast series, Dr. Benjamin Broom, a nephrologist with Nephrology Associates in Birmingham, Alabama, is joined by Drs. Elizabeth Edwards and Donald DiPette, both of whom are on faculty in the department of internal medicine at the University of South Carolina in Columbia. They will offer healthcare providers an overview of conditions that can warrant a nephrology referral as well as provide insight into collaboration among providers when referring a patient.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, clinical care of patients and undergraduate medical education faced substantive challenges. Many traditional patient-physician and family-physician interactions were no longer possible, and alternative, often virtual, methods of communications were required to be devised. The existing challenges of transition of care from inpatient to outpatient treatment for many patients were exacerbated with the physical and communication restraints. The authors of this article analyzed this vital "transition of care" and identified an opportunity to improve medical student education with a special elective that addressed enhanced methods for improving the transition of care of patients within the restrictions of the pandemic. A joint clinical faculty/medical student team developed a student elective wherein the students actively participated in its design and implementation, thus filling an identified gap in the undergraduate curriculum, which adds value to the educational effort through an innovative process in an on-going manner. The authors describe their elective in this podcast. The targeted audiences include medical students, resident physicians, academic faculty, clinical faculty, and institutional medical educators.

Surveys are commonly used in medical education, yet educators and researchers often fail to follow best practices for survey design, administration, and reporting in manuscripts. In this podcast, Drs. Tanya Nikiforova and Emmanuelle Yecies discuss the evidence and expert-supported best practices for designing and reporting on surveys in medical education research, a topic they and coauthors Drs. Andrea Carter and Carla L. Spagnoletti address in an upcoming article in the Southern Medical Journal.

In this podcast, Dr. Christopher Jackson shares an inside view on the residency match and recent changes to the application process in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. He additionally discusses his role as a clinician educator in shaping the training experience for internal medicine residents at UTHSC.

This podcast explores the motivating factors for a physician experiencing "Joy in Practice", a topic that will also be addressed in an upcoming issue of the Southern Medical Journal. Join Matthew Du, a third-year medical student at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine as he details how this study used a bit different approach to the topic of satisfaction with one's practice; instead of addressing the commonly studied concept of "burn-out," he and his coauthors, Drs. Zhoy Jung Tak and John Yoon, utilized the novel concept of why physicians experience joy in practice. The authors' study utilized validated physician well-being measures, and tested the concept of joy in practice with certain intrinsic and extrinsic factors. The authors believe that there is promise in addressing joy in practice as a marker of physician well-being, and offer primary and secondary outcomes from the study as insightful into the perspectives from a national physician survey.

Join Dr. Doris Lin as she discusses the readiness of hospitalists to assess and evaluate resident progress, a topic on which she has written an article for the April 2021 issue of the Southern Medical Journal. In this podcast, she also explores the role of faculty development in the evaluative process, as well as provides strategies to help hospitalists assess and evaluate trainee progress. In addition, she offers insight regarding the current state of evaluation of learners and where it could be headed in the near future.

Join Drs. Tracey Dabal and Christopher Jackson as they discuss the safety of baricitinib for the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis, a topic they address in their article that will appear in the May 2021 issue of the Southern Medical Journal. In this podcast, they talk about why they chose to perform their safety-focused meta-analysis and what results were the most surprising to them. They also provide insight into how the findings could impact practice. Additionally, the two of them share their perspective on submitting and having published a research article, as well as touch on the various aspects involved with the publication process.

In this podcast, we are joined once again by Dr. Philip Hartman. He is also a past president of the Southern Medical Association.

The podcast will cover the COVID-19 vaccine which Dr. Hartman has received and he will discuss his opinions on the vaccine, as well as what his thoughts are for the vaccine and the community at large. Lastly he will offer insight into possible vaccination strategies as the vaccine is made available to the public.

In this podcast, Dr. Everett Magann discusses prophylactic transfusion during pregnancy for women with sickle cell disease. Dr. Magann is the corresponding author of an article appearing in the April 2021 issue of the Southern Medical Journal that addresses this topic.