Bedside Rounds

Adam Rodman, MD, MPH, FACP
  • 4.8 (415)
  • MEDICINE
Bedside Rounds

Bedside Rounds is a storytelling podcast about medical history and medicine’s intersections with society and culture. Host Adam Rodman seeks to tell a few of these weird, wonderful, and intensely human stories that have made modern medicine.

  1. 09/03/2023

    74 - R2D2

    What does it mean when a computer can make better medical decisions than a human? The progress in large language models, and in particular the popularity of ChatGPT, has brought these questions to the forefront in 2023, but we’ve been discussing this for over 50 years. In this episode, Dr. Shani Herzig and I are going all the way back to the early 1970s with the invention of AAPHELP, the first real clinical decision support system, and the first time doctors had to contemplate working with – or competing against – computer systems.

    33 min

  2. 06/26/2023

    73 - Seadragon

    What happens when a patient far from surgical care – say, at the bottom of the Pacific ocean on a submarine, or at a research base in Antarctica in the middle of the winter – develops a surgical abdomen? This dilemma was the impetus to build the first truly effective clinical decision support system – and to grapple with what it means when a computer can make better medical decisions than a doctor. In this episode, part one of three, we discuss the dramatic stories of appendectomies at Novolazarevskaya and aboard the submarine Seadragon. Also, there’s a brand new #AdamAnswers about the origin of the word “scut.”

    28 min

  3. 03/20/2023

    72 - Problems

    American doctors spend the majority of their time during the day on the computer, either writing or reading notes about their patients; only a small fraction is spent with the human beings in their care. Technology itself – especially the electronic medical record – has often been blamed for this. But in this episode – a recorded grand rounds that I gave at the San Francisco VA in 2022 – I argue that this alienation has its roots in the way we’ve decided to organize clinical data, and the assumptions that we’ve made about the nature of medical care. In particular, I’m going to discuss one of the most influential medical thinkers of the second half of the 20th century, Larry Weed, his invention of the problem-oriented medical record and the SOAP note, and how his insight – that medical documentation fundamentally influences how we think about our patients – changed the way we think about our patients.

    52 min

  4. 01/16/2023

    71 - A Doctor's Work, part 2

    In the past episode, cultural and medical historians Lakshmi Krishnan and Mike Neuss discussed the history of the actual work of the doctor – Holmesian detective, data entry clerk, or something else altogether. In this episode, we conclude our discussion by talking about what type of metaphors are best suited for clinical work. Plus a brand new #AdamAnswers about the reason that American doctors are so obsessed with using, well, the # symbol in our notes.

    38 min

  5. 12/19/2022

    70 - A Doctor's Work

    What do doctors actually do? Are they Sherlockian detectives, hunting down obscure clues to solve intractable cases? Are they virtuosic experts, training for half a lifetime to bring the latest science to bear to cure disease? Or are they clerks, whose main job is to collect and enter data into the electronic health record? In this episode, Adam is joined by medical and cultural historians Lakshmi Krishnan and Mike Neuss to discuss the stories we tell about our own work – and how this often conflicts with the realities of clinical practice.

    49 min

  6. 10/31/2022

    69 - The Database

    How do doctors actually think? And if we can answer that, can we train a computer to do a better job? In the post-WW2 period, a group of iconoclastic physicians set about to redefine the nature and structure of clinical reasoning and tried to build a diagnostic machine. Though they would ultimately fail, their failure set the stage for the birth of the electronic health records, formalized the review of systems, and set up a metacognitive conflict that remains unresolved to this day. This episode, entitled “The Database,” is the second part of this on the history of diagnosis with Gurpreet Dhaliwal.

    49 min

  7. 07/25/2022

    68 - The History

    Internal medicine physicians like to pride ourselves on our clinical reasoning – the ability to talk to any patient, pluck out seemingly random bits of information, and make a mystery diagnosis. But how does this actually work? In this episode, called The History, I’ll be joined by Gurpreet Dhaliwal as we explore the beginnings of our understanding on how clinical reasoning works – starting in the middle of the 19th century with polar tensions between two ways of approaching our patients that are still felt today. Along the way, we’ll talk about the American Civil War, Car Talk, Sherlock Holmes, and whether the practice of medicine can ever be considered a science. Sign up for Digital Education 2022 here: https://cmecatalog.hms.harvard.edu/digital-education Sources: Fitzgerald F, Curiosity. https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/full/10.7326/0003-4819-130-1-199901050-00015 Montgomery K, How Doctors Thinks (amazon link: https://www.amazon.com/How-Doctors-Think-Clinical-Judgment/dp/0195187121) Da Costa J, Medical Diagnosis, 1864. https://openlibrary.org/books/OL23402241M/Medical_diagnosis

    40 min

  8. 06/07/2022

    The Facemaker with Dr. Lindsey Fitzharris (#histmedconsultservice)

    Modern plastic surgery was born out of the horrors of trench warfare in World War I. In this episode, Adam interviews historian Lindsey Fitzharris about her new book The Facemaker, about the life of surgeon Harold Gillies and his quest to rebuild his patients' faces.

    52 min
See All (86)

Hosts & Guests

4.8
out of 5
415 Ratings

About

Bedside Rounds is a storytelling podcast about medical history and medicine’s intersections with society and culture. Host Adam Rodman seeks to tell a few of these weird, wonderful, and intensely human stories that have made modern medicine.

Information

  • Creator
    Adam Rodman, MD, MPH, FACP
  • Years Active
    2014 - 2023
  • Episodes
    86
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Copyright Adam Rodman 2015-2024
  • Show Website
    Bedside Rounds

You Might Also Like

To listen to explicit episodes, sign in.

Stay up to date with this show

Sign in or sign up to follow shows, save episodes, and get the latest updates.
Select a country or region

Africa, Middle East, and India

Asia Pacific

Europe

Latin America and the Caribbean

The United States and Canada