A Mere Mortal Dr. Steven Schlozman wasn't terribly surprised when an insurance company rejected his request to prescribe a new treatment for a patient. And, as usual, he expected to spend personal time sitting on hold waiting to appeal the decision. But what startled him was the conversation that took place when he finally got through to a live human being. In this podcast, Schlozman—a 1994 graduate of the Brown-Dartmouth Program in Medicine—recounts what happened in this "rare and truly honest ...
Jun 18, 2009•6 min
Dartmouth undergrad examines opioid death toll Conducting the first comprehensive analysis of prescription opioid-related deaths in New Hampshire presented some special challenges for Laura Hester, a geography major in the Dartmouth College Class of 2009. It involved driving an hour each way from Hanover, N.H., to the Chief Medical Examiner's Office in Concord almost every other day for two months in the winter. It required combing through the 1,500 death certificates from 2003 to 2007 that were...
Jun 18, 2009•6 min
Talking about health-care reform Everyone—from the Obama administration to your friends and neighbors—is talking about health-care reform. So in the Summer 2009 issue of Dartmouth Medicine magazine, alumni of Dartmouth Medical School from across the country answered questions about their practices and the changes they'd like to see made to the nation's health-care system. To find out more about what Americans who are patients rather than physicians are saying on this topic, Dartmouth Medicine sp...
Jun 18, 2009•7 min
Surviving cancer P.J. Hamel, a senior editor at King Arthur Flour Company, headquartered in Norwich, Vt., describes herself professionally as a "baker and blogger." She writes the King Arthur catalog, creates recipes, has written cookbooks, and blogs about baking on the company's website. And personally Hamel is, among many other roles, a cancer survivor--she was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2001 and over the next nine months had surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation therapy at Dartmouth-Hitch...
Mar 11, 2009•14 min
A Patron of Positivity The summer after her first year of medical school, Dr. Julia Nordgren worked with Dr. Judy Frank, conducting research and shadowing Frank on rounds in the neonatal intensive care unit. What she learned from Frank changed her outlook on both medicine and life. "Judy Frank was clearly no ordinary woman in medicine," Nordgren says. In this podcast, originally published as an essay in the Spring 2009 issue of Dartmouth Medicine, Nordgren reflects on how her experiences that su...
Mar 11, 2009•7 min
Lee Witters discusses the discovery of insulin One early prescription for diabetes involved drinking a pint and a half of milk for breakfast, eating rancid meat for dinner, and using hog's lard as skin lotion. Actually, explains Dr. Lee Witters, this treatment did some good simply by causing patients to eat less (no one likes rancid meat, after all). The discovery of insulin, which paved the way for more effective diabetes treatments, was one of the great advances in medical history, and it make...
Dec 15, 2008•58 min
An interview with Dr. James Bernat, a history of DHMC's ethics committee, and more information on advance directives Dr. James Bernat, an internationally recognized medical ethicist, is a professor of neurology at Dartmouth Medical School and head of the Ethics Committee at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center. In 1997, and again in 2006, Bernat was one of several scholars invited to Rome to advise the Vatican on how to define death. Reporters from prominent media outlets--from the New York Times ...
Dec 15, 2008•21 min
Discovering New Darwins Charles Darwin was lucky. Without the financial support of his family, all of his powers of observation and analysis might have gone for naught. Today, of course, most scientists do not depend on their families to fund their research. Instead, the U.S. federal government began investing heavily in science in the mid-20th century. As a result, says Dr. Ethan Dmitrovsky, the United States has been a leader in the biomedical revolution. Dmitrovsky, a DMS professor of pharmac...
Dec 15, 2008•8 min
Getting, and getting used to, a cochlear implant Geneva Durgin was 13 months old when she heard sound for the first time through a cochlear implant. Before the implant, she couldn't hear anything, even with hearing aids. Although Geneva spent the first year of her life in silence, she thrived developmentally, thanks in large part to sign language instruction and early intervention from the Vermont Center for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing. Geneva's parents decided to get a cochlear implant for her...
Sep 19, 2008•13 min
José Conejo-Garcia talks about his discovery of PILAR The immune system protects us from a host of pathogens, but in some cases it's actually the cause of health problems. T cells, a type of white blood cell that is a key player in the immune system, become activated when they encounter antigens. Usually, those antigens are signs that a pathogen is trying to get a foothold in the body, so the response of T cells is essential to fighting off disease. But when the antigen is actually a self-antige...
Sep 19, 2008•10 min
Inside Waste Management at DHMC Over 2,500 tons of trash pass through the waste management room at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center each year. Practicing good environmental stewardship while processing so much trash—some of it hazardous—requires a well-thought-out system. This is a web extra to an article that appeared in the Summer 2007 issue of Dartmouth Medicine Magazine. To read the article, go to: http://dartmed.dartmouth.edu/summer07/html/green.php
Jul 25, 2007•3 min
Scenes from a Dartmouth Visit to Vietnam Last spring, the director of DMS's biomedical libraries, William Garrity, led a group of volunteers to Vietnam to launch the RICE pilot project. RICE, which stands for "remote interaction, consultation, and epidemiology," employs smartphones (such as the BlackBerry) to improve communication between rural health providers and the larger, central hospitals. This is a web extra to an article that appeared in the Summer 2007 issue of Dartmouth Medicine Magazi...
Jul 25, 2007•3 min
A Q&A with Dr. John Modlin about Enteroviruses Dr. John Modlin, an international expert in childhood infectious diseases, is the chair the Department of Pediatrics at DHMC and a professor of pediatrics (infectious disease) and of medicine at DMS. He is the former chair of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices; has served on many other influential national committees and advisory groups; and has authored more than 150 papers on the devel...
Jul 25, 2007•2 min
A Q&A with Dr. John Modlin about Enteroviruses Dr. John Modlin, an international expert in childhood infectious diseases, is the chair the Department of Pediatrics at DHMC and a professor of pediatrics (infectious disease) and of medicine at DMS. He is the former chair of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices; has served on many other influential national committees and advisory groups; and has authored more than 150 papers on the devel...
Jul 25, 2007•1 min
A Q&A with Dr. John Modlin about Enteroviruses Dr. John Modlin, an international expert in childhood infectious diseases, is the chair the Department of Pediatrics at DHMC and a professor of pediatrics (infectious disease) and of medicine at DMS. He is the former chair of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices; has served on many other influential national committees and advisory groups; and has authored more than 150 papers on the devel...
Jul 25, 2007•2 min
A Q&A with Dr. John Modlin about Enteroviruses Dr. John Modlin, an international expert in childhood infectious diseases, is the chair the Department of Pediatrics at DHMC and a professor of pediatrics (infectious disease) and of medicine at DMS. He is the former chair of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices; has served on many other influential national committees and advisory groups; and has authored more than 150 papers on the devel...
Jul 25, 2007•5 min
A Q&A with Dr. John Modlin about Enteroviruses Dr. John Modlin, an international expert in childhood infectious diseases, is the chair the Department of Pediatrics at DHMC and a professor of pediatrics (infectious disease) and of medicine at DMS. He is the former chair of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices; has served on many other influential national committees and advisory groups; and has authored more than 150 papers on the devel...
Jul 25, 2007•3 min
A Q&A with Dr. John Modlin about Enteroviruses Dr. John Modlin, an international expert in childhood infectious diseases, is the chair the Department of Pediatrics at DHMC and a professor of pediatrics (infectious disease) and of medicine at DMS. He is the former chair of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices; has served on many other influential national committees and advisory groups; and has authored more than 150 papers on the devel...
Jul 25, 2007•2 min
A Q&A with Dr. John Modlin about Enteroviruses Dr. John Modlin, an international expert in childhood infectious diseases, is the chair the Department of Pediatrics at DHMC and a professor of pediatrics (infectious disease) and of medicine at DMS. He is the former chair of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices; has served on many other influential national committees and advisory groups; and has authored more than 150 papers on the devel...
Jul 25, 2007•3 min
A Q&A with Dr. Jack Wennberg about the Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care Project John Wennberg, M.D., Ph.D., is the founding director of Dartmouth's Center for the Evaluative Clinical Sciences (CECS) and the Peggy Y. Thomson Professor of the Evaluative Clinical Sciences. CECS was established in 1989 and is the locus for a diverse group of scientists and clinician-scholars who conduct cutting edge research on critical medical and health issues with the goal of measuring, organizing, and improvin...
Mar 22, 2007•2 min
A Q&A with Dr. Jack Wennberg about the Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care Project John Wennberg, M.D., Ph.D., is the founding director of Dartmouth's Center for the Evaluative Clinical Sciences (CECS) and the Peggy Y. Thomson Professor of the Evaluative Clinical Sciences. CECS was established in 1989 and is the locus for a diverse group of scientists and clinician-scholars who conduct cutting edge research on critical medical and health issues with the goal of measuring, organizing, and improvin...
Mar 22, 2007•5 min
A Q&A with Dr. Jack Wennberg about the Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care Project John Wennberg, M.D., Ph.D., is the founding director of Dartmouth's Center for the Evaluative Clinical Sciences (CECS) and the Peggy Y. Thomson Professor of the Evaluative Clinical Sciences. CECS was established in 1989 and is the locus for a diverse group of scientists and clinician-scholars who conduct cutting edge research on critical medical and health issues with the goal of measuring, organizing, and improvin...
Mar 22, 2007•4 min
A Q&A with Dr. Jack Wennberg about the Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care Project John Wennberg, M.D., Ph.D., is the founding director of Dartmouth's Center for the Evaluative Clinical Sciences (CECS) and the Peggy Y. Thomson Professor of the Evaluative Clinical Sciences. CECS was established in 1989 and is the locus for a diverse group of scientists and clinician-scholars who conduct cutting edge research on critical medical and health issues with the goal of measuring, organizing, and improvin...
Mar 22, 2007•3 min
A Q&A with Dr. Jack Wennberg about the Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care Project John Wennberg, M.D., Ph.D., is the founding director of Dartmouth's Center for the Evaluative Clinical Sciences (CECS) and the Peggy Y. Thomson Professor of the Evaluative Clinical Sciences. CECS was established in 1989 and is the locus for a diverse group of scientists and clinician-scholars who conduct cutting edge research on critical medical and health issues with the goal of measuring, organizing, and improvin...
Mar 22, 2007•5 min
A Q&A with Dr. Jack Wennberg about the Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care Project John Wennberg, M.D., Ph.D., is the founding director of Dartmouth's Center for the Evaluative Clinical Sciences (CECS) and the Peggy Y. Thomson Professor of the Evaluative Clinical Sciences. CECS was established in 1989 and is the locus for a diverse group of scientists and clinician-scholars who conduct cutting edge research on critical medical and health issues with the goal of measuring, organizing, and improvin...
Mar 22, 2007•2 min
A Q&A with Dr. Jack Wennberg about the Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care Project John Wennberg, M.D., Ph.D., is the founding director of Dartmouth's Center for the Evaluative Clinical Sciences (CECS) and the Peggy Y. Thomson Professor of the Evaluative Clinical Sciences. CECS was established in 1989 and is the locus for a diverse group of scientists and clinician-scholars who conduct cutting edge research on critical medical and health issues with the goal of measuring, organizing, and improvin...
Mar 22, 2007•3 min
A Q&A with Dr. Jack Wennberg about the Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care Project John Wennberg, M.D., Ph.D., is the founding director of Dartmouth's Center for the Evaluative Clinical Sciences (CECS) and the Peggy Y. Thomson Professor of the Evaluative Clinical Sciences. CECS was established in 1989 and is the locus for a diverse group of scientists and clinician-scholars who conduct cutting edge research on critical medical and health issues with the goal of measuring, organizing, and improvin...
Mar 22, 2007•2 min
A Q&A with Dr. Jack Wennberg about the Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care Project John Wennberg, M.D., Ph.D., is the founding director of Dartmouth's Center for the Evaluative Clinical Sciences (CECS) and the Peggy Y. Thomson Professor of the Evaluative Clinical Sciences. CECS was established in 1989 and is the locus for a diverse group of scientists and clinician-scholars who conduct cutting edge research on critical medical and health issues with the goal of measuring, organizing, and improvin...
Mar 22, 2007•3 min
A Q&A with Dr. Joseph Rosen about Polytrauma Dr. Rosen is a plastic surgeon at DHMC who treats patients around the world including soldiers injured in Iraq. His specialties include nerve repair and human-machine interfaces, microsurgery and transplantation of limbs, and telemedicine and informatics. He was an organizer of the 2006 Polytrauma Conference at Dartmouth College, is a professor of plastic and reconstructive surgery at DMS, and is a consultant to the military. This is a web extra t...
Mar 22, 2007•1 min
A Q&A with Dr. Joseph Rosen about Polytrauma Dr. Rosen is a plastic surgeon at DHMC who treats patients around the world including soldiers injured in Iraq. His specialties include nerve repair and human-machine interfaces, microsurgery and transplantation of limbs, and telemedicine and informatics. He was an organizer of the 2006 Polytrauma Conference at Dartmouth College, is a professor of plastic and reconstructive surgery at DMS, and is a consultant to the military. This is a web extra t...
Mar 22, 2007•1 min
