No 32: The Top 21 Podcasts for Military Clinicians
tldr
21 Podcasts for military clinicians, mostly focussing on EM, PHEM and PHC. Also, some thoughts on how to learn medicine and why podcasts are a great tool, especially for generalists. Do the basics well and remind yourself of the basics often.
The following list of 21 Podcasts are ones that I would highly recommend and in this order. For the full list of The Top Medical Podcasts of 2021, click here.
1. The Military Medicine Podcast
3. REBEL Cast
4. Primary Care Knowledge Boost
5. The RAGE Podcast - The Resuscitationist's Awesome Guide to Everything
6. PHEMcast
8. EMCrit Podcast - Scott D Weingart MD
10. The EMJ Podcast
12. FOAMCast - An Emergency Medicine Podcast
13. The Emergency Medical Minute
14. BJGP Interviews
15. RCGP eLearning
17. RCGP Somewhere in between podcast
18. Surgery 101
20. WarDocs - The Military Medicine Podcast
21. SAMOPS Specialty Spotlights
Military medicine is a big topic. Military medics can be super-specialists or the ultimate generalists. Military medicine (MilMed) covers the 7 capabilities of care, all the way from the point of injury (or illness) through pre-hospital emergency medicine, evacuation (MEDEVAC), to acute hospital care, discharged to primary healthcare, on to rehabilitation, occupational review and back to the frontline. It involves patient care, logistics, IT, research, teaching, training, management, leadership and green skills.
The major issue with being a clinician in the military is that even if you are a super-specialist with a niche interest in the diagnosis of serum rhubarb, you may still be deployed in a tent in the middle of nowhere and be expected to treat who ever turns up at the front door.
In a single deployment you could be treating frost bite, snake bites, alcohol intoxication, pre-eclampsia, appendicitis, gun shot wounds and stubbed toes. And then, when you get back, there’s the annual diabetes reviews, the hay fever prescriptions, and occupational assessments.
Staying on top of all of these topics is near impossible, even for those with years of experience and the memory of an elephant.
Cramming for deployments won’t always work, because you won’t always know that you are going and just like exams, you never know what is going to show up on the day.
Packing a shelf full of medial textbooks to take with you, won’t work because you don’t have the luggage capacity. Filling an iPad with PDFs might work but only if you have electricity and 3G or wi-fi – which is a luxury.
The best solution, is to do “little and often”. Keep ideas fresh in your memory. Rehearse the important topics. Prepare for the expected. This is why I have tried to develop the habit of using “dead time” to listen to at least one medically relevant podcast every day. Every time I go out for a walk, commute, or do some exercise I try to use it productively.
I have recently just finished all 200 episodes of The St. Emlyn’s Podcast and I would thoroughly recommend it. It has taken me about 8 months to listen to them all in between other podcasts but it has been absolutely worth it. I honestly think this collection of short talks were more educational, more evidence-based and more entertaining that almost any other medical course I have ever been on.
My guestimate is that medicine can be broken down into thirds:
1. The 1st third will almost never change. This is the patient contact, history, examination, communication skills and absolute basics of being a clinician.
2. The 2nd third will change and evolve very slowly. This is the bread and butter topics. The stuff that works, is cheap, effective, evidence-based, common practice and what you learn throughout med school. Aspirin for MIs, the pain ladder, the Kreb’s cycle etc.
3. The 3rd third is the new stuff, the churn, the fads. This is the new drugs, new regimes, new diseases, new guidelines and papers. This is the exciting stuff and the challenging stuff. This is what everyone worries about and what everyone is interested in.
The good news is that the 1st third you won’t really need to remember. Once, you have done your training and been a clinician for a few years this third will be habit, and yes, you can always improve this stuff but it doesn’t take active thought in a challenging situation.
The stuff that you will actually need to think about to save someone’s life, limb or eyesight in a military scenario is almost all the 2nd third. The important stuff is the stuff that works. It is doing the basics well. This is great news because this is the sort of topics that can be easily refreshed through a quick recap, through listening to podcasts and through the odd reflection.
The new exciting stuff is almost always an “incremental gain”. It might help you save an extra 0.1% of all casualties or it might help you reduce blood loss by a few hundred mls which might help you save a life. This is the stuff that it is nice to know and it might make all the difference, once you have tried everything else. So, listen to the podcasts, learn about the cutting edge but don’t worry to much about it. It’s the sort of thing that makes listening to a podcast of “bleeding” interesting, it keeps you hooked but it’s the boring stuff that you need to remember.
If the exciting stuff, becomes the boring stuff. It probably means that its been tested enough for you to know that it works, everyone is doing it, its cost effective and you should know it and do it. Once, something has become part of the SOP, its invariably not exciting any more and its time to push the boundaries of modern medicine even further.
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