TTHealthWatch is a weekly podcast from Texas Tech. In it, Elizabeth Tracey, director of electronic media for Johns Hopkins Medicine in Baltimore, and Rick Lange, MD, president of the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center in El Paso, look at the top medical stories of the week.
This week’s topics include methods of suicide, managing common foot and ankle conditions, daily toothbrushing and pneumonia, and flourishing among medical residents.
Program notes:
0:32 Can medical residents flourish?
1:32 What are factors associated with it
2:32 Characteristics that are ‘individual’
3:32 Feel as a calling
4:00 Method specific suicide mortality
5:00 Lifespan typically 7 years shorter
6:00 Getting rid of firearms won’t solve
7:00 Brushing teeth and pneumonia
8:00 Also secondary outcomes
9:00 Patients feel better
9:15 Management of foot and ankle conditions
10:00 Manifest as burning pain in ball of foot
11:01 Platelet rich plasma
12:01 Off the shelf orthotics
12:53 End
Transcript:
Elizabeth: How has suicide changed in the 21st century?
Rick: Can doctors flourish?
Elizabeth: How are common foot and ankle conditions treated best?
Rick: And daily toothbrushing to prevent pneumonia.
Elizabeth: That’s what we’re talking about this week on TTHealthWatch, your weekly look at the medical headlines from Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center in El Paso. I’m Elizabeth Tracey, a Baltimore-based medical journalist.
Rick: And I’m Rick Lange, president of Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center in El Paso, where I’m also dean of the Paul L. Foster School of Medicine.
Elizabeth: Rick, how about if we start first with Annals of Internal Medicine? This really interesting thought of, “Gosh, can residents actually flourish as they are doing their training?”
Rick: We commonly talk about things like happiness or life satisfaction or burnout. Those are individual characteristics. What we really want to know is, can internal medicine residents flourish? That’s kind of a more holistic concept of wellbeing and it integrates a number of the other things that I mentioned, but also psychological, social, and physical aspects of wellbeing.
There are ways to measure this. There are surveys that you can take, one called the Flourish Index and one called the Secure Flourish Index, and they were developed to measure 5 domains: happiness and life satisfaction, physical and mental health, meaning and purpose, character and virtue, and close social relationships.
They administered these surveys to 14 residency programs in Connecticut, Illinois, and Pennsylvania in 2021 to determine whether residents could flourish and what were the factors or variables associated with that. They surveyed 277 residents; nearly half of them were interns. That’s the first year; that’s most stressful. About half were women.
Overall,