Cold Steel, Hot Credits: A discussion with Nikhil Patil on SR&ED and other ways to support innovation in your practice

How can we better prepare ourselves and our trainees for sitting the oral exam? By this point, residents have typically already passed their written exam. And so they have the book knowledge, but how do you get that book knowledge from inside your brain to your mouth and obvious obviously, onto your examiner and onto their page? To answer that question, I invited Dr. Sorena Afshar onto the podcast this week.

AI is likely to change the way that medical and surgical education happens over the next decade. We needed to find out how, and Dr. Samir Grover joined us on this episode to talk about it.

Jeremy Heffner is a trauma and acute care surgeon at Lima Memorial Health System in Ohio. He is also the Chief Operating Officer of SurgeON, a social media company dedicated to surgeons. Heffner was also previously a bioengineer who worked at NIH. He has been incredibly open about his journey and struggles with PTSD as a surgeon, and how those struggles ultimately caused his breakdown. Sadly, Dr. Heffner's story is not unique, and we brought him on the podcast to hear his insights about how many surgeons struggle with PTSD.

This week's guest is Dr. Bishal Gyawali. Bishal is an oncologist at Queen's University and a policy researcher. His focus as a researcher has been both sensational and at the same time extremely fundamental. Bishal has been asking questions around how we decide which drugs are approved for funding by the government, as well as how we might best allocate resources to help cancer patients around the world. Bishal has been an integral part of the "Common Sense Oncology" movement, which will promote interventions that measurably improve the lives of patients, promoting effective treatments but also challenging interventions that might cause more harm than good. Our conversation focused around Bishal's training, how he became interested in cancer health policy and his thoughts around the idea of value in cancer care. We also discussed Bishal's thoughtful use of technology, blogs, and social media.