I love podcasts. I listen to them on my commute and when I walk my dog twice a day.
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| Bo the Dog |
In the last year I have become addicted to The Curbsiders, what I consider the best internal medicine podcast. These three guys get interesting experts and interview them on topics with a primary care angle. They do a good job of digging deep to get good engagement from them and though they are respectful they do ask challenging questions (though honestly, I thought I got all softballs, listen to the podcast on coronary calcium scores for some probing questions).
Most importantly they are entertaining. I don’t need NephSAP audio digest. That stuff kills me. Never absorbed a sentence of it. The Curbsiders make listening to medical science fun.
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| Looks like they stopped doing these in 2013. Anyone miss them? |
And this week they had me as a guest. I enjoyed the experience immensely, but in an hour of talking off the cuff I made some embarrassing mistakes:
- In describing water reabsorption I said it occured in the cortical collecting duct rather than the medullary collecting duct.
- In describing my cure for cramps I tell the story of Gitelman’s and say it is like congenital loop diuretics rather than congenital thiazide diuretics
- I mucked up the story about MRFIT and how it allowed a head to head comparison of HCTZ and chlorthalidone. I really oversold what happened.
it was observed that in the 9 clinics that predominately used HCTZ, mortality was 44% higher in the special intervention (SI) group compared with the usual care (UC) group.10 The opposite was true in the 6 clinics that predominately used chlorthalidone. The MRFIT Data Safety Monitoring Board changed the protocol near the end of the trial to exclusively use chlorthalidone. In the initial clinics that used HCTZ that had a 44% higher mortality in the SI group, the trend was reversed after the protocol was changed to chlorthalidone, and they then had a 28% lower risk (P=0.04 for comparison of coronary heart disease mortality at the 2 time periods).
Like sending out newsletters, in Podcasts (especially when you are the guest) once it is recorded, you own your words with no chance to edit them.
Give The Curbsiders a listen, I think you’ll enjoy them.