Stanford Medicine bioethicist Tyler Tate found high levels of success in ballet, miming, acting, fencing and collegiate tennis. But his love of storytelling ultimately led him to medicine. The post From ballet to medicine, a love of stories has driven this bioethicist appeared first on Scope ..read more

The Unconventional Path of Stanford Medicine hematologist Tamara Dunn had her eyeing a career on Broadway. The post How mixing music and medicine keeps this doctor grounded appeared first on Scope ..read more

Bongeka Zuma, graduate of Oprah Winfrey’s academy and Stanford School of Medicine, discusses her plans to advance medical care in her hometown. The post Paying back her people: New doctor has plans to return to her African village appeared first on Scope ..read more

From the 1930s to the 1950s, tobacco companies regularly advertised in medical journals, promoting their brand of cigarettes as the healthier choice. More doctors smoke Camels, they touted. Philip Morris cigarettes don't cause throat irritation. Menthol cigarettes might even cure the common cold. These may seem like quaint anecdotes from another era, but the tobacco industry continues to solicit allies from the medical community. In its latest tactic, Philip Morris International, the world's largest tobacco company, succeeded in funding a series of continuing medical education courses on the o ..read more

Jay Shah, MD, took a deep breath as he stood on the Berg Hall stage and looked out across the crowd. It was made up of 150 of his Stanford Medicine peers, some of them longtime mentors and collaborators. Though he is accustomed to speaking before much larger crowds, this time was different. The surgeon and urologist was about to share something profoundly personal with a group of physicians, a human subset often preconditioned to wear the same steely veneer he had long worn. Those reflexive instincts, the ones that make a person hold their true feelings in tight, were doing a number on his sto ..read more

Three first-time mothers dressed in identical pink, floor-length hospital gowns and blue surgical masks sat in a small, windowless hospital conference room in rural Gujarat, a state of 60 million people on India's western coast, roughly half the size of California. The young women described the experience of having a child in the neonatal intensive care unit at this modern hospital located so far from their homes that they were staying in the mothers' onsite dormitory. One mom had been there for nearly two months. Speaking in Gujarati, the mothers shared worries about how their families ..read more

We all get moody -- it's part of human nature. But if you have people in your life afflicted with bipolar disorder, you quickly realize that not all moodiness is created equally. An estimated 4.4% of adults in the U.S. -- nearly 50 million people -- will be diagnosed with a mood disorder that falls into the bipolar classification.  While there are many medications to help these people find a sweet spot between their fluctuating moods -- from a manic state of high energy to an often paralyzingly depressive low -- those pharmacological interventions are riddled with adverse effects and can ..read more

At exactly 9 a.m. Pacific Time on every third Friday of March, anxious graduating medical students around the country tear open envelopes to reveal where they matched for their residencies. These three- to seven-year residency programs, usually based at hospitals, are essentially their first jobs out of medical school and the next stage of their training to become fully fledged and licensed physicians. Match Day might sound like a combination of the Oscars and one of Harry Potter's Sorting Hat ceremonies, but it's the result of an algorithm to create the ideal pairings between tens of thousand ..read more

Lillie Reed has been raising awareness about gender-based violence and the resulting trauma ever since she began studying public health as an undergraduate at Duke University. But her passion for the work grew from personal experience.  Raised in Greenville, North Carolina, Reed said her first experiences with abuse were at home and that her upbringing showed that the experience of domestic violence goes well beyond the violence. "The fear and anger and other ripple effects that violence creates ... it can feel inescapable," she said. "When you are experiencing domestic violence, even in ..read more

In this We Are Stanford Med series, meet individuals who are shaping the future of medicine. They hail from all over the globe and come to Stanford Medicine carrying big ideas and dreams. Melanie Shojinaga was on top of the world when she began pursuing her dreams via the Master of Science in Physician Assistant Studies Program at Stanford Medicine in the fall of 2021. Then life took an unexpected turn. Toward the end of her first quarter, she began experiencing intense migraines. She attributed it to the stress of finals and a lack of sleep. But over winter break the headaches worse ..read more