In this episode, your intrepid podsurgeons talk to the venerable and famed Martin Zielinski, lately of the Mayo Clinic and currently Chief of Trauma and Acute Care Surgery at Baylor. Dr. Zielinski talks with us about damage control surgery. For something so widely practiced and studied, there are few better examples of the art of surgery than DCS. When does one know that a patient is in a damage control state? It is physiologic derangement or the severity of the injuries? When does one know the patient's ready to go back to the OR? How has the shift away from crystalloid altered thinking and p ..read more

In this episode, DuBose and Milos are sadly deprived of my companionship and commentary, but that's perfectly fine because they're talking to David Feliciano and who's a better guest than that? The three of them discuss the operative treatment of gastric and duodenal ulcer disease, which was once a mainstay of emergency general surgery and is now something rarer than hen's teeth. In addition to proton pumps, those pills inhibit trainee experience. When we started eradicating H. pylori, we started eradicating familiarity with the Kelling-Madlener and Pauchet procedures. I can't think of a third ..read more

In this episode, which is the second in a row that was recorded without me, Milos and DuBose interview Dr. Kevin Schuster, a Professor of General Surgery, Trauma, and Surgical Critical Care at Yale. I am reminded, as I listen, to my very first question in my very first room of my general surgery oral boards. A cardiac surgery patient with sepsis, likely intraabdominal. Was it acalculous cholecystitis? It was. Did I completely blank out? I did indeed. Did I say, "I'm going to get a CT scan," and was I met with an abrupt transition to the next patient? Yes and yes. Did my realization of my error ..read more

In this episode, Milos and DuBose talk to Martin Schreiber, the Division Head of Trauma, Critical Care and Acute Care Surgery at the Oregon Health Sciences University. Professor Schreiber discusses the finer points of resuscitation with whole blood, including how to get a whole blood program started. He also goes on to discuss how to have two weddings at once, and why John Holcomb has used 'tonic-clonic' to describe Dr. Schreiber's dance style. The most notable thing about this episode, of course, is that I am absent.  ..read more

Like me and DuBose, Dr. Chad Ball is an expert in BDSM - Boards in Diverse Surgical Majors. He's as associate professor of surgery and oncology at the University of Calgary, where he practices hepatobiliary, pancreatic, acute care, and trauma surgery. We discuss how the desire to master surgical subspecialties is rooted in masochism, really, and how that training affects practice ..read more

D. Dante Yeh is the Chief of Emergency General Surgery at Denver Health Medical Center and is the author of an incredibly comprehensive multicenter study with the coolest name you could imagine. The MUSTANG Trial looked at the treatment of appendicitis in America and addressed questions that had, until then, really only been looked at in European studies. Listen as we talk about the honestly fascinating conclusions from that study as well as a discussion about why America is different. Did you know that the nonoperative treatment of appendicitis in Belgium involved mussels? It's the broth that ..read more

When it's healthy, it's yellow and fluffy-looking, like a Golden Retriever puppy. When it's sick, it's the stuff of nightmares. Unless you're Dr. Greg Beilman, who hath tamed the pancreas and its ailments. Dr. Beilman is the Chief of General Surgery at the University of Minnesota; he's also an Associate Dean at the medical school, the SVP of acute care operations for M Health and, because he clearly has a ton of free time, a colonel in the Army with five deployments under his belt. With all that, it's no wonder that the pancreas doesn't scare him. Come and listen to him with us and maybe my ni ..read more

In this episode, Milos, DuBose, and I discuss a fascinating topic, Professionalism, with David Spain, MD. Dr. Spain is the David L. Gregg, MD Professor and Chief of Acute Care Surgery at Stanford University, which, I hear, is a pretty good institution. Earlier this year, Dr. Spain and his colleagues published their work in the Annals of Surgery associating patient outcomes with the admitting or consulting services' tendency to accrue complaints about their professionalism. Their results - which are somehow both shocking and not shocking - showed that if a patient was cared for by a service wit ..read more

Appropriate for Spooky Season, this episode focuses on brains...braaaaains...BRAAAAAAINS. Dubose, Buhavac and I talk with the one and only Deb Stein, the President of the Eastern Association for the Surgery of Trauma (EAST), the Director of Critical Care Services for the University of Maryland Medical System, the Chair of the Certifying Committee for the Trauma, Burns, and Surgical Critical Care Boards, and my fingers are cramping up so I'm going to have to stop typing all of her titles and offices. Suffice it to say that there are very few surgeons on the planet who are as respected and autho ..read more

We're back! At the helm is Miloš Buhavac of Texas Tech, the infamous Joe DuBose of the University of Texas, and Rishi Kundi from the Shock Trauma Center, who is here mostly because he knows the password to the PodBean account. For our first episode, we talk to none other than Dr. David Feliciano and Dr. Greg Magee about Axillosubclavian Injuries. As it turns out, six hours after completing the recording, I had a supraclavicular GSW and transected subclavian. That's the power of manifesting, folks.  ..read more