Dear Listeners & Peds ICU community, WE are back on air!

Welcome to PICU Doc On Call, A Podcast Dedicated to Current and Aspiring Intensivists.

I'm Pradip Kamat coming BACK to you from Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta/Emory University School of Medicine

and I'm Rahul Damania from Cleveland Clinic Children’s Hospital and we are two Pediatric ICU physicians passionate about all things MED-ED in the PICU.

PICU Doc on Call focuses on interesting PICU cases & management in the acute care pediatric setting.

As we turn into a new year, we would like to introduce Season 2 of PICU Doc on Call.

Yes Pradip, I am super excited for this year & I want to take this moment to thank YOU all, our listener community for making PICU Doc on Call such a success as we share our passion for medical education thru this forum!

This episode will give you a quick layout of how we will be organizing each episode of PICU doc on call this year. We will also highlight some tips and tricks on how to best learn from a medical podcast. Our goal in this episode is to provide you a framework on some best practices in medical podcasting and how to retain information from a podcast. Especially for our past & future episodes, we hope you can use this audio learning platform to assist you in applying the knowledge at the bedside when you are working in the acute care setting.

Let’s get into our first learning objective,

Rahul, did you know that learning via podcasts can actually benefit your brain & change the neural chemistry.

In fact, a 2016 med ed study published out of UC Berkeley concluded that listening to narrative stories from podcasts can stimulate multiple parts of your brain such as the limbic system and can enhance mood as it modulates dopamine and serotonin driven neural pathways. Think about listening to your favorite true-crime podcast — the suspense actually allows for you to stimulate centers in your medulla that increase the amount of endorphines, dopamine and serotonin that keep you on the edge of your seat.

That is so unique, so based on this, I do want to highlight some of the key elements which will make our podcast or any medical podcast you listen to beneficial. These pearls will also help you if you are developing a medical podcast of your own!

The first concept here is that many podcasts provide narratives.

When it comes to medical podcasts, narratives are in the form of medical cases which allow for you to retain content knowledge as a patient case invokes emotion and this can help you remember information more robustly.

When listening to a podcast, you have to use your imagination to picture what’s going on. For example, if I painted a 2 yo M with a history of rhinorrhea at home for about a week who now presents to the ED with subcostal & intercostal retractions that then progresses to intubation in the PICU, you not only are envisioning a patient in front of you, but also are shifting your mind across settings. Our brain has to work at the pace of the audio, so hopefully your mind doesn’t wander off like it does when reading a textbook page. And because you have to...

How to Learn & Retain Knowledge from a Medical Podcast

PICU Doc On Call