MDJ Podcast Ep 1_trial_0

In this podcast episode, the host discusses a new medical drama called Brilliant Minds. The show follows Dr. Oliver Wolfe, a brilliant and unconventional neurologist who takes risks to help his patients. The episode focuses on a patient named Hannah who can no longer recognize her children after a lobectomy. Dr. Wolfe deduces that Hannah has Capgras syndrome and works tirelessly to find a solution. The host praises the show for its accurate medical information and hopes for more episodes like this. The host also mentions that the show is based on real cases from neurologist Dr. Oliver Sacks. Overall, the host is excited about the upcoming medical shows and will continue to discuss them on the podcast. Welcome to There's No Drama Like Medical Drama, where we talk all things medical drama. This is the show for people who love a good medical show, a good medical thriller novel, and even real-life medical drama. I'm Dr. T, a pediatrician, and while I love real-life medicine, I also revel in good medical stories in all their forms. So if you want to hear a doctor's take on many of the medical shows that are hot right now, follow this podcast. If you want a medical show, if you ever watch a medical show and wonder, would that really happen? I'm here to tell you. Now, 2024 promises to be a great year for medical shows because we have five, yes, five medical shows debuting across the networks. I can't promise to watch them all because I don't know if they're all going to be good, but I can say that we're off to a great start with the show I'm talking about this week, which is Brilliant Minds, which premiered on September 23rd. Now, let me lay my cards on the table. I love this show already. Dr. Oliver Wolfe is that kind of doctor that other doctors love to hate or they secretly admire him. First of all, he's brilliant. He thinks about those obscure diagnoses that many of us doctors only read about once in medical school and quickly forgot, and he's cocky enough about what he knows to let other doctors know when they screwed up. Doctors don't like that. Episode one opens with him doing what appears to be a crazy stunt. Because he's a neurologist and he knows the ins and outs of a brain with Alzheimer's, he takes the huge risk of taking his patient with Alzheimer's on a trip to his estranged daughter's wedding, believing that if he can just put the patient in front of a piano, that those deep-seated memories of how to play and sing a song he knew decades ago and even memories of who his daughter is would burst forth. And of course, he's right because it's in the script. No, let's not be cynical. It's true that many Alzheimer's patients can recall with amazing accuracy some of their long-term memories and skills. Now, would that really happen? Would a physician literally abduct a patient from his medical facility and drive him to said patient's daughter's wedding on a motorcycle? It's far-fetched, I'll admit. But what doctor wouldn't love to create the amazing, unforgettable moment in a patient's life that happened in this scene? If you don't know what happened, don't know what I'm talking about, make sure you watch the episode. But I guess, I bet you can guess. Now here's the thing, Dr. Oliver Wolf is based on the real-life neurologist, Dr. Oliver Wolf Sachs. Dr. Oliver Wolf Sachs was considered a brilliant neurologist who also was known to be eccentric. And his friend and colleague on the show, Dr. Carol Pierce, is based on the real-life Dr. Carol Burnett. Yes, her name is actually Carol Burnett. The real-life Dr. Carol Burnett was a pediatrician and she was the first black graduate from Albert Einstein College of Medicine in 1960. Now the real-life Dr. Oliver Sachs also had the unusual condition of face blindness known by the medical term prosopagnosia. And that is the case in the show that Dr. Oliver Wolf in Brilliant Minds has this condition. One of the overwhelming or the overarching themes of this show is that unconventional approaches are sometimes needed to help our patients. In real life, more and more doctors are investigating and adopting non-conventional approaches to treating their own patients because as people get sicker and sicker, we're finding that a lot of conventional treatments produce lackluster results. We're asking as physicians, are there better ways to help our patients? Are there real answers out there that aren't in the popular medical journals, especially regarding the brain? So back to our show. Of course, Dr. Wolf gets fired for this stunt which sets up his reunion with a former colleague whom I mentioned earlier, Dr. Carol Pierce. She recruits him the Bronx General because she knows he's one of those, quote, doctors who help the unhelpful. The main story of today's episode centers around the patient Hannah who has undergone a temporal lobectomy to cure her epilepsy and it did cure her epilepsy, but it also caused a severe side effect. Hannah could no longer recognize her children. Dr. Wolf meets Hannah as she's about to be tranquilized for what appears to be a psychiatric break, insisting that the hospital has switched out her actual children for two impostors. Dr. Wolf blocks the injection that the medical staff wants to give her and assures Hannah that he will work with her to figure it out. Now who wouldn't want this fictional doctor to be their doctor, a doctor who's determined to figure it out, who advocates tirelessly for his patients, who drives a patient to her childhood home to try to trigger her memory? He does all this for Hannah. What if a doctor actually had time to drive a patient to her childhood home to help treat her disease? A great quotable from this episode is when Dr. Wolf quotes Sir William Osler in saying, ask not what disease the person has, but what person the disease has. Well, as I said, Dr. Wolf is the type of doctor other doctors love to hate. So of course, the chair of neurosurgery, Dr. Nichols dismisses Wolf from Hannah's case. At one point, Dr. Nichols says it's his job to cure the seizures, not to make her a good mother. Huh, that's a lot of arrogance right there. Anyway, Dr. Wolf believes both can be achieved. Now I don't blame the chief of neurosurgery. He's working within the confines of accepted medical practice, medical assumptions, extremely limited time, and outdated medical information. That's just how our system is set up. And when I say outdated medical information, I mean this, in real life, it's estimated that scientific research takes 17 years to become medical practice. So as researchers are making breakthroughs and understanding effective approaches to disease, doctors may not learn about it for almost two decades. But I digress. Back to the show, Dr. Wolf identifies Hannah's mysterious symptoms of Capgras syndrome, a delusional misidentification syndrome that occurs due to damage to the brain, which can occur due to multiple causes. It's rare, it's obscure as a diagnosis, but a brilliant neurosurgeon has such a diagnosis in his mental Rolodex. I, on the other hand, had to look it up, but that was very interesting. Now one thing I love about a good medical show is when I can learn things. I love medical shows that actually are really rooted in good medicine and you can learn things from them. I think that's what a lot of people like about medical shows, whether you're a doctor or not. In the end of the episode, this is what the science nerd in me really loves. Dr. Wolf breaks down what is actually occurring in the brain leading to Hannah's symptoms. He's drawing illustrations of the brain. He's showing the connections, pointing out different areas of the brain. Even the neurosurgery chair, Dr. Nichols, who had formally kicked him off her case, had to watch the explanation with admiration. I really like this show. I think the 13 episodes that they're committed to this season are going to be great. One thing to know about this show is these cases that the fictional Dr. Wolf is going to work on in this show are really based on cases that the true Dr. Oliver Sacks dealt with, complex neurological cases. That's pretty cool. I think we found a winner in Brilliant Minds and I'm looking forward to the rest of it. Keep tuning in. We're going to be talking about Brilliant Minds. We're going to be talking about Dr. Odyssey. And then there are other shows that are coming up that haven't even premiered yet, but we're going to get into all of that. And I would love to know if there's something you would like to talk about. And of course, I'm not going to forget about the classic shows that are still out there. Chicago Med, for example. When things come up, I'm going to talk about it on this show because there's no drama like medical drama.