Two podcasts, three doctors, one good show

In the last two months, two of my must-listen podcasts, Systematic and Mac Power User, have had medical professionals on as guests. I don’t usually listen to medical podcasts—Twitter and saved PubMed searches are big enough firehoses—so I thought it would be interesting to hear how my more experienced colleagues use technology. Two of the three episodes were underwhelming, one was stellar.

It started with Brett Terprstra and Dr. Pamela Peeke on Systematic. She has several books targeted towards lay public, and the episode went in the same vein—broad advice on nutrition, well-being, etc. I cringed more than once, but that was to be expected—public health information relies on overplaying the risks and simplifying facts to the point of absurdity¹. The one thing I could agree with was how important meditation can be, as mindful meditation might decrease physician burnout. Negative points for not mentioning Mindfulness in Plain English as essential reading, though I haven’t read Dr. Peeke’s own recommendation, The Miracle of Mindfulness.

I had higher hopes for Episode 169 of MPU, since Katie Floyd’s and David Sparks’s guest, Dr. Jeffrey Taekman, has an excellent productivity blog. Alas, McSparky spent more than half of the show being fascinated by the minutiae of what doctors do. Which is better than what followed—long periods of uncomfortable silence while the unprepared guest clicked through every app in his menu bar to see if there is anything worth mentioning². There wasn’t.

Then another episode of Systematic came on, with Dr. Don Schaffner, a microbiologist³. It was outstanding. Brett was a better interviewer than David, and avoided getting too side-tracked by his guest’s interesting work. But ultimately, the show was good because Dr. Schaffner had useful tips and app recommendations that did not simply regurgitate the latest round of MPU/Mactories/Macdrifter/etc. sponsors. His paper review workflow gave me several ideas I will work on during the holiday downtime. He also suggested a promising contender in my quest to find headphones that will survive more than 8-12 months of intensive use.

One more thing for me to do during the downtime: promote Zotero. Between the developers fumbling Papers 3 and Mendeley being taken over by an evil corporation, Zotero coupled with a few extensions is the best reference manager on any platform. Coming in 2014.