"The Doctor's Art" is a weekly podcast that explores what makes medicine meaningful, featuring profiles and stories from clinicians, patients, educators, leaders, and others working in healthcare. Listen and subscribe on Apple, Spotify, Amazon, Google, Stitcher, and Podchaser.
From Tanzania to India, from Tibet to Antarctica, Jonathan Reisman, MD, has practiced medicine in truly diverse regions of the world. Reisman's talents and passions are unparalleled in their variety; he is, among many things, an emergency physician, naturalist, food writer, travel writer, and wilderness survival expert. He is also the author of The Unseen Body, an exploration of the human anatomy through all of its miraculous, mundane, bizarre, and surprising parts, presented through the eyes of a lifelong adventurer.
Over the course of his conversation with Henry Bair and Tyler Johnson, MD, Reisman shares his experiences traveling through the most remote areas of the world, what his voyages have taught him about health and illness, the impact of emerging digital technologies on the doctor-patient relationship, and much more.
In this episode, you will hear about:
- 2:04 How a love of the natural world led young Reisman to travel abroad and ultimately to the medical profession
- 5:30 Reisman's early adventures studying sociology in the Russian Far East
- 9:26 The parallels between exploring the natural world and the human body
- 12:18 The puzzle-solving aspects of medicine and the impact of emerging technologies and artificial intelligence
- 21:15 Reisman reflects on his time practicing medicine in India, Tanzania, Nepal, and Antarctica, and the importance of the physical exam in these settings
- 31:53 The strengths and limitations of the physical exam, especially as they relate to the clinician-patient relationship
- 36:38 How artificial intelligence will complement human physicians in the future
- 46:12 What Reisman believes is critical to the future of medical education
- 55:10 Reisman's advice to young clinicians on how to keep their curiosity alive
The following is a partial transcript (note errors are possible):
Bair: Yeah, so to kick us off and I know this is not a straightforward story, but can you share a little bit about what first drew you to a medical career?
Reisman: Sure. So I did not want to be a doctor through high school. Through college. I finished college without doing any of the sciences that would be required to go to medical school. But then I was out of school for a few years and traveled pretty extensively, lived abroad. And I guess then it started occurring to me that perhaps being a doctor would be a career that I liked, partly due to the ability to travel and to sort of serve people, to be useful to people, no matter where you go in the country or the world. Especially helping the downtrodden was attractive.
I love traveling and the thought of traveling in the context of doing some medical work-related project or just helping people in whatever locality I was in was definitely attractive. Another thing was I have a lot of hobbies, like crafts using my hands. And I thought that being a doctor would be a great combination of two things I liked -- one, using my hands, and the other, using my brain to problem solve, almost like a detective observing on a detailed level, putting together clues and sort of figuring out a mystery. It turned out I was right.
You know, depending on your specialty, you use your hands more or your brain more or less, which I ended up in emergency medicine, which I think is a great combination of those two. But if you ask my mother, who was sort of telling me to be a doctor from the time I was small, she would probably say that eventually I just realized she was correct.
Johnson: You could grow up to be a doctor, a physician, or someone who helps people get better from being sick. Right? Any of those were fine choices, right?
Reisman: Those are the only three choices, however.
Bair: Yeah. So I'd like to dig into your lifelong love of adventure and exploration. You know, we typically think of being an explorer as a dream that kids have, a fantasy vocation that is all but unrealistic in the real world. And yet you were able to, for all intents and purposes, become a professional explorer. Can you tell us how that happened? How did you initially get into traveling?
Reisman: Sure. I did not travel much before the end of college and really got the travel bug after that. I did get the bug while in college of being interested in the natural world and learned to, as I write in the book, identify wild edible plants and some wild edible mushrooms and just got fascinated with understanding all sorts of species and how they interact and how they comprise an ecosystem and sort of how that works on a higher level.
And that fed into the travel because when you travel, you end up in sort of different climates, different ecosystems, with different natural worlds. You end up interacting with cultures who raise different animals, eat different plants, have different forests surrounding their villages, etc. So I think the love of nature and wanting to see all the varieties of nature across the earth played into the travel.
But my first big travel was a few months after finishing college. I ended up going to Russia for 6 months and interning at a social research center based in Saint Petersburg. The way that came about was while I was in college, I took summer school classes in environmental science, and my professor was a Russian researcher who studied basically the social aspects of the environmental movement in Russia since the end of the Soviet Union.
For the full transcript, visit The Doctor's Art.
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