Contributing Writer
Dartmouth Geisel School of Medicine
John Damianos is a fourth year medical student at the Dartmouth Geisel School of Medicine, Lebanon, NH class of 2020. In 2016, he graduated from Dartmouth College with a Bachelor of Arts in linguistics and neuroscience and a minor in French. He enjoys playing tennis, cooking, and studying Byzantine chant in his spare time. After graduating medical school, John would like to pursue a career in internal medicine, eventually specializing in gastroenterology.
Do-it-yourself (DIY) medicine is particularly appealing to those who wish to take their health into their own hands and remove costly, time-consuming physicians from the equation. Crucial, however, is the fact that these companies are independently run and thus are not regulated by any governing scientific body.
Nutritional education, as an appendage to conventional medical education, has the power to close the gap by equipping physicians with more well-rounded knowledge to help patients manage the more unmanageable conditions.
As medical students, we spend endless hours stuck in a library, with tons of books and piles of notes that we try to get into our heads … It is only logical that it is challenging to maintain a healthy diet and exercise routine while aiming for academic excellence.
As future doctors, we must advocate for a more integrated nutrition and lifestyle medicine education, one that is based not just in healthy eating, but also in the reversal of this global chronic disease epidemic. Let healthy food be thy guide to a happy body and soul.
Advice on how to eat is perhaps the most ubiquitous type of medicine we are exposed to throughout our day-to-day. Just look at Dr. Oz or recall the waxing and waning popularity of fad diets. While I struggle to define any sources as legitimate nutrition education, it stands to reason that doctors receive training about carbs, calories and fats, right?
A few weeks ago, Coca-Cola disclosed that they have donated almost $120 million in grants to medical, health, and community organizations since 2010. As medical students, we can all understand how scientists who receive grant funding from a corporation such as Coke are at increased risk for inserting biases, conscious or otherwise, into their scientific research.
Hippocrates, the ‘father of medicine’ said, “let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food.” The role of nutrition in health has been recognized since the beginning of medicine, yet somehow nutrition education has fallen by the wayside in most medical curricula. Given that 34.9 percent of Americans are obese and obesity has been linked to diabetes, heart disease, stroke and certain types of cancer, nutrition should be a focal point of medical education.
How can doctors-in-training incorporate nutrition in their delivery of health care? Anne, an extended fourth-year medical student planning a career in integrative family medicine, shares her dream to centralize healthy nutrition in medical practice. She also describes her nutrition research that examines the effects of an anti-inflammatory diet for Crohn’s disease patients.
“Americans don’t lose weight.” This was the favorite tagline of a gastroenterologist I shadowed as a second-year medical student. In the few hours I spent with him, he seemed to have a defeatist attitude towards the potential that patients have in caring for themselves. Unfortunately, I do not believe this physician is alone in his thoughts. The allopathic medical education culture lends itself to treat people with medications and surgeries.
Whether you are embarking on your Step 1 studying journey or starting your clerkship, it is absolutely essential to maintain your health and well-being throughout medical school. It can be very easy to get caught up in the flow of studying lectures or rounding on patients. Even though it may seem convenient to go for the bag of potato chips when you’re on the run in the hospital or plowing through lectures without taking a …
There’s no one moment I remember distinctly when I realized my love for cooking. Cooking has been part of me for as long as I can remember: recipes have long since been abandoned for the spontaneity of Thursday night creations. Tuesdays have become an excuse to make cookies. For my family, like for many, the kitchen was the center of our house. Maybe my love of cooking came early, sitting on the floor in my parent’s apartment banging …
The world’s oldest person, a 116-year-old Japanese woman, Ms. Misao Okawa, recently shared with the media her secret to a long life: “Eat and sleep and you will live a long time. This advice is certainly appealing to sushi lovers (Ms. Okawa’s favorite meal!) and those who desire the return of “naptime” in school and the workplace. While the benefits of sleep were discussed in detail in a previous article on Bridging the Gap, the …
Columnist and in-Training Staff Member
University of Illinois College of Medicine
Mariam graduated with a BS in microbiology, immunology, and molecular genetics at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she conducted undergraduate research in B-cell development and lymphomagenesis as well as the neurobiology of stress. In high school, Mariam spent several years studying mechanisms of induced pluripotency in an embryonic stem cell research lab at The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla. She now studies computational neuroscience and medicine as part of the Medical Scholars Program (MD/PhD) and the Neuroscience Program (NSP) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Outside of research and clinical experiences, Mariam has earned a black belt in Taekwondo and enjoys yoga and San Diego beaches.
Bridging the Gap
Bridging the Gap focuses on the relationship between basic research and medicine, in order to develop an appreciation for the science that underlies the foundations of modern medicine.
