The Short Coat: An Inside Look at Getting Into and Getting Through Medical School

Slather some beef tallow on it.

On this episode, M3 Fallon Jung, M1s Isa Perez-Sandi and Cory Karasek, and M2 Maria Schapfel let loose on the internet’s wildest health content. We react to AI-generated videos claiming cortisol is why Dave smells bad, Colonel Sanders warning you about non-biodegradable supermarket fruit, and those unhinged animations where a screaming spine demands you fix your posture. Some of it’s nonsense, some of it’s accurate, and all of it leads to tangents about fake vomit made from chunky soup, whether the ER triage nurse should tell non-emergent patients “good news, you’re not dying,” and the eternal question every clinical student faces: “So what specialty are you going into?”

We talk about imposter syndrome, being “pluripotent,” the secret ER life hack nobody tells you about, and why Jeff Goldblum’s face should be used in all AI-generated health content. It’s an hour of medical students trying to make sense of what social media is feeding their future patients—and themselves.

Episode credits:

Producer: Dave Etler

Co-hosts: Fallon Jung, Alexis Baker, Cory Karasek, Maria Schapfel

Clips: alimentaryschool (Instagram), lifehacks (Facebook), nursestankk (Facebook), superzenlabs (, fullhealthmode (Instagram), meow._.22_1 (Instagram), doctor.binh (Instagram)

The views and opinions expressed on this podcast belong solely to the individuals who share them. They do not represent the positions of the University of Iowa, the Carver College of Medicine, or the State of Iowa. All discussions are intended for entertainment purposes only and should not be taken as professional, legal, financial, or medical advice. Nothing said on this podcast should be used to diagnose, treat, or prevent any medical condition. Always seek qualified professional guidance for personal decisions.

We Want to Hear From You: YOUR VOICE MATTERS!

We welcome your feedback, listener questions, and shower thoughts. Do you agree or disagree with something we said today? Did you hear something really helpful? Can we answer a question for you? Are we delivering a podcast you want to keep listening to? Let us know at https://theshortcoat.com/tellus and we’ll put your message in a future episode. Or email theshortcoats@gmail.com.

We need to know more about you! https://surveys.blubrry.com/theshortcoat (email a screenshot of the confirmation screen to theshortcoats@gmail.com with your mailing address and Dave will mail you a thank you package!)

The Short Coat Podcast is FeedSpot’s Top Iowa Student Podcast, and its Top Iowa Medical Podcast! Thanks for listening!

We do more things on…

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theshortcoat

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/theshortcoat

You deserve to be happy and healthy. If you’re struggling with racism, harassment, hate, your mental health, or some other crisis, visit http://theshortcoat.com/help, and send additions to the resources there to theshortcoats@gmail.com. We love you.

Don’t give up the outside activities that’ll make you a better doc

As Dave has observed many times, medicine will take everything you have, if you allow it to. What this means is that you have to carve out time for your own interests, whether you’re a physician or a medical student. These are the things that not only keep you sane–an outlet for all the intensity that the study and practice of medicine has to offer–but they can even make you better at surgery or how positively your patients view you.

M1s Ben Cooper, Reese Rosenmeyer, Arielle Weber, and Reed Adajaar talk about their hobbies, what they get out of them as hard-working medical students, where they prioritize them in their lives, and why it’s sometimes even easier to enjoy them in med school than it was as undergrads. Dave offers some findings on how having outside interests makes doctors great. And the crew answers a question from Nicole, a mother of three little ones and military wife who, at the ripe old age of 35, is contemplating how she can pursue her lifelong dream of becoming a doctor.

If you have a question we can discuss on the show, send it in at https://theshortcoat.com/tellus!

Episode credits:

Producer: Anna Royer

Co-hosts: Ben Cooper, Reed Adajaar, Reese Rosenmeyer, Arielle Weber

The views and opinions expressed on this podcast belong solely to the individuals who share them. They do not represent the positions of the University of Iowa, the Carver College of Medicine, or the State of Iowa. All discussions are intended for entertainment purposes only and should not be taken as professional, legal, financial, or medical advice. Nothing said on this podcast should be used to diagnose, treat, or prevent any medical condition. Always seek qualified professional guidance for personal decisions.

We Want to Hear From You: YOUR VOICE MATTERS!

We welcome your feedback, listener questions, and shower thoughts. Do you agree or disagree with something we said today? Did you hear something really helpful? Can we answer a question for you? Are we delivering a podcast you want to keep listening to? Let us know at https://theshortcoat.com/tellus and we’ll put your message in a future episode. Or email theshortcoats@gmail.com.

We need to know more about you! https://surveys.blubrry.com/theshortcoat (email a screenshot of the confirmation screen to theshortcoats@gmail.com with your mailing address and Dave will mail you a thank you package!)

The Short Coat Podcast is FeedSpot’s Top Iowa Student Podcast, and its Top Iowa Medical Podcast! Thanks for listening!

We do more things on…

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theshortcoat

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/theshortcoat

You deserve to be happy and healthy. If you’re struggling with racism, harassment, hate, your mental health, or some other crisis, visit http://theshortcoat.com/help, and send additions to the resources there to theshortcoats@gmail.com. We love you.

[Content warning: Dave did his best to remove sniffles.]

Spicy chicken nuggets, bad decisions, and what happens when medical students test their heat tolerance on mic

What happens when medical students, extremely spicy chicken nuggets, and microphones collide? Regret.

M1s Reed Adajaar, Trever Maiers, Ben Cooper, and Matt Taylor assigned themselves a Hot Ones–style challenge featuring progressively hotter sauces on chicken nuggets. Confidence is high at the start. That does not last.

As the Scoville units climb, so do the sweating, the panic, and the chaos at the table. Milk appears. Milk fails. Conversation continues anyway—exploring their goals for a new semester, their knowledge of anatomy, and how their past experiences are serving them as they go through med school. Things start off mostly coherent, move towards entertaining attempts at coherence, and finally devolving into incoherence as the magnitude of their error in suggesting this episode becomes truly apparent.

This episode is light on medicine, heavy on heat, and fully committed to the bit. If you’ve ever said “How bad could it be?”—this episode has an answer.

Episode credits:

Producer: Trever Maiers

Co-hosts: Ben Cooper, Matt Taylor, Reed Adajaar

The views and opinions expressed on this podcast belong solely to the individuals who share them. They do not represent the positions of the University of Iowa, the Carver College of Medicine, or the State of Iowa. All discussions are intended for entertainment purposes only and should not be taken as professional, legal, financial, or medical advice. Nothing said on this podcast should be used to diagnose, treat, or prevent any medical condition. Always seek qualified professional guidance for personal decisions.

We Want to Hear From You: YOUR VOICE MATTERS!

We welcome your feedback, listener questions, and shower thoughts. Do you agree or disagree with something we said today? Did you hear something really helpful? Can we answer a question for you? Are we delivering a podcast you want to keep listening to? Let us know at https://theshortcoat.com/tellus and we’ll put your message in a future episode. Or email theshortcoats@gmail.com.

We need to know more about you! https://surveys.blubrry.com/theshortcoat (email a screenshot of the confirmation screen to theshortcoats@gmail.com with your mailing address and Dave will mail you a thank you package!)

The Short Coat Podcast is FeedSpot’s Top Iowa Student Podcast, and its Top Iowa Medical Podcast! Thanks for listening!

We do more things on…

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theshortcoat

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/theshortcoat

You deserve to be happy and healthy. If you’re struggling with racism, harassment, hate, your mental health, or some other crisis, visit http://theshortcoat.com/help, and send additions to the resources there to theshortcoats@gmail.com. We love you.

What to expect for med students moving from classroom to exam room

The beginning of clerkships mark a medical student’s progress from theoretical learning to practical application of what they’ve been taught. This past week, our M2s received a 4-day long orientation to clerkships (we call it “transitions week”), and M2s Samantha Gardner and Alexis Baker were joined by M3s Fallon Jung and Zach Case to talk about this important milestone. What are clerkships like? How will students know what to actually do? Who will they be working with? What are residents and attendings looking for when they evaluate a clerkship student? How should they react when a patient says something out-of-pocket?

There’s so much to be learned in clerkships…including that they really are prepared to enter the real world, even if they don’t yet feel it!

Episode credits:

Producer: Fallon Jung

Co-hosts: Zach Case, Samantha Gardner, Alexis Backer

The views and opinions expressed on this podcast belong solely to the individuals who share them. They do not represent the positions of the University of Iowa, the Carver College of Medicine, or the State of Iowa. All discussions are intended for entertainment purposes only and should not be taken as professional, legal, financial, or medical advice. Nothing said on this podcast should be used to diagnose, treat, or prevent any medical condition. Always seek qualified professional guidance for personal decisions.

We Want to Hear From You: YOUR VOICE MATTERS!

We welcome your feedback, listener questions, and shower thoughts. Do you agree or disagree with something we said today? Did you hear something really helpful? Can we answer a question for you? Are we delivering a podcast you want to keep listening to? Let us know at https://theshortcoat.com/tellus and we’ll put your message in a future episode. Or email theshortcoats@gmail.com.

We need to know more about you! https://surveys.blubrry.com/theshortcoat (email a screenshot of the confirmation screen to theshortcoats@gmail.com with your mailing address and Dave will mail you a thank you package!)

The Short Coat Podcast is FeedSpot’s Top Iowa Student Podcast, and its Top Iowa Medical Podcast! Thanks for listening!

We do more things on…

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theshortcoat

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/theshortcoat

You deserve to be happy and healthy. If you’re struggling with racism, harassment, hate, your mental health, or some other crisis, visit http://theshortcoat.com/help, and send additions to the resources there to theshortcoats@gmail.com. We love you.

[ICYMI, here’s a rerun of a show released earlier this year. We’ll be back with new shows starting next week!]

How the system pays doctors can change healthcare outcomes—sometimes in scary ways.

The way docs are paid can make patients sicker…or can lead to healthier ones. The payment schemes most docs work under incentivize them to fix patients, while others motivate them to prevent illness—and geriatrician Dr. Jonathan “Nathan” Flacker is here to explain why. This episode rips the curtain off RVUs, fee-for-service traps, and the real reason your doc is rushing through your visit (hint: it’s not personal, it’s math).

We dig into ChenMed’s wild idea: what if clinics got paid to keep you out of the hospital? Turns out, when money flows toward health instead of procedures, everyone wins. Except maybe the $400M proton beam facility (for the record, we love proton beams, but you might not need them if you can avoid cancer altogether).

Is concierge-style medicine only for the wealthy? What happens when you build “rich person care” for low-income seniors? And how many patients can a doc see well before it all breaks? If you’re dreaming of a career where you actually help people instead of just clicking boxes—this one’s a wake-up call.

Also: Love calls, RVU debt, and why pajama time should be illegal.

Episode credits:

Producer: Jeff Goddard

Co-hosts: Riley Behan-Bush, Zach Grissom, Alex Nigg

Guest: Dr. Jonathan “Nathan” Flacker, ChenMed

We Want to Hear From You: YOUR VOICE MATTERS!

We welcome your feedback, listener questions, and shower thoughts. Do you agree or disagree with something we said today? Did you hear something really helpful? Can we answer a question for you? Are we delivering a podcast you want to keep listening to? Let us know at https://theshortcoat.com/tellus and we’ll put your message in a future episode. Or email theshortcoats@gmail.com.

We need to know more about you! https://surveys.blubrry.com/theshortcoat (email a screenshot of the confirmation screen to theshortcoats@gmail.com with your mailing address and Dave will mail you a thank you package!)

The Short Coat Podcast is FeedSpot’s Top Iowa Student Podcast, and its Top Iowa Medical Podcast! Thanks for listening!

We do more things on…

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theshortcoat

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/theshortcoat

You deserve to be happy and healthy. If you’re struggling with racism, harassment, hate, your mental health, or some other crisis, visit http://theshortcoat.com/help, and send additions to the resources there to theshortcoats@gmail.com. We love you. Music provided by Argofox. License: bit.ly/CCAttributionDOCTOR VOX – Heatstroke: youtu.be/j1n1zlxzyRE Catmosphere – Candy-Coloured Sky: youtu.be/AZjYZ8Kjgs8Hexalyte – Wandering Hours: youtu.be/FOAo2zsYnvA