The Doctor’s Channel

Entertainment has evolved.  Just think about all the viral videos you have watched.  I hate to admit it, but I’ll watch ‘Squirrel Catapult’ over and over, and ‘Triumph the Comic Dog at the Star Wars Convention’ never gets old.  And frankly, I’d buy every one of the ‘Trunk Monkey’ commercials if I could.

But using them for education?  Unlikely.  And frankly, knowing doctors as I do, if you told me to watch online videos made by doctors, I’d be suspicious at best and most likely ignore the whole thing.

But recently, I realized that education has evolved too.  I started looking around at The Doctors’ Channel. This site is an interesting experiment in online education.  Described by its developers, Drs David Best and Michael Banks, as ‘Internet television for doctors,’ the idea is that any physician (that means all of you aspiring directors) can post educational or entertaining videos through The Doctors’ Channel at www.thedoctorschannel.com.  And of course, we can all watch them for educational and entertainment purposes.  Multiple specialties are represented at The Doctor’s Channel, and from the comments attached to assorted videos, it appears this site is gaining momentum and generating a lot of interest.

The videos are all, currently, being kept to a 2-3 minute limit.  So, you hit the high points of a topic you know well, and post the information for others to view.

Emergency medicine being my specialty, I found some good information, but not a lot of it.  I know it isn’t because we aren’t creative as a group.  So I hope that some of our colleagues will start posting more videos at the Doctors’ Channel in the future.  As the ‘safety net’ of American health-care, we have lots to say.

Education aside, if you want a laugh just go the the site, under humor, and watch ‘Medical Terminology Concerto.’  It will bring back lots of memories of frantic nights spent studying in medical school.  On the other hand, it may make you scream and lie in a fetal position.  You’ll just have to take a chance.  Or, if you’re feeling more religious, watch the Bark Mitzvah.  You can’t go wrong watching a dog celebrate his journey to manhood.  Keep the tissues handy.

I challenge my emergency medicine colleagues to rise to the occasion, and both educate and entertain the house of medicine!  We have more bizarre stories than anyone else, and the world needs to hear them.  Within, of course, the boundaries of propriety and federally mandated privacy restrictions.  (Wow, that takes the fun out of a story doesn’t it?  Guess I can’t tell you about our ‘trimanual exam’ a few nights ago…)

Anyway, I hope you enjoy cruising around The Doctor’s Channel.  I plan to post some things there myself eventually.  Because there’s a little bit of Spielberg, Jewison, Howard, Brooks and Coppola in all of us.

Edwin