The Clinic & The Person

The Clinic and The Person is a podcast developed to summon or quicken the attention of health care professionals, their educators, researchers and others to the interests and plights of people with specific health problems aided through knowledge and perspectives the humanities provide. We are guided by how physician-writer Iona Heath sees the arts adding a view to biomedicine “that falls from a slightly different direction revealing subtly different detail” and how that view applies to particular health care situations. Our aim is to surface these views, and our desire is to present them in ways that encourage and enable health care professionals to fully engage, to consider all sources, not just biomedical, in their roles helping people with their particular health problems.

“The Clinic” represents all that Biomedicine brings to bear on disease processes and treatment protocols, and “The Person,” represents all that people experience from health problems. Our episodes draw from works in the humanities—any genre—that relate directly to how people are affected by specific clinical events such as migraine headaches, epileptic seizures, and dementia, and by specific health care situations such as restricted access to care and gut-wrenching, life and death choices. We analyze and interpret featured works and provide thoughts on how they apply in patient care and support; health professions education; clinical and population research; health care policy; and social and cultural influences and reactions.

Contributors

Co-host

Anne V. Bentley

Executive producer, Anne Bentley, developed a deep interest in science, health and sustainability early in her life and has held various commercial roles in the Life Science industry and related fields of clinical lab analytics, pharmacy and digital health technology. As an entrepreneur she is passionately evolving her life’s work to new approaches that may advance the knowledge of one’s health, the health of our environment and the collective health and well-being of being human through new communication platforms. After years of commercial leadership experience and entrepreneurship she has discovered the intrinsic value and excitement of partnering with like-minded people.

Co-host

Daniel Albrant

Co-Host Daniel Albrant was interested in biomedicine from his childhood growing up in Rochester, Minnesota, in the shadow of the Mayo Clinic. He pursued becoming a physician for a couple years at the University of Minnesota before “coming home” to Pharmacy. He practiced clinically as an ICU/Transplant pharmacist and hospital pharmacy consultant for 28 years. During the last 15 years of his clinical practice, he became intentional about his spiritual growth and that ultimately led him to Wesley Theological Seminary for an MDiv and to become a Licensed Local Pastor in The United Methodist Church. He currently pastors two churches in central Virginia.

Co-host

J. Russell Teagarden

Co-Host J. Russell Teagarden came to his interest in applying insights from the Humanities to Biomedicine after decades in clinical pharmacy practice and research. He realized that biosciences explained how diseases and treatments work, but not how they affect people in their everyday lives. Through doctoral level academic studies and independent research in the Medical Humanities, he discovered rich and abundant sources of knowledge and perspectives on how specific health problems and clinical scenarios can be better understood than from the biosciences only. He shares these discoveries through his blog, According to the Arts, and the podcast, The Clinic & The Person.