Features
Happy, Healthy, Whole
Sep. 13, 2018— At a 20-week ultrasound Lindsey and Jeremy Walley were excited to learn the gender of their first-born child. Their elation that it was a girl was met by a sudden quiet and serious look from the ultrasound technician, who then whisked them to another room for a meeting with their obstetrician-gynecologist. The couple knew...
Our Amazing Skin
Sep. 13, 2018—Skin is the human body’s largest organ accounting for 8 pounds and 2 square meters on an adult. It is our fiercest protector, an impervious shield that plays a major role in keeping us alive. Since a substantial portion of our immune cells live in our skin, it teaches our body to fight off infections....
Global Good
Sep. 11, 2018—Street vendors sell caskets along the road that leads to the hospital in Mwanza, Tanzania. It’s a stark reality, this expectation of death distilled into an image, then seared into memory. Reid Thompson, MD, can’t forget what he saw, and he doesn’t want to forget. “When you walk out of the hospital and come down...
My Tenuous Relationship With an Octopus
Sep. 10, 2018—Written by Jonathan Dallas Ever since third grade, the octopus has been my least favorite animal. Not that any octopus ever did anything to me; on the contrary, I’ve only seen one in an aquarium, and I’m sure it took no special notice of me, nor I of it. In fact, given their keen...
Brighter Days Ahead
Mar. 2, 2018— It was like a switch flipped. One month, Ryan Bayley, MD’08, was practicing emergency medicine with the energy and joy he had experienced for years. The next month, his shifts had become drudgery. It was the final year of his emergency medicine and EMS fellowship training in New York City. It was the last...
Home away from home
Mar. 1, 2018—Eric Quintana, MD, comes from a close and large extended Hispanic family in New Mexico – his paternal great-grandparents had 17 children; and he has three siblings and 30 first cousins. Quintana is the only member of his family to become a doctor, or to graduate from college. In June 2017, when he became a...
Invisible Threat
Mar. 1, 2018— Every day, a team of epidemiologists, infection preventionists and data analysts report to work at Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC) with a mission: to track invisible trails of microscopic clues, dissect data, analyze lab results, pore over patient medical records and ferret out possible hiding places of disease-causing microbes that could lead to dangerous...
Life Goes On
Mar. 1, 2018— Ahmya Calloway, 13, had end-stage renal failure that impacted her heart function. The Chattanooga, Tennessee, native had been cared for at Monroe Carell Jr. Hospital at Vanderbilt since she was 2 years old. Medication was the first thing Calloway’s doctors tried, but over time her health declined to the point that she needed hemodialysis....
Up Close and Personal
Mar. 1, 2018— Recent advances in imaging technology are enabling scientists to “see” how molecules, cells and tissues are put together — and work together. These unprecedented views of life down to the minutest level are yielding radical new insights into the causes, treatment and prevention of disease. At Vanderbilt University and Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC),...
The Science of Our Senses
Sep. 23, 2017— Mark Wallace, Ph.D., drops his glasses on his desk and they land with a metallic clang. He is making a point about autism. “There’s sound energy and light energy that come from the same place in space,” said Wallace, dean of the Graduate School at Vanderbilt University and Louise B. McGavock Professor of Hearing...
Healing Minds
Sep. 22, 2017— Schizophrenia not only affects the person struggling with hallucinations, delusions and disorganized thoughts. It wreaks havoc through the entire family. Charlotte Test, of Dallas, Texas, knows that all too well. Test and her late husband Donald Test Jr., who died in 2016, have a very personal connection to the devastating effects of schizophrenia. Donald...
Hidden figure
Sep. 22, 2017— Harold Jordan, M.D., has had a distinguished medical career that includes many highlights, including being chair of Psychiatry at Meharry Medical College, his medical alma mater, and serving as acting dean of the School of Medicine at Meharry as well. Besides his academic career, Jordan was devoted to improving mental health care for the...
Cracking the Code of the Immune System
Sep. 22, 2017— Of all the threats that face humankind, microbial invaders are among the most frightening. They can overwhelm the body’s immune defenses in a matter of hours. Modern medicine is often powerless against them. And new emerging infections are raising their ugly heads all the time. At Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC), an elite unit...
Childhood Illness Inspires Sisters’ Pursuit of Medicine
Sep. 22, 2017— Identical twins Shelby and Sydney Payne, VUSM 2019 and 2020, respectively, use the word “adventure” and its derivatives a lot in conversation. It’s fitting because their lives have been full of it. The twins grew up with “adventurous and entrepreneurial” parents and moved quite often. They were born near Fort Lauderdale, Florida, moved to...
Gut Reaction
Sep. 22, 2017— Jennifer Fleming was 22 years old, just beginning a career in a new city, when she started having some troubling symptoms. A persistently upset stomach, diarrhea and a small amount of rectal bleeding launched a barrage of tests that ultimately ended in a diagnosis of ulcerative colitis, an inflammatory disease that damages the lining...
Remote Control
Mar. 6, 2017—When Willem Leister Einthoven, inventor of the electrocardiogram (EKG), sent an EKG over telephone lines back in 1906, it was the first example of modern telecardiology. More than a century later, Vanderbilt Heart and Vascular Institute cardiologist Allen Naftilan, M.D., Ph.D., puts a stethoscope to his ears and listens to the heartbeat of a patient...
Hooked
Mar. 6, 2017—The epidemic of opioid abuse, which each day claims the lives of 91 Americans and adds billions annually to the nation’s health care bill, can be stopped—but it’s not going to be easy, say those steering the ship at Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC). “It took us a while to get here, and it’ll take...
Healing from Within
Mar. 6, 2017—Researchers have long suspected the immune system, so efficient at defending the body against foreign invaders, could be key to treating cancer. “The immune system has properties that make it very effective in recognizing and fighting off certain germs. We are figuring out how to use some of those properties in redirecting the immune system...
Positive Outlook
Mar. 6, 2017—When Rachel Fox was 15 years old, the petite, blonde high school sophomore spent most of her time babysitting in her suburban Nashville neighborhood and practicing the piano. For about a year, she noticed she was increasingly hungry and thirsty, frequently urinating and losing weight. She battled fatigue as she plodded along with her school...
This is Not a Drill
Mar. 2, 2017—At 2:20 a.m. on June 12, 2016, Michael Cheatham, M.D., asleep at home in Orlando, Florida, was awakened by a phone call. A colleague said, “There’s been a mass casualty shooting event, and we need you here.” Cheatham, VUSM ‘89, board-certified in general surgery, surgical critical care and neurocritical care, was not on call that...
Global Ambition
Aug. 23, 2016— Growing up in the small rural village of Yetebon, Ethiopia, Kidane Amare Sarko could step just outside his thatched-roof, mud and wood hut and see his future. He could see his father, who could neither read nor write, work in the field as a farmer. As the eldest boy in a family of seven...
The Envelope, Please
Aug. 22, 2016— More than an hour had passed since Trisha Pasricha, M.D., ‘16, got the news. It wasn’t until all the cameras were shut down and the last shot secured that the tears began to well up in her eyes. It was done. Pasricha, like thousands of other fourth-year medical school students across the country, had waited...
Doctor of Big Data
Aug. 22, 2016— For several months in 2014, Josh Denny, M.D., a 37-year-old father of three young children, and an internist with a busy practice, quietly worked on a project in his office on Nashville’s West End Avenue, that he could not discuss with his family, friends or co-workers. “I did tell my wife, but I’m not...
Tuning the Brain, Taming the Tremors
Aug. 19, 2016— Six years after they met in an Internet chat room, Linda Jones and Steve Retterer woke up in the same Vanderbilt Adult Hospital room. “I think it’s daylight,” Jones said, as the anesthesia began to wear off. “I think you’re right,” Retterer answered, groggily. The romance they unknowingly began in 2005 when they were...
House Calls to the Homeless
Aug. 19, 2016—Vanderbilt Street Psychiatry Program provides hands-on approach to mental health
New Programs Prepare Future Health Care Leaders
Feb. 22, 2016— Graduate students at Vanderbilt seeking careers in health care just got an added boost in course offerings. Three distinctly different programs were recently introduced to address the evolving needs of future practitioners. According to Bonnie Miller, M.D., associate vice chancellor for Health Affairs and senior associate dean for Health Sciences Education, the additions are...
Bitter Pill
Feb. 22, 2016—On the evening of June 12, 2015, Donna Emley took two acetaminophen (Tylenol) for a slight muscle ache and went to bed. The next day, she and her husband drove to Kentucky, where they were planning to spend a week at an organic farm. She awoke at 2 a.m. the following day and noticed that...
In Search of Answers
Feb. 22, 2016—It’s human nature to need answers. We don’t like uncertainty. That includes getting answers about your health. You go to your health care provider; you want to leave with a diagnosis. But not all health care encounters work out that way. For about 25-30 million Americans, a diagnosis never comes, because the disease is rarely...
Against All Odds
Feb. 22, 2016—Dawn James of Knoxville, Tennessee, was 16 weeks pregnant when a 3-D ultrasound determined that her unborn baby had severe spina bifida that left almost his entire spinal cord exposed. The baby was given zero chance of survival. “We spoke with 10 specialists during my pregnancy, trying to see if we could find somebody who...
Son’s Disease Prompts Mom’s Scientific Quest
Aug. 21, 2015—At age 50, Terry Jo Bichell, a midwife and mother of five with no basic science training, set out to cure Angelman Syndrome. It wasn’t a mid-life crisis; a fit of reinvention as her four oldest daughters left the house. It was a pure desire to help her son Louie, 16, and the thousands of...
Hope Amid a Continuing Crisis
Aug. 21, 2015—It’s been 20 years since her doctor silently handed Katrina Robertson a lab report that showed she was infected with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). Yet the memory is still painfully fresh. “I remember just boo-hooing and crying because it was like I’m gonna die,” said the 47-year-old native Nashvillian. “Everybody I’d heard about … it...
Undone in the ICU
Aug. 21, 2015—“I was under the impression that I was being held prisoner. There were people I was aware of who would come into the room, in the outer areas, and they wouldn’t talk to me or look at me. I remember being aware that I couldn’t move my arms. I was being held somehow. I started...
Journey Out of Silence
Aug. 21, 2015—Allyson Sisler-Dinwiddie, Au.D., will never forget the day her hearing went away. She was just waking up, home alone on a Saturday morning, when her dog, Maddie, leapt off the bed and darted to the bedroom door. “I could tell she was barking, but I couldn’t hear her. I picked up the phone to see...
Chronic Fatigue Syndrome
Aug. 19, 2015—Dee Rogers has a busy and stressful job at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. So it would be normal to be tired at the end of the work day. But in 2014 she began to notice that she didn’t feel rejuvenated even after a good night’s sleep or weekend’s rest. On Saturday, she’d get up, eat...
Amy Fleming, M.D., Takes Helm of Medical Student Affairs
Feb. 10, 2015—In 1993, Amy Fleming, a first-year medical student at the University of Virginia, was sitting at a table during a small group gathering at the home of Richard Pearson, M.D., the dean of student affairs, when she saw her future. It wasn’t a shout-it-from-the-mountaintop revelation. It was a comfortable, inner knowing kind of observation—a glimpse of...
The Long Road Back
Feb. 10, 2015—In early September 2014, Ian Crozier, M.D.,’97, supervised the jet evacuation of a critically ill patient from Kenema, the epicenter of the raging Ebola epidemic in Sierra Leone. An exhausted Crozier told the medical team that he hoped he didn’t have to see them again. One week later, he did. This time he was the...
Afterburn
Feb. 10, 2015—Burn injuries can happen to anyone. Each burn patient’s story is unique, but they all start the same: with an unplanned event. So sudden. Often tragic. Always painful. The severe burn patient is a significant challenge medically and often requires numerous surgeries. They have large open wounds, have difficulty maintaining body temperature and fluids, are...
The Good, The Bad and the Ugly of Inflammation
Feb. 10, 2015—It’s a scourge of modern life, each year gobbling up billions of health care dollars in the United States alone. When it’s good, it fights off foreign invaders, heals injuries and mops up debris. But when it’s bad, inflammation ignites a long list of disorders: arthritis, asthma, atherosclerosis, blindness, cancer, diabetes and, quite possibly, autism...
Choosing Wisely
Feb. 9, 2015—The U.S. medical system spends $750 billion a year on health care that doesn’t result in improved health outcomes. In fact, one-third of medical spending is wasted on unnecessary procedures, according to a report from the Institute of Medicine. Patients sometimes ask for tests and treatments that are not necessarily in their best interest. And...
Off Limits
Aug. 26, 2014—According to Food Allergy Research and Education, about 1.5 million Americans have food allergies. They affect 1 in every 13 children under 18 in the U. S.—or about two in every classroom. Those who have them must approach food with a great deal of caution.
These Doctors Mean Business
Aug. 21, 2014—While patient care is an important part of the careers of the majority of Vanderbilt University School of Medicine graduates, some find that they can make the greatest leadership contributions in non-clinical roles. These doctors get down to business.
Healing from Within
Aug. 19, 2014—Through the services offered at the Osher Center for Integrative Medicine at Vanderbilt, patients like Brenda Wilson are learning how to live with chronic pain and taking steps toward building a new normal. The Center recently received a $5 million gift from the Bernard Osher Foundation.
Creative Care for Complex Cases
Jul. 31, 2014—The Complex Care Team is charged with caring for patients with complex needs—medically, socially and economically—and bringing creative solutions to solve the issues and get them on the road to recovery.