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#13: Cultivating Compassion

Welcome to 3P: Pills, Pearls, and Patients where we will discuss current events in medicine, stories from real patient-physician encounters, and gain insight into what it's like being a physician in today's society.

Please note that while the first episode is available to listen to without registration, accessing additional episodes will require you to subscribe and log in.

  Back to Pills, Pearls & Patients (3P)

Hello and welcome to the next episode of 3P, Pills, Pearls and Patients. I'm your host, Dr. Marina Malak. And today's episode is called Cultivating Compassion. So this is a good follow up to the previous episode where we talked a little bit about burnout and it's hard to separate the concept of burnout, and it's really hard to talk about burnout without mentioning self-compassion.

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Dr. Marina Malak is a family physician in Mississauga, Ontario and a lecturer and faculty member at the University of Toronto. She is actively involved in medical advocacy, and is a board member of the Mississauga Primary Care Network. She is also a member of the National Committee of Continuing Professional Development at the College of Family Physicians of Ontario, and a member of the Research Ethics Board at Trillium Health Partners.

She is passionate about patient care; medical education; and promoting mental, physical, and emotional wellness. She enjoys reading, writing, public speaking, puzzles, doodling in her bullet journal, and creating drawings on Procreate.

#12: Wacky Wait Times

Welcome to 3P: Pills, Pearls, and Patients where we will discuss current events in medicine, stories from real patient-physician encounters, and gain insight into what it's like being a physician in today's society.

Please note that while the first episode is available to listen to without registration, accessing additional episodes will require you to subscribe and log in.

  Back to Pills, Pearls & Patients (3P)

Hello there and welcome to the next episode of 3P Pills, Pearls and Patients. I'm your host, Dr. Marina Malak. And today's episode is called Wacky Wait Times. This topic is highly relevant to today's society, especially in the times of the pandemic and all of the crazy wait times that patients are complaining about, and rightly so. I mean, let's be honest, I think we've always had a "wait time" issue.

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Dr. Marina Malak is a family physician in Mississauga, Ontario and a lecturer and faculty member at the University of Toronto. She is actively involved in medical advocacy, and is a board member of the Mississauga Primary Care Network. She is also a member of the National Committee of Continuing Professional Development at the College of Family Physicians of Ontario, and a member of the Research Ethics Board at Trillium Health Partners.

She is passionate about patient care; medical education; and promoting mental, physical, and emotional wellness. She enjoys reading, writing, public speaking, puzzles, doodling in her bullet journal, and creating drawings on Procreate.

#11: Monkeypox

Welcome to 3P: Pills, Pearls, and Patients where we will discuss current events in medicine, stories from real patient-physician encounters, and gain insight into what it's like being a physician in today's society.

Please note that while the first episode is available to listen to without registration, accessing additional episodes will require you to subscribe and log in.

  Back to Pills, Pearls & Patients (3P)

Hello and welcome to the next episode of Pills, Pearls and Patients, 3P. I'm your host, Dr. Marina Malak. Today's episode is going to be about monkeypox. Now, I am not even close to being an infectious disease specialist. I think I've said that enough times on our talks about COVID, as well as Paxlovid. Nor do I claim to really know all things about monkeypox.

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Dr. Marina Malak is a family physician in Mississauga, Ontario and a lecturer and faculty member at the University of Toronto. She is actively involved in medical advocacy, and is a board member of the Mississauga Primary Care Network. She is also a member of the National Committee of Continuing Professional Development at the College of Family Physicians of Ontario, and a member of the Research Ethics Board at Trillium Health Partners.

She is passionate about patient care; medical education; and promoting mental, physical, and emotional wellness. She enjoys reading, writing, public speaking, puzzles, doodling in her bullet journal, and creating drawings on Procreate.

#10: Valuing Virtual Care

Welcome to 3P: Pills, Pearls, and Patients where we will discuss current events in medicine, stories from real patient-physician encounters, and gain insight into what it's like being a physician in today's society.

Please note that while the first episode is available to listen to without registration, accessing additional episodes will require you to subscribe and log in.

  Back to Pills, Pearls & Patients (3P)

Hello and welcome to the next episode of 3P Pills, Pearls and Patients. I'm your host, Dr. Marina Malak. And today is a timely and very relevant episode to some of the changes that have been happening in medicine over the past couple of years, really since the pandemic. And it's about virtual care. Today, we're going to be talking about Valuing Virtual Care. The good, the bad. How to make use of it. And some of the issues that may arise. And what family physicians and patients can do to really benefit from virtual care. So it's really important to remember that prior to the pandemic, virtual care was happening, but in different ways than what we're experiencing now. Virtual care can occur by the phone or by video.

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Dr. Marina Malak is a family physician in Mississauga, Ontario and a lecturer and faculty member at the University of Toronto. She is actively involved in medical advocacy, and is a board member of the Mississauga Primary Care Network. She is also a member of the National Committee of Continuing Professional Development at the College of Family Physicians of Ontario, and a member of the Research Ethics Board at Trillium Health Partners.

She is passionate about patient care; medical education; and promoting mental, physical, and emotional wellness. She enjoys reading, writing, public speaking, puzzles, doodling in her bullet journal, and creating drawings on Procreate.

#9: Media Literacy

Welcome to 3P: Pills, Pearls, and Patients where we will discuss current events in medicine, stories from real patient-physician encounters, and gain insight into what it's like being a physician in today's society.

Please note that while the first episode is available to listen to without registration, accessing additional episodes will require you to subscribe and log in.

  Back to Pills, Pearls & Patients (3P)

Hello and welcome to 3P Pills, Pearls and Patients. I'm your host, Dr. Marina Malak, and this is the next episode. So today is really an impromptu episode and it seems a little bit, you know, maybe not directly related to medicine, but I thought I would talk a little bit about how we talk about topics in medicine, as in what determines what "hot on the press" or an important topic in medicine today.

Is it what's happening in the news? Is that what patients are interested in hearing about? Is it what doctors are seeing more in society today? In other words, what determines what's "relevant" today? Quite an interesting topic. And when making this podcast, that's something that I have to think about as well. I have a series of topics listed out kind of on my computer about things that I want to record on and talk about.

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Dr. Marina Malak is a family physician in Mississauga, Ontario and a lecturer and faculty member at the University of Toronto. She is actively involved in medical advocacy, and is a board member of the Mississauga Primary Care Network. She is also a member of the National Committee of Continuing Professional Development at the College of Family Physicians of Ontario, and a member of the Research Ethics Board at Trillium Health Partners.

She is passionate about patient care; medical education; and promoting mental, physical, and emotional wellness. She enjoys reading, writing, public speaking, puzzles, doodling in her bullet journal, and creating drawings on Procreate.

#8: Managing Migraines–Part 2

Welcome to 3P: Pills, Pearls, and Patients where we will discuss current events in medicine, stories from real patient-physician encounters, and gain insight into what it's like being a physician in today's society.

Please note that while the first episode is available to listen to without registration, accessing additional episodes will require you to subscribe and log in.

  Back to Pills, Pearls & Patients (3P)

Hello and welcome to the next episode of the 3P podcast Pills, Pearls and Patients. I'm your host, Dr. Marina Malak.

So if you remember last time in our episode, Headache Hassles, I talked a little bit about the diagnosis of headaches as well as the differential diagnosis of headaches. Headaches are a headache to manage and diagnose. But I hope that Episode 1 provided some clarity, or at least some guidance about how to take an approach towards headaches. The difference between primary and secondary headaches, as well as just some general examination tips and history taking skills that you can implement in your practice.

Today we're going to do Part 2 of the episode, which is entitled Managing Migraines. Now I know that we talked about the different types of primary headaches in Part 1, which was, as a reminder, migraines, tension headaches and cluster headaches. And I'm not really sure which headache type I mostly see in practice. I want to say that migraine headaches and tension headaches are probably the most common ones. Although if you remember my story in Part 1, there was an episode of Cluster Headache that I did come across.

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Dr. Marina Malak is a family physician in Mississauga, Ontario and a lecturer and faculty member at the University of Toronto. She is actively involved in medical advocacy, and is a board member of the Mississauga Primary Care Network. She is also a member of the National Committee of Continuing Professional Development at the College of Family Physicians of Ontario, and a member of the Research Ethics Board at Trillium Health Partners.

She is passionate about patient care; medical education; and promoting mental, physical, and emotional wellness. She enjoys reading, writing, public speaking, puzzles, doodling in her bullet journal, and creating drawings on Procreate.

#7: Headache Hassles–Part 1

Welcome to 3P: pills, pearls, and patients where we will discuss current events in medicine, stories from real patient-physician encounters, and gain insight into what it's like being a physician in today's society.

Please note that while the first episode is available to listen to without registration, accessing additional episodes will require you to subscribe and log in.

  Back to Pills, Pearls & Patients (3P)

Hello again everybody and welcome to the next episode of 3p, Pills, Pearls and Patients. I'm your host Dr. Marina Malak and today we have an interesting and I think highly relevant topic that almost everybody can relate to. Today's episode is called Headache Hassles and it is actually the first of two episodes that's going to be focusing on headaches. Today is going to focus on a general overview of headaches, very basic and next episode is going to take a deeper delve into migraines.

So let's talk all things headache. It's kind of funny because I don't think we actually know or at least take the time to think about what exactly a headache means. You know Sometimes the expression says oh you know this is such a headache or doing this is going to be a headache and have you ever really thought about what the word headache means? I mean breaking it down into syllables it literally means your head aches, the head hurts. Now the word headache in medicine has a very wide differential diagnosis and sometimes patients don't know how to accurately describe exactly what it is they're feeling in their head and it's not their fault, I mean there are different types of headaches, there are different causes of pain in the head. There's referred pain, there's primary headaches, there's secondary headaches so my goal today is not to do a very extensive delve into headaches mostly because number one I am not a neurologist and number two you could probably do five, six, seven even ten episodes about headaches and still not cover everything.
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Dr. Marina Malak is a family physician in Mississauga, Ontario and a lecturer and faculty member at the University of Toronto. She is actively involved in medical advocacy, and is a board member of the Mississauga Primary Care Network. She is also a member of the National Committee of Continuing Professional Development at the College of Family Physicians of Ontario, and a member of the Research Ethics Board at Trillium Health Partners.

She is passionate about patient care; medical education; and promoting mental, physical, and emotional wellness. She enjoys reading, writing, public speaking, puzzles, doodling in her bullet journal, and creating drawings on Procreate.

#6: Diving into Diabetes–Part 2

Welcome to 3P: pills, pearls, and patients where we will discuss current events in medicine, stories from real patient-physician encounters, and gain insight into what it's like being a physician in today's society.

Please note that while the first episode is available to listen to without registration, accessing additional episodes will require you to subscribe and log in.

  Back to Pills, Pearls & Patients (3P)

Hello again and welcome to Episode 6 of the 3P podcast, Pills, Pearls and Patients. I'm your host Dr. Marina Malak and today we're taking a Dive into Diabetes and this time for Part 2.

So if you remember in the last episode we kind of quickly went over the diagnosis of Type 2 diabetes. We focused a little bit on when to screen, as well as, some risk factors and then very quickly we talked about an algorithm management for diabetes. So we talked about the impact and importance of lifestyle including how to educate patients about diet and exercise. We also quickly went through the medications that you can use to treat patients with Type 2 diabetes. Of course we did not talk about insulin and again in this episode we will not be talking about insulin management. We reviewed that Metformin is often the first-line therapy and then there's some novel agents out like the GLP-1 agonists, as well as, the SGL2 inhibitors and their place in managing diabetes, as well as, some risks that you need to know associated with these medications and the benefits of using these medications.
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Dr. Marina Malak is a family physician in Mississauga, Ontario and a lecturer and faculty member at the University of Toronto. She is actively involved in medical advocacy, and is a board member of the Mississauga Primary Care Network. She is also a member of the National Committee of Continuing Professional Development at the College of Family Physicians of Ontario, and a member of the Research Ethics Board at Trillium Health Partners.

She is passionate about patient care; medical education; and promoting mental, physical, and emotional wellness. She enjoys reading, writing, public speaking, puzzles, doodling in her bullet journal, and creating drawings on Procreate.

#5: Diving into Diabetes–Part 1

Welcome to 3P: pills, pearls, and patients where we will discuss current events in medicine, stories from real patient-physician encounters, and gain insight into what it's like being a physician in today's society.

Please note that while the first episode is available to listen to without registration, accessing additional episodes will require you to subscribe and log in.

  Back to Pills, Pearls & Patients (3P)

Hello again and welcome to Episode 5 of the 3P podcast, Pills, Pearls and Patients. I'm your host Dr. Marina Malak.

Now I wish that I could say XYZ disease is the most prevalent disease that we see in primary care because to be honest there are so many of the "top most common" illnesses that we see. This can range from diabetes to hypertension to depression and anxiety to asthma. I mean of course these are probably some of the most common or at least prevalent illnesses we see and I want to start off by saying although this podcast episode is going to talk about diabetes, there you go I spoiled it.
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Dr. Marina Malak is a family physician in Mississauga, Ontario and a lecturer and faculty member at the University of Toronto. She is actively involved in medical advocacy, and is a board member of the Mississauga Primary Care Network. She is also a member of the National Committee of Continuing Professional Development at the College of Family Physicians of Ontario, and a member of the Research Ethics Board at Trillium Health Partners.

She is passionate about patient care; medical education; and promoting mental, physical, and emotional wellness. She enjoys reading, writing, public speaking, puzzles, doodling in her bullet journal, and creating drawings on Procreate.

#4: Inflation as a Medical Emergency

Welcome to 3P: pills, pearls, and patients where we will discuss current events in medicine, stories from real patient-physician encounters, and gain insight into what it's like being a physician in today's society.

Please note that while the first episode is available to listen to without registration, accessing additional episodes will require you to subscribe and log in.

  Back to Pills, Pearls & Patients (3P)

Hello and welcome to the next episode of 3P, Pills, Pearls and Patients. I'm your host Dr. Marina Malak and today we're going to be talking about inflation, in fact, today's episode is called Inflation as a Medical Emergency.

Yikes a medical emergency sounds a lot like something where you might walk into an emergency room and see a bunch of doctors around a patient, see nurses scrambling everywhere, hospital bells ringing, and so forth. Or maybe something more like the pandemic where covet cases were rising, increasing rapidly, people were scattering by toilet paper, stocking up on personal protective equipment. Other medical emergencies that come to mind might be in a physician's lens such as Cauda Equine Syndrome or an acute stroke atrial fibrillation presenting with syncope etc. So why are we saying that inflation is a medical emergency what about inflation is medical exactly?
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Dr. Marina Malak is a family physician in Mississauga, Ontario and a lecturer and faculty member at the University of Toronto. She is actively involved in medical advocacy, and is a board member of the Mississauga Primary Care Network. She is also a member of the National Committee of Continuing Professional Development at the College of Family Physicians of Ontario, and a member of the Research Ethics Board at Trillium Health Partners.

She is passionate about patient care; medical education; and promoting mental, physical, and emotional wellness. She enjoys reading, writing, public speaking, puzzles, doodling in her bullet journal, and creating drawings on Procreate.