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ST on Health: A Tuneful Chat with Dr. David Schiedermayer, a Harmonica-Toting Palliative-Care Doc

Aired on Tuesday, September 9th.

On this edition of StudioTulsa on Health, guest host John Schumann speaks by phone with Dr. David Schiedermayer, a reflective and soft-spoken physician/author who is based in Wisconsin, tells a good yarn, and has worked in the fields of medicine and health for many years now. He's been an internist and a hospitalist in the past, and he's now focused on palliative care. Oh, and he's also one heck of a harmonica player. In fact, Dr. Schiedermayer deliberately sets out to blend his thoughtful doctoring and his bluesy music-making as often as possible -- with his patients and with their families, and with just about everyone else -- and he tells us why, and even provides a few instrument-at-hand demonstrations, on today's show. "Music has charms to soothe the savage breast," wrote an English playwright, rather famously, in the late 1600s. But it of course does much more than this -- it doesn't just soothe or comfort us; it actively heals us, grounds us, enlightens us, and brings us peace. (Or at least it has the potential to do so.) And not just the "us" who happens to be the patient, as Dr. Schiedermayer makes clear, but all of us -- everyone in the room, or everyone with ears to hear.

Rich Fisher passed through KWGS about thirty years ago, and just never left. Today, he is the general manager of Public Radio Tulsa, and the host of KWGS’s public affairs program, StudioTulsa, which celebrated its twentieth anniversary in August 2012 . As host of StudioTulsa, Rich has conducted roughly four thousand long-form interviews with local, national, and international figures in the arts, humanities, sciences, and government. Very few interviews have gone smoothly. Despite this, he has been honored for his work by several organizations including the Governor's Arts Award for Media by the State Arts Council, a Harwelden Award from the Arts & Humanities Council of Tulsa, and was named one of the “99 Great Things About Oklahoma” in 2000 by Oklahoma Today magazine.
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