Dr Ben and Friends

Knock knock. A surgeon, a scrub tech, and a stand-up comedian walk into a podcast and somehow we end up talking about the duodenum with way more passion than anyone expects. We kick things off by turning a common medical term into a real, listener-friendly anatomy lesson: what the duodenum is, where it sits in the digestive system, and why surgeons treat it with extra respect when ulcers or perforations show up. Then we play “What The Heck?” with actual operating room instruments, and Brando...

“Jump room.” “Sterile field.” “Hemostat.” “Mayo scissors.” “Bovie.” If those words sound like a weird mix of hospital drama and nonsense syllables, you are exactly the person we made this for. We take real operating room terms and surgical instruments and hand them to a comedian with one job: pronounce them, define them, and commit to the guess with confidence. The results are laugh-out-loud wrong in the best way and unexpectedly helpful if you have ever wanted to understand how surgery...

Surgical jargon can sound like nonsense until you realize it’s describing real, high-stakes work. We bring on operating room tech Herb Coleman alongside comedian Marianna Barksdale and turn a simple guessing game into a surprisingly useful tour of how the OR actually runs, with plenty of punchlines along the way. We unpack flash sterilization, what it is, when it’s used, and why “we need that instrument flashed” is not as dramatic as it sounds, but still seriously important for infection pre...

He’s deadlifting 600lbs, training like a machine, and then one day his body hits a wall. Herb Coleman thought he was just getting older until a routine check uncovered something that could have ended everything without warning: a thoracic aortic aneurysm measuring about seven centimeters, plus a leaking valve. What happens next moves fast, from echocardiogram to an urgent call back to the hospital to emergency open heart surgery. We sit down with Herb, a former NFL defensive line...

Knock knock, howdy folks, we’re bringing the operating room to the mic, one weird term at a time. Dr. Ben is joined by his teammate in surgery and OR tech Herb Coleman plus the wildly multi-talented comedian, writer, actress, and stunt double Marianna Barksdale for a game we call “What The Heck?” The rules are simple: we hand Marianna real surgical and medical field vocabulary, she takes her best swing, and then we reveal what it actually means. First up, “surgical count” sounds harmle...