Rod Gerardo, a medical student at the Wright State University Boonshoft School of Medicine, was chosen for an internship with "The Dr. Oz Show" in New York City.
“The internship was for students interested in public health and TV,” Gerardo said in a release, who is from Brecksville, Ohio. “The Dr. Oz Show" was an opportunity for me to dip my feet into that realm of medicine.”
Gerardo took a year off from medical school to be a medical student producer for the 'Dr. Oz Show'. The internship began in August 2016 and concluded at the end of April. He was one of three medical student producers for the show, and was in the studio three days a week. Gerardo and his colleagues vetted content for the show, helped develop new material, designed 3-D animations an worked with the props department to create demonstrations for the show.
In addition, Gerardo and the other two medical students wrote health advice tips for iHeart radio public service announcements and researched information for Oz's magazine columns and interviews.
“Dr. Oz is one of the most intelligent and busiest physicians I have ever met,” Gerardo said, who earned his undergraduate degree in biology and a master’s degree in nutrition from the University of Cincinnati. “His mind moves so fast.”
Gerardo learned from Oz that physicians do not need to be limited to the careers of their mentors.
"If there is something that you want to do with medicine or a way that you want to help patients, you can do that,” Gerardo said. “And, you can still be a family man and make it all work.”
"The Dr. Oz Show" is health and wellness TV show, starring Mehmet Oz, a cardiothoracic surgeon and professor at Columbia University. The show began in 2009 after Oz spent five years as a health expert on the "Oprah Winfrey Show."
The show educates viewers about a variety of health topics. “This area in which ‘The Dr. Oz Show’ lives is a gray area where medicine meets the media. Before Dr. Oz, it was fairly uncharted territory,” Gerardo said. “It was difficult to take health topics and package them in a way that the general public can learn something from them. We always try to educate the viewers.”
