Sorry, I'm losing my train of thought here. That's okay. I pointed at you and you weren't ready. I will

I was

No, I was writing down diuretics poison to the kidney

And I was thinking I was like I was like how do I want to tackle this?

Welcome back to the curbsiders. Hello Matt. The internal medicine podcast that uses expert interviews to bring you clinical pearls and practice changing knowledge. Here we got a good one today. I'm Dr. Matthew Wato. Here with my co-host Dr. Stuart Brigham. Hello. Stuart Kent Brigham. That's right. Paul Neumann.

Paul Nelson Williams. Not here. No. Stuck in the hospital moment of silence for Paul. Please. Taking care of this. That was a very short moment of silence. Oh, sorry. That's okay. Anyways, so today we have a very special guest. It's Dr. Joel Topf. He's known within the nephrology circles for his blog precious bodily fluids. The musings of assault whisperer. Dr. Topf is a board certified nephrologist and partner at St. Clair Nephrology. He holds academic appointments as assistant clinical professor.

At the Oakland University William Beaumont School of Medicine and academic faculty for the Saint John Hospital Medical Center nephrology fellowship. He has best known through his Twitter handle at Kidney underscore boy. We are very lucky to have Dr. Topf with us today and his enthusiasm for diuretics and all things nephrology is incredibly infectious. If you don't follow him on Twitter, please just stop the podcast right now. Open up Twitter and follow him now. No seriously. Stop the podcast right now. Calm Calm down Stuart. They have plenty of time.

Okay. Twitter is not going anywhere. It I hear it is anyways. Please enjoy the show. I promise Matt not to be salty this time. Welcome back to the curbside. Hello Matt. Hi Stuart. How are you doing tonight? Salty as ever. Salty. Yes. That's a good segue to introduce our expert for tonight. Dr. Joel Topf. Hi Dr. Topf. Hey, hello.

So Dr. Topf, you are you are you call yourself at Kidney Boy on Twitter and also have been known to be called the Salt Whisperer. Is that right?

Yeah, I don't think anybody else has ever called me the Salt Whisperer, but lots of people call me Kidney Boy. I think Salt Whisperer is going to stick.

Yeah, one of the better Twitter names I've heard definitely in the medical world probably probably my favorite one that I've heard. So Kidney Boy. Yeah, I like it a lot. I think it says a lot about your sense of humor. And yeah, once that I was hooked.

I was hooked on reading your feed once I once I heard that. So people should check you out.

So it came from my first year of fellowship. One of the positions as fellow was running the dialysis service. And I just I felt like a traffic cop. I was like, you get dialysis now. You guys got to stop. We'll get you in a couple of hours.

It was just like directing traffic on Main Street. And I just I changed my my beeper handle to be a Kidney Boy. And the apology nurses just a little laugh. They thought that was so funny.

And then years later I was like, and on Twitter, I was like, oh, I'll go with Kidney Boy.

It's just great. I love it. Well, we are. Yeah. So we're really excited to have you on the podcast. You've done a lot of cool stuff that will get into some of it. And if not, we'll definitely link to your your blog and and your Twitter feed so people can enjoy that and check it out.

I wanted to ask the question I've been asking recently for people. What are you best known for as a doctor or as a nephrologist?

So I was early into social media. I was one of the first nephrology bloggers. There were just a couple ahead of me. This was back in 2009.

And I've been blogging since then. And it really whenever I go to a nephrology meeting, I'm always always meet people that I've never I've never seen before. But they've like, oh, I've been reading you for years.

And it's pretty it's it's it's this kind of weird micro celebrity. It's a lot of fun. But yeah, I think that's probably what I'm most known for that has then evolved into Twitter, which is like blogging with people listening.

It's a lot more fun, actually. And there's a back and forth communication.

Yeah, if you look Twitter up in the literature, they call it micro blogging. So I guess that's kind of blogging too technically, but so when when you're at a cocktail party and a layperson asks you what you do, how do you answer that?

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