Known as "Doc Hoagland" to his listeners, he enjoys the informal, conversational style of the show. "If my guest uses a word or phrase that I don't think the listening audience would understand, then I will interject a question: What do you mean by that particular fact? It's truly a conversation between me and my guest about a particular topic."
He also likes the fact that the show reaches people who may not have any other means of keeping up to date on health news. "In this area of Minnesota, Iowa, and Wisconsin, we are a farming district," Dr. Hoagland explained. "We have a tremendous number of farms for beans, corn, hogs, and cows."
He explained that the farmers in the area "many times either don't want to look at television or don't have television. Some of them have no knowledge about computers. It gives us a way of getting to them."
His fulfillment comes at the end of program. He'll walk out of the studios with the guest for that segment and think, "I have done something for the community as a volunteer and, hopefully, they've learned something from what we did," he said.
Dr. Shives would like to see "Healthline" become syndicated someday. "That's difficult to do because of the time slot," he said. "But that's one thing I'd like to see, because I think it would be good for the general public outside of southeastern Minnesota."
An 'Amateur Folklorist' Goes Live
Dr. John Uhlemann has been hosting a radio show for more than 13 years, but it has nothing to do with medicine. Every Saturday from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. he hosts a show called "Music From the Hills" on KDHX 88.1 FM in St. Louis, a listener-supported station that provides a wide range of musical and cultural-affairs programming.
As a student at Grinnell College, Iowa, he joined a folk-dance group, which at the time in the 1960s "was considered an avant garde thing to do," said Dr. Uhlemann, a dermatologist who practices in St. Charles, Mo., and at Washington University, St. Louis. "We did mostly line dances from the Balkan countries. In those countries, the music aims toward the ecstatic. In other words, you don't listen to pretty melodies and go skipping around in circles. Instead, it was a much more vigorous type of music and dancing."
Dr. Uhlemann said that the music was unlike anything he had heard before, and he began to collect recordings for his own enjoyment. But after befriending some of the staff at KDHX, they invited him to host a show to spotlight folk and traditional music primarily from Eastern Europe and Scandinavia.
"I am not an amateur broadcaster; I am an amateur folklorist with a radio show," Dr. Uhlemann said. "Like the late [classical music radio personality] Seymour DeKoven, I try not to be stuffy, pedantic, or dull, if I can help it, but I leave it to my listeners to decide. The music I play is ethnic music that lets the local people speak for themselves. That is, I do not play 'world music' in the sense of soft rock in a language you don't speak. This is real folk and national music, designed for consumption by the people the musicians grew up with. Too much 'world music' is watered down for the international market. It's like putting bean sprouts in beef stroganoff and calling it Thai cooking. You might like the taste, but it isn't Thai cooking."
It takes him up to 4 hours each week to prepare for his show, including making CDs from hundreds of LPs at home. He considers it his job as host of "Music From the Hills" to "introduce people to the music in such a way that it's palatable and get them to listen to things they would never otherwise listen to," he said. "There's something of a teaching component to that, and I like teaching. But there's also this component of 'what can I do with this material that will be not just informative but also an aesthetic experience for people?' That's the creative side of it."
Dr. Uhlemann has visited every Eastern European country except Russia and the Baltic states, so when he plays a song from a certain country or region, he may share an anecdote based on his own experience there. "Sometimes I'll give them a story, like 'this comes from such-and-such village. This village is interesting because…'"
Hosting provides a nice contrast to the "by-the-book" nature of his dermatology practice, he said. "Because I don't do a lot of the cosmetic things that I guess might fulfill such a role, this for me is a more creative thing."