You’ve probably come across Will Flanary, aka Dr. Glaucomflecken, the internet’s most famous physician/comedian. For more than four years, the ophthalmologist has been gently roasting medicine by playing a rotating cast of characters — the emergency physician clad in cyclist gear, the “ortho bro,” the pediatrician in a unicorn headband. But he's also used his comedy to skewer the business of health care, including the confounding bureaucracies of insurance — with a special emphasis on UnitedHeal...
Dec 18, 2024•32 min•Transcript available on Metacast Have you ever taken phenylephrine for a stuffed-up nose and then felt better? If so, you might have been perplexed when Food and Drug Administration experts said last year that that the drug — which is in some versions of DayQuil, Sudafed, and other medicines — is no more effective than a placebo. On this episode of the “First Opinion Podcast,” we talk with professor and researcher Michael Bernstein about the placebo effect and its counterpart, the “nocebo effect” — if you tell patients somethin...
Dec 11, 2024•27 min•Transcript available on Metacast Biomedical engineer Jeff Karp’s famous lab has created medical tape inspired by spider webs, waterproof adhesive bandages that take inspiration from geckos, needles reminiscent of porcupine quills. But as an elementary school student, Karp told me on the “First Opinion Podcast,” he struggled. His second-grade teacher wanted to hold him back a year. “I was getting all these labels from teachers like ‘lazy’ and ‘lost cause,’ ” he said. But according to Karp, what made him struggle — undiagnosed AD...
Dec 04, 2024•46 min•Transcript available on Metacast About 75% of U.S. hospitals use chaplains, who are either employed by the health care center or are spiritual leaders from the local community. Physician Robert Klitzman and chaplain Molly O’Neil Frank join today’s podcast to discuss why chaplains are a critical part of patient care. Perhaps counterintuitively, they say, chaplains' roles have become even more important as religious affiliation has declined in the country.
Nov 27, 2024•27 min•Transcript available on Metacast When Randi Johnson was undergoing treatment for breast cancer, her husband, Brian, often felt at a loss to help. But then, when he and Randi met with a surgeon to discuss reconstructing her breast, he was struck by something he could do. The Midwestern father of five, a lifelong tinkerer, decided to make his wife the best possible prosthetic nipple. “The nipple solution is actually very elusive,” Randi said. “Surgical nipples tend to flatten. Tattoos fade. Or they still don't have dimension. The...
Nov 20, 2024•38 min•Transcript available on Metacast Torie speaks with Carmel Shachar, an assistant clinical professor at Harvard Law and health policy expert, about how the second Trump term might differ from the first, how the health policy world is preparing, and her work on reproductive health, telehealth, and vaccines.
Nov 13, 2024•30 min•Transcript available on Metacast No matter who wins the 2024 presidential race, one thing is clear: Political anxiety and division will remain high for the foreseeable future. So just before Election Day, Torie spoke with Kevin Smith, a professor of political science at the University of Nebraska who studies the intersection of political attitudes, biology, and evolution. In 2019, he and colleagues published a study that found almost 40% of Americans reported experiencing stress over politics, 11.5% thought their physical healt...
Nov 06, 2024•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast This close to Nov. 5, we are being battered with promises that this race will determine the future of the country. But Christine Dehlendorf wants people to remember that as important as Election Day is, it won’t be the end of discussions about reproductive health. Dehlendorf is a family physician and professor of family and community medicine at the University of California, San Francisco and directs the Person-Centered Reproductive Health Program. Recently, she co-authored a First Opinion argui...
Oct 30, 2024•33 min•Transcript available on Metacast Medicare policy has been conspicuously absent from the 2024 presidential race. Health policy scholar Paul Ginsburg thinks this is because both Democrats and Republicans understand that the reforms needed in the Medicare system are not going to be popular.
Oct 23, 2024•27 min•Transcript available on Metacast Mark Cuban, co-founder of Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drugs, joins the podcast along with STAT's Matthew Herper. They talk with Torie about pharmacy benefit managers, the 2024 presidential campaign, and how the health care industry should work. "This is literally the easiest industry to interrupt, to disintermediate, that I’ve ever been involved with, Cuban said.
Oct 16, 2024•37 min•Transcript available on Metacast For several years now, newspapers have been moving away from a longstanding tradition: endorsing candidates for political office. But Scientific American is bucking the trend. In 2020, for the first time, the 179-year-old magazine endorsed Joe Biden for president. They followed suit this year, endorsing Kamala Harris. Both times, the move spurred a great deal of discussion about scientific objectivity, journalistic objectivity, and the point of endorsements. To learn more about the decision to e...
Oct 09, 2024•41 min•Transcript available on Metacast Every four years, someone says “This is the most important election ever.” But it’s hard to question the long-term impact Election Day 2024 will have — from the top of the ballot on down. So the first five episodes of the fall 2024 season of the “First Opinion Podcast” will grapple with the campaign and its intersection with health, medicine, and the life sciences. I’ll speak with experts on issues that have come up on the campaign trail, topics that candidates should focus on, and what a second...
Oct 02, 2024•34 min•Transcript available on Metacast For scientists and medical professionals well versed in the safety and effectiveness of vaccines, it is often too easy to write off the concerns of people who fear them, or feel they have been injured by them. But vaccine expert Kizzmekia S. Corbett-Helaire argues that professionals should be more empathetic when it comes to listening to these concerns, and that understanding them may help developers make better vaccines. Corbett-Helaire, an assistant professor of immunology and infectious disea...
Jul 17, 2024•33 min•Transcript available on Metacast In a special edition of the "First Opinion Podcast," STAT executive editor Rick Berke and senior writer Helen Branswell interviewed the country’s former top infectious disease expert about some of the insights and revelations from his new memoir, "On Call: A Doctor's Journey in Public Service." Conversation topics include when Fauci knew that Covid-19 was a real threat; when AIDS activist Larry Kramer called him "the consummate manipulative bureaucrat" in an interview with STAT; how quickly nati...
Jul 10, 2024•52 min•Transcript available on Metacast While the bogus science of eugenics — the idea that the idea that the human race can be improved through selective reproduction — has been nearly universally discredited, remnants of this belief system are still alive and well in modern research. One of the most glaring examples of this is the work of academic psychologist Richard Lynn. Two recent First Opinion authors, Rebecca Sear and Dan Samorodnitsky, join the podcast this week to talk about Lynn’s explicitly racist research, how it is still...
Jul 03, 2024•37 min•Transcript available on Metacast It has been two years since the Supreme Court made the historic decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, which had protected the right to abortion in the United States. Since then, 21 states have severely restricted or outright banned access to abortion care. Diana DeGette, a Democrat who has represented Colorado's 1st Congressional District in the House of Representatives since 1997, and who has co-chaired the House's Pro-Choice Caucus since 2000, joins the podcast this week to discuss how the Supreme...
Jun 26, 2024•31 min•Transcript available on Metacast Millions of people around the world are living with long Covid, a potentially debilitating and medically perplexing condition. Rachel Hall-Clifford is one of them. As a medical anthropologist, she’s well suited to understand the condition. But as a mother, wife, friend, researcher, and teacher, it drags her down, just as it does so many others.
Jun 19, 2024•37 min•Transcript available on Metacast This week's episode of the "First Opinion Podcast" explores the issue of medical debt, which burdens as many as 40% of U.S. adults. They collectively owe more than a whopping $200 billion. Many organizations and even federal and state governments have established debt relief programs to tackle the problem. Such programs make intuitive sense. But they may not work and, in some cases, could even harm the mental health of some individuals on the receiving end. That's the surprising takeaway from a ...
Jun 12, 2024•28 min•Transcript available on Metacast The medications methadone and buprenorphine are considered “gold standards” for the treatment of opioid use disorder. They are so effective, in fact, that they are considered nearly curative for people that use them as prescribed. Unfortunately, a multitude of social and physical barriers to access means that only about 20% of people that need them have access to these treatments. That access is even harder for pregnant people, who face additional stigmas and challenges. Judith Cole, a nurse pra...
Jun 05, 2024•40 min•Transcript available on Metacast When it comes to childhood and young adulthood, most people in the U.S. think of carefree times of life with few major responsibilities. But for a small subset of young people, these years also mean caring for loved ones. Harvard medical students Kimia Heydari and Romila Santra both have firsthand experience being young caregivers, and spoke with "First Opinion Podcast" host Pat Skerrett about the unique challenges of taking care of family members at ages when few of their peers had similar expe...
May 29, 2024•39 min•Transcript available on Metacast If you ask a chatbot how to cause a pandemic, it will suggest the 1918 influenza virus, according to researcher Kevin Esvelt. It will even tell you where to find the gene sequences online and where to purchase the genetic components. Esvelt is a biologist and MIT professor whose work has included altering the genes of mice to prevent the spread of Lyme disease. In a recent First Opinion essay, he wrote about how easy and inexpensive it has become to order genetic components that could be used to...
May 22, 2024•35 min•Transcript available on Metacast University of Pennsylvania oncologist and researcher Ezekiel Emanuel and Matthew Guido, a project manager in the Healthcare Transformation Institute, discuss their original research on tuition-free programs with former host Pat Skerrett, who is filling in while Torie Bosch is on maternity leave. They make the case that medical school debt is only one of many factors that influence new doctors to choose less-popular specialties and geographic locations for their residencies.
May 15, 2024•35 min•Transcript available on Metacast James Sulzer has spent his life tinkering with tools that help patients with neurological conditions. But after his 4-year-old daughter sustained a traumatic brain injury in 2020, his eyes were opened to how much his field was missing about the real experiences of families dealing with recovery. This week, Sulzer speaks with host Torie Bosch about the importance of centering patients in research and treatment.
May 08, 2024•30 min•Transcript available on Metacast Back in February, physician and advocate Joel Zivot wrote a First Opinion essay shortly after Kenneth Smith was executed using nitrogen gas in Alabama. In “A new Louisiana capital-punishment bill would fundamentally alter physician licensing,” Zivot argues against proposed bills in both Kansas and Louisiana that would allow “death by hypoxia.” Not only is this type of death cruel and painful, he argues, but such a bill would “effectively wrest control of physician conduct from medical boards.” L...
May 01, 2024•40 min•Transcript available on Metacast De-Shaine Murray is working at the cutting edge of neurotechnology. As a postdoctoral fellow at Yale, he is developing a device to monitor the brain following traumatic brain injury or stroke. He is also trying to fight the long legacy of racism in neuroscience. He sees a direct line from racist pseudoscience like phrenology to disparities in neuroscience today, like how the texture of Black people’s hair can sometimes exclude them from clinical trials because electrodes are not designed for the...
Dec 20, 2023•35 min•Transcript available on Metacast Manil Suri and Daniel Morgan are an unusual team: Manil is a mathematics professor and author, while Daniel is a physician and professor of epidemiology, public health, and infectious diseases. But they recently teamed up for a First Opinion essay, “Diagnostic tests for rare conditions present a mathematical conundrum,” in which they write about how the more rare a disease ease, the more likely a test will return a false positive. Host Torie Bosch spoke with Manil and Daniel about how false posi...
Dec 13, 2023•32 min•Transcript available on Metacast Before he joined Congress, Rep. Raul Ruiz, a Democrat from California, worked in another chaotic environment: the emergency department. Today, he says, he tries to bring his background in medicine and public health to policymaking. In particular, he has turned his attention to a shortage of infectious disease physicians that threatens U.S. preparedness for the next pandemic. Our conversation was based on his recent First Opinion essay, “The infectious disease doctor shortage threatens future pan...
Dec 06, 2023•30 min•Transcript available on Metacast When Prozac first entered the psychiatry scene in in the late 80s, the profession was still Freud's territory. Meaning: it was considered by many a failure to take medication to cure depression. But that was all about to change, with early stewards like psychiatrist Peter Kramer, who refused to shy away from the new drug's potential. These days, he says that people take for granted all of the progress that's been made with antidepressant treatment. Kramer joins Torie to discuss how the country's...
Nov 29, 2023•32 min•Transcript available on Metacast Fifteen years ago, Mara Buchbinder and colleagues came up with the concept of the “patient in waiting.” The concept described a new category of patients created by cutting-edge testing for conditions that may never appear. The patient in waiting was, quite literally, someone who was waiting to see if they would become ill. Mara's husband, Jesse Summers, was diagnosed with metastatic colon cancer in 2021. It went into remission — but earlier this year, a test searching for disease recurrence came...
Nov 22, 2023•36 min•Transcript available on Metacast This week, medical student Amelia Mercado and her professor J. Wesley Boyd talk about the stressors of medical training, privacy concerns within academic institutions, and how high insurance costs affect access to mental health care. The conversation is based on their co-authored First Opinion, "How medical schools are failing students who need mental health care."
Nov 15, 2023•33 min•Transcript available on Metacast 
