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…

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.Af STAT

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,…

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 th…

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.Af STAT

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, Cub…

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…

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 t…

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 conc…

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…

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 …

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 …

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.…

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 th…

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…

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 "…

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 …

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 o…

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 …

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 …

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 neuro…

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 ho…

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. prepared…

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…

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 Sum…

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 men…

The term "excited delirium" has been used for years by law enforcement and other first responders, including health care workers, to describe people who exhibit behavior that is considered "out of control." This diagnosis has been applied again and again, even posthumously, as a justification for extreme and sometimes deadly, interventions by law e…

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 recently said that that the drug — which is in some versions of DayQuil, Sudafed, and other medicines — is no more effective than a placebo. But to Michael H. Bernstein, an assistant professor …

In just two weeks, the brutality of the Israel-Hamas conflict has shocked the world. But one of its most heartbreaking aspects — the destruction of the already-struggling health care system in Gaza — is part of a decades-long pattern during war both in the region and around the world. Leonard Rubenstein is a distinguished professor of practice at t…

After physically debilitating cancer treatment, Laurie Brunner encountered another medical hurdle: She had developed lymphedema that required surgery, but her BMI was over the cutoff. To receive the necessary treatment, she would have to lose weight. I spoke with Laurie and her physician Jody Dushay about how the ongoing shortages of GLP-1 medicati…

We're popping into your feed on a Sunday because we wanted to share an episode of The Nocturnists: Post-Roe America. You may have already heard the First Opinion Podcast interview with Ali Block, an abortion provider and executive producer of The Nocturnists, and Nikki Zite, an OB/GYN in Tennessee. (If you haven't listened yet, please do!)On this e…

Physicians Alison Block and Nikki Zite knew what they were getting into when they became abortion providers early in their medical training. Family planning has long been a politicized, divisive area of medicine. And even though they knew that Roe v. Wade — the 1973 Supreme Court case that protected abortion access across the country — was being th…

From our colleagues at Globe Opinion comes a new podcast: Say More. Say More, hosted by Globe columnist Shirley Leung, is all about exploring our backyard for the cultural trends, scientific discoveries, and breakthrough startups that are shaping the nation.Af STAT

Stephanie W. Edmonds and Ginny L. Ryan are both doctors. Edmonds, a registered nurse, has a Ph.D., while Ryan is a traditional M.D. But as part of a fight over “scope creep” in health care, many medical doctors might bristle at the idea of calling Edmonds “doctor.” In the last episode of the season, Edmonds and Ryan speak about the health care hier…

"You can't pour from an empty cup" is what registered nurse Tara Rynders learned the hard way after two decades of work and one heartbreaking, life-threatening experience of being a critical care patient herself. Before that experience, she'd always found found that dance, play, and other types of movement helped her express and heal from the traum…

Duchenne muscular dystrophy is a devastating disease and, until very recently, was one without much hope. When Hawken Miller was diagnosed at age 5, the physician told his parents to enjoy the time they had with him, as there wouldn't be much. Over 20 years later, Miller is a journalist and content strategist for CureDuchenne, an organization start…

Physician and professor Jason Karlawish argues that new promising drugs like lecanemab, an anti-amyloid antibody expected to be approved by the FDA July 6, will introduce complicated issues into the field of Alzheimer's care. These medications require a great deal of testing and patient monitoring, trained physicians, and other resources in a syste…

Drug shortages are a growing problem in the U.S., and a shortage of live-saving cancer drugs has reached crisis levels. Oncologist Kristen Rice explains that drug shortages have been happening for several years but have been getting progressively worse in the last few months. Oncologists are facing critical shortages of common, generic cancer medic…

Under the Affordable Care Act, health insurers are required to cover all costs associated with preventive care — including PrEP, or pre-exposure prophylactic treatment for HIV. But now all preventive care coverage is under threat, thanks to a lawsuit filed by employers who believe they shouldn’t be required to pay for care that violates their relig…

Just days after the end of Roe v. Wade, Caitlin Bernard, an OB/GYN in Indiana, told the Indianapolis Star a heartbreaking story: She had recently been asked to perform an abortion on a 10-year-old Ohio girl who had been raped. In late May, the Indiana Medical Licensing Board held a hearing on Bernard. While they did not revoke her license, they fin…

When a loved one is living with serious substance use disorder and refuses to get help, sometimes it seems like the only solution is to force them into it. In many states, people can be “arrescued” — that is, forced under penalty of law into a treatment program that is nearly identical to being incarcerated, down to orange jumpsuits. But Sarah Wake…

The high cost of cancer treatment in the U.S. is literally killing people. “Over a quarter of cancer patients delay medical care, go without care, or make changes in their cancer treatment because of cost,” Ezekiel J. Emanuel, an oncologist and co-director of the Health Care Transformation Institute at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote in a rec…

We've all had the experience of a clinician staring at screen while asking us sensitive questions to fill out our electronic health records. But that frustrating experience is made even worse by a new trend in health care. As Sanjay Basu wrote in a recent First Opinion, hospitals are using so-called "screen and refer" systems to identify people wit…

As an oncologist, Jennifer Lycette gets to know her patients particularly well. She’s doubtful that artificial intelligence could replace that personal connection, but new research based on, of all things, Reddit Q&As, says otherwise. New study findings raised questions about the potential for using chatbots, like ChatGPT, to help physicians answer…

Alex Rosenblat is particularly careful when it comes to her digital privacy. She requests to fill out paper forms instead of digital ones; she documents and tracks what she signs. But even her diligence can't always save her. Rosenblat recently spent months retracing her digital steps after Phreesia, a company that collects demographic information,…

In training to become a physician, medical residency can be a grueling period. Now, medical residents across the country have begun fighting to unionize their ranks. In Boston, residents at Massachusetts General Brigham — a major medical system — recently garnered enough votes to file for a union election. In her first episode as host of the "First…

After two years as host of the First Opinion Podcast and many more as the founding editor of STAT's expansive, authoritative First Opinion platform, Pat Skerrett put down his editing pen and microphone to start a new chapter: retirement. But before he left, he sat down with Torie Bosch, who has just joined STAT as our new First Opinion editor. They…

When Ken Duckworth was a child, his family didn't talk about mental health, especially not his father's bipolar disorder. It was an untouchable topic, but Duckworth knew his father shouldn't be seen as a lost cause. Instead, his father and others like him might actually have critical expertise on how to navigate the world with mental illness — expe…

In a special event as part of STAT's Open Doors initiative, the "First Opinion Podcast" was recorded live this week in front of an audience with returning guest Jay Baruch. Not long after being a guest on the first episode of the "First Opinion Podcast" in February 2021 on the many stories he's written for STAT in his time working as an emergency r…

The idea that the narrowing gap between Covid-19 deaths among white Americans and Americans of color represents a racial equity success story is being bandied about. Not so fast, says Nathan T. Chomilo, a pediatrician and internist at the University of Minnesota Medical School. This conversation emerged from the First Opinion essay "Covid-19 is an …