Dr. M's Women and Children First Podcast

The Story We Cannot See For those that have not read Theo of Golden, do so. Quite an incredible read. There is a moment in Theo of Golden when Allen Levi introduces us more deeply to Ellen, a woman whose circumstances make it easy for the world to place her into a category. Homeless. Poor. Troubled. Someone living at the margins. But then we learn her story. And suddenly that category becomes inadequate. Worse, inappropriate. That is one of the quiet gifts of a beautifully told story. It forces us to remain with another human being long enough for our first judgment to become uncomfortable. For it to turn against us. For us to recoil against our prejudices. I have experienced versions of this countless times in the newborn nursery. A baby is born, and somewhere in the medical record is the story we have constructed about the mother. No permanent address. Limited prenatal care. Substance use. Domestic instability. Unemployed. Teenager. Medicaid. Social work involved. These things matter. As physicians, we need to know them. They may tell us something important about the risks facing a newborn. But they tell us remarkably little about love. Or lack there of. I have walked into rooms where a mother's life outside the hospital was extraordinarily difficult, yet there she sat holding her newborn with the same wonder I have seen in mothers surrounded by every imaginable advantage. She studies the baby's face. Counts the fingers. Asks whether the baby is eating enough. Worries about a rash. Pulls the blanket a little higher. And sometimes, sitting beside that bassinet, the distinction between the woman with everything and the woman with almost nothing disappears..... and a literature review. Dr. M

"Last week someone asked why I prefer books. My immediate answer was that I love their quiet, non-commercial nature. No ads. No hype. Just quiet wisdom with deep rewards for a focused mind. But today I realized something more profound: Each of my biggest life-changing moments came from a single sentence deep inside a book." (Sivers D. 2026) I still prefer to hold a book in my hands, the weight of it, the rough-hewn pages beneath my fingers, the quiet ritual of turning one page after another. Reading, for me, has never been simply about absorbing information. It is the privilege of living for a while through another person’s eyes. We borrow their world, their memories, their fears and joys, and somehow return to our own lives seeing them a little differently. And then there are the words themselves. Sometimes I stop not because of what happened in the story, but because of the way someone chose to say it. A sentence can be so beautiful that it deserves to be read twice. Perhaps that is what I love most about books. For a little while, the world gets quiet, someone else begins to speak, and I get to simply be in love with words. For me, the changes are not as profound as Derek noted in his response. (hit the link below to read his life altering passages) For me, most passages were more in line with philosophy and health. and more.... Dr. M

My guest today is Nicholas Kelly, a registered dietitian, speaker, and someone who has spent essentially his entire life navigating medicine from the other side of the exam table. Nicholas was diagnosed with cystic fibrosis in infancy. That diagnosis meant growing up with a chronic disease that required constant attention: medications, treatments, nutrition, hospitalizations, and an intimate relationship with a healthcare system that most children never experience. But what makes Nicholas’s story so compelling is what he has done with that experience, a story that has inspired me. He ultimately became a healthcare professional himself, giving him the unusual perspective of being both clinician and lifelong patient. And through his TEDx talk, Healing Through the Human Experience, and his broader work, he has challenged clinicians to think more deeply about something that can easily get lost in modern medicine: What does healthcare actually feel like to the person receiving it? Our conversation moves well beyond cystic fibrosis. We talk about resilience, identity, nutrition, the evolution of CF treatment, the patient-clinician relationship, and the moments when healthcare gets that relationship right and when it gets it very wrong. We also explore what happens when a child who has spent his life being defined, at least partly, by a serious disease grows into an adult and begins to decide for himself what that disease will, and will not, mean for his life. Nicholas’s story is ultimately about much more than living with cystic fibrosis. There is an amazing story within the story about his mother. Listen and find out what she did for him. Beautiful. It is about living fully in the presence of uncertainty, finding purpose through adversity, and reminding those of us who practice medicine that treating disease and caring for a human being are not always the same thing. This is my conversation with Nicholas Kelly.   Enjoy, Dr. M

The Story Your Brain Decides to Tell Two people walk into the same room. One has been told that she is there to make new friends. The other has been told that she is there to determine whether the people in the room can be trusted. Same room. Same people. Same conversations. But perhaps not the same experience. That is the fascinating implication of emerging neuroscience exploring how the brain constructs the story of our lives. We tend to imagine that our senses work something like cameras. Light enters the eyes. Sound enters the ears. Information travels to the brain. Reality comes in, and we experience it. Except that isn't really what happens. The brain is constantly deciding what matters. Our goals, expectations, memories and beliefs create a frame through which incoming information is interpreted. This month's Scientific American article by Ingrid Wickelgren describes research suggesting that when people approach the same experience with different goals, their brains organize that experience differently. Their neural activity begins to reflect the narrative they are constructing. In other words, we don't simply experience reality. We edit it. This is even more complex because we all show up with epigenetic fingerprints of past experiences. Think about walking through an airport. If you are hungry, you suddenly notice restaurants. If you are late, you notice clocks. If you are angry, you notice people's energy and anger. If have a history of trauma, you notice similarities of past experience. If you have lost your child for thirty terrifying seconds, you notice every small person wearing a similar shirt. The airport hasn't changed. Your brain's response and perception has. Your orientation and current frame/goal determines which pieces of an impossibly complicated environment rise into conscious awareness. Neuroscientists have been circling this concept for decades. Marvin Minsky described mental "frames" as structures we bring to new situations. Rather than building our understanding of the world from scratch every second, the brain pulls up a model based upon previous experience and asks, essentially: What kind of situation is this? What should I expect? What matters here?..... And a section on maternal story and the default mode network. Dr. M

Today’s conversation sits right at the intersection of childhood development, technology, and a question that is becoming harder for parents to ignore: What might our children need to develop before we hand them a screen? My guest today is Dr. Kari Stubbs, who holds a PhD in education and has spent her career in K–12 education technology. And that makes her current work particularly interesting. She isn’t approaching this conversation as someone who is anti-technology. Quite the opposite. She understands technology, has worked within it for years, and sees very clearly where the world is headed. But she also spends her weeks talking with early-childhood leaders and school-district directors, hearing firsthand that children are showing up at school differently than they did a generation ago. Kari raised her own two children using what she describes as a brain-based approach to movement and development, during a time when screens still largely stayed attached to walls and desks. Today, she argues for something that sounds almost countercultural coming from an education technologist: protecting significant screen-free time during the first five years of life. Her argument isn’t that technology is bad. It’s that timing matters. Those first five years are when children are building many of the foundational human capacities they will carry into school, relationships, and eventually the workplace—things like curiosity, adaptability, creativity, self-regulation, and collaboration. And ironically, as artificial intelligence becomes increasingly capable, these deeply human aptitudes may become more valuable, not less. Kari writes about these ideas in her Substack, The First Five: Before Screens, and today we’re going to explore what the developing brain actually needs from movement, play, relationships, and the physical world—and what may be lost when screens arrive too early or occupy too much of childhood. Enjoy, Dr. M