Claim OwnershipFirst Opinion Podcast
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A weekly podcast about the people, issues and ideas that are shaping health care.
121 Episodes
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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 … prosthetic nipples that were around when we started, they looked really fake, and they'd fall off. And that's really kind of a deal breaker.”
After Brian made one for Randi, the two of them decided to offer the service to others. Today, they make affordable, realistic nipples for dozens of people a year, largely reaching potential customers through word of mouth.
One of their sons, Justin, recently chronicled their work in his new documentary “Mom & Dad’s Nipple Factory,” now available for rent or purchase on streaming platforms. (Watch the trailer here.)
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.
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 health had been affected, and 4% reported suicidal thoughts. They talked about political anxiety, tribalism, and how much our political attitudes might be driven by biology rather than environment.
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 arguing that primary care providers and family physicians should have more training in providing abortion care.
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.
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.
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 endorse and the process behind it, Torie spoke with Scientific American editor-in-chief Laura Helmuth and opinion editor Megha Satyanarayana (formerly of STAT).
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 Trump or first Harris administration might hold. Think of it as “First Opinion Podcast Hits the Trail,” perhaps, except I’m staying home in the swing state of Pennsylvania fending off campaign texts.
For the debut episode, I spoke with Kathleen Kelly Daughety, vice president of campaigns and civic engagement for Inseparable, a mental health advocacy organization with a strong focus on policy.
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 diseases at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston and a Freeman Hrabowski Scholar at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, joins "The First Opinion Podcast" this week to discuss her experience helping roll out the first Covid-19 vaccines in the midst of the pandemic. She also addresses her desire to close the gap between public health experts trying to end disease and people who genuinely fear harm from vaccines.
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 national health risk can skyrocket when it comes to pathogenic viruses; and which former president Fauci has the most affection for.
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 being cited in medical journals to this day, and their efforts to get his papers and those citing them, retracted from the scientific literature.
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 Court's 2022 decision has affected American health care and politics. She believes the decision has actually awakened voters to the idea that they need to protect their access to health care.
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 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 study that Katherine Hempstead, a senior policy adviser at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, wrote about in a First Opinion essay and talked about with STAT's Pat Skerrett on the podcast. They were joined by Allison Sesso, the CEO of Undue Medical Debt, a national nonprofit organization that helped sponsor the study.
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 practitioner, and addiction psychiatrist Arthur Robin Williams join the podcast this week to speak about these specific challenges, including the reality that federal law allows for child protective services to be called when people receiving legal effective treatments for addiction have given birth. Despite medications like methadone being fully safe during pregnancy, they continue to carry a stigma that can result in trauma for both birth parents and newborns.
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 experiences.
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 create harmful pathogens or toxins and how the biotech industry and government agencies must strengthen safety precautions to prevent this.
Esvelt sat down with host Pat Skerrett to chat about the amazing things genetic technology can accomplish when used correctly, as well as the dangers of such technology in the hands of someone with bad intentions.
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.
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.
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.” Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry signed the bill into law in early March.
In this episode, Zivot speaks with host Torie Bosch about what it means for death to be cruel, why he believes the state has no business using medicine to kill.
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