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The practice of medicine–filled with moments of joy, suffering, grace, sorrow, and hope–offers a window into the human condition. Though serving as guides and companions to patients’ illness experiences is profoundly meaningful work, the busy nature of modern medicine can blind its own practitioners to the reasons they entered it in the first place. Join resident physician Henry Bair and oncologist Tyler Johnson as they meet with doctors, patients, leaders, educators, and others in healthcare, to explore stories on finding and nourishing meaning in medicine. This podcast is for anyone striving for a deeper connection with their medical journey. Visit TheDoctorsArt.com for more information.
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One of the most mysterious and frightening entities in medicine are prion diseases — rare neurodegenerative disorders that are usually infectious in nature but involve not bacteria or viruses, but proteins. Prions are misfolded proteins that can induce normal proteins to become misfolded as well, resulting in a chain reaction that leads to irreversible brain damage and death. What makes prions alarming is that they are incurable, can incubate for decades in a person's brain without symptoms, ...
The second half of the 20th century saw monumental shifts in civil rights in the United States, with the end of legalized racial segregation, discrimination, and disenfranchisement affecting all spheres of life, from education to health care to housing to marriage and more. Judge David S. Tatel is a civil rights lawyer who has contributed to key advancements in voting rights, educational equality, and disability rights. Over the course of his five-decade career, he has served as Director...
Addiction is often misunderstood not just by the public, but also by clinicians. It challenges us as individuals, families, and communities. To understand addiction is to understand not only human behavior and neuroscience, but also social networks, public policies, and bioethics. Our guest on this episode, Keith Humphreys, PhD, is a psychologist who specializes in addiction and has served on the White House Commission on Drug Free Communities during the Bush administration, and as Senior Pol...
One of the most fascinating concepts in human health is the idea of social contagion, meaning that emotions, behaviors, and health outcomes can spread through social networks, much like infectious diseases. Examples in the medical literature abound: if a person becomes obese, their friends have a significantly higher chance of becoming obese — even their friends of friends have increased odds of becoming obese. Similarly, someone who quit smoking is likely to create a ripple effect through th...
Digital technologies have saturated our lives and there is no going back. Given this, it's worth pondering whether and how they are fundamentally reshaping our mind and our relationships. A seminal work that explores these issues is the 2010 book The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, by journalist Nicholas Carr. In it, he argues that the internet is “shallowing” our brains, meaning that as we offload cognitive tasks to digital tools, our ability to read linearly, to abs...
Medicine is filled with stories that illustrate the most beautiful, devastating, hopeful, and consequential moments of life. But how do we capture these moments and transform them into everlasting lessons that guide us on our search for meaning? That's where the art of storytelling comes in. Our guest on this episode is Anna Reisman, MD, director of the Program for Humanities in Medicine at the Yale School of Medicine. Dr. Reisman is not only a physician-writer whose essays have appeared...
During the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, the phrase “Healthcare Heroes” echoed through hospital walls and city streets. For many people, this felt like an overdue acknowledgment of the difficult and important work that healthcare professionals carried out during the most devastating healthcare crisis the world had seen in a century. But this phrase can also be problematic, romanticizing the sacrifices of individual clinicians without addressing the systemic failures that put them at ri...
Precision medicine — the approach to health care that involves tailoring medical interventions to an individual's genetic makeup, environment and lifestyle — promises to deliver the right treatment to the right person at the right time. From preventing diseases decades before they appear, to specially designed cocktails of cancer drugs, to genetic modification of rare diseases, many of these applications sound straight out of science fiction. At the forefront of precision medicine and me...
Joseph Sakran, MD, MPH was a teenager in a small town in Virginia when, in 1994, his life took a dramatic turn. At the age of 17, he was out with his friends after a high school football game when a nearby gunfight broke out and he was struck by a stray bullet in the throat. The bullet, tearing through his windpipe and a carotid artery, brought him to the razor edge of death before he was saved by trauma surgeons. Thirty years later, Dr. Sakran is now a trauma surgeon who serves as Direc...
To the best of our knowledge, humans appear to be unique among animals in our awareness of mortality — at least in our capacity for existential reflection about death in an abstract, cultural, and symbolic sense. With this capacity comes profound psychological experiences, from our search for meaning, to our struggle with grief, to a yearning for the spiritual. Our guest on this episode is Dr. Rachel Clarke, a palliative care physician based in the United Kingdom who entered medicine aft...
Modern medicine has long considered many neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease to be immutably linked to the fate of certain unlucky individuals through yet-poorly understood genetic mechanisms. But increasingly, we are seeing evidence that some of our lifestyle choices, including our diet, physical activity, and relationships, may play a significant role in the development of, or protection against, these diseases. Our guest on this episode, David Per...
What makes a life worth living? This question has animated great thinkers and faith traditions for millennia. Interestingly enough, in our time of rapid globalization, technological advancement, and material abundance, we often seem more unmoored from our conception of the self and its relation to the world than ever before.Our guest on this episode, Miroslav Volf, has spent his life wrestling with this question of questions and helping others to do the same. Volf is a professor of theology a...
Most people shudder at the idea of an infectious disease outbreak — patients stricken with a mysterious illness, hospitals overflowing, and cities going into lockdown. But for Syra Madad, DHSc, MSc , MCP, rushing into such a scenario, donned in a hazmat suit, to control the chaos has been a dream since childhood. Today, she is an epidemiologist, biosecurity advisor, and a pathogen preparedness expert who serves as Senior Director of the System-Wide Special Pathogens Program at New York City H...
1For many physicians, having serious illness conversations with patients — talking about a dire prognosis or the futility of curative treatments — is one of the most daunting aspects of patient care. But to palliative care physician Shunichi Nakagawa, MD, these conversations are fundamentally about communicating the honest truth in an elegant, considerate, and humane way. Dr. Nakagawa, the director of the Inpatient Palliative Care Service at Columbia University Medical Center, joins us in...
When Impossible Foods released its first product, the Impossible Burger, in 2016, it was met with equal parts curiosity, skepticism, and excitement. This plant-based “meat that bleeds” was seen as a novelty item. Today, Impossible Foods’ expanded line of offerings, from sausages to chicken nuggets to Italian meatballs, can be found in most American grocery stores at a price that rivals traditional meats. The founder of Impossible Foods is Pat Brown, MD, PhD, a physician and molecular bio...
Many people regard dementia as a fate worse than death, in large part because it strikes at the essence of our humanity — our memories, identity, and relationships with others. Unlike diseases that primarily afflict the body, dementia erodes the mind, leading to a gradual fragmentation and loss of self and autonomy. The burden of this disease on caregivers also cannot be understated. Not only does dementia require comprehensive, long term care that addresses the afflicted individual’s co...
There once was a time when indoor smoking was allowed in workplaces all across the United States, when trans fats were ubiquitous, and when fast food restaurants didn't have to post calorie information on their menus. That wasn't so long ago, and it's in large part thanks to the pioneering efforts of Tom Frieden, MD, MPH, Health Commissioner of New York City from 2002 to 2009, that these changes were made. Dr. Frieden’s city-wide initiatives during this time included steps to reduce tobacco u...
It is well documented that descendants of Holocaust survivors exhibit greater levels of anxiety, depression, and vulnerability. The trauma of domestic violence can ripple through generations, with maladaptive coping mechanisms and emotional instability perpetuating subsequent cycles of trauma and dysfunction. The brutal history of slavery in the United States is seen today in the form of persistent economic disparities and ongoing social injustices, affecting mental and physical health across...
The Genocide Against the Tutsi, occurring in Rwanda between April-July 1994, was a devastating episode of mass violence in which nearly 1 million people were killed over a period of 100 days. Fueled by longstanding ethnic tensions, political power struggles, and a deep seated history of discrimination, the genocide saw members of the Tutsi ethnic group slaughtered indiscriminately by extremists of the Hutu ethnic group. Growing up amid this chaos, Christian Ntizimira, MD witnessed some o...
Death and grief are much more “hidden” from society today than they once were. The medicalization of dying means that death now occurs more frequently in hospitals and care facilities than at homes. The secularization of society means that traditional religious or communal rituals surrounding death and mourning have diminished. The fast pace and optimistic lens of consumer culture means less contemplation of aging, mortality, and grief. But Mikołaj Sławkowski-Rode, PhD, a professor of ph...
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