Plenary Session

Now that we are nine months into the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, we invite Dr. Alasdair Munro, a pediatrics infectious disease expert, back on to the show to discuss recent developments in public health policy concerning the spread of COVID-19, the risk of it, and children. We also talk about the rigorously policed echo chamber of Twitter, specifically #medtwitter, and finding an audie...

This week we return to our roots of oncology and dissect the recent results from KEYNOTE-177. We also have an in-depth interview with mathematician Dr. Wes Pegden of Carnegie Mellon University on a mathematical approach to the COVID-19 pandemic. KEYNOTE-177: doi.org/0.1056/NEJMoa2017699 COVID-19 Mathematical Model: https://math.cmu.edu/~wes/covid.html Back us on Patreon! www.patreon.com/plenaryses...

We have a short and sweet episode for you this week -- no monologue, just two deep-dives with two stellar guests. Our first interview is with Dr. Zubin Damania (known as ZDoggMD) and we cover everything from making original music to the artistry of professional oratory to the pain of electronic health records. Our second interview is a return to our popular segment Journal Club with a Fellow: We i...

Our first guests this week are Drs. Adam Cifu and Scott Stern and are on to discuss their new podcast Symptom to Diagnosis -- based on their book of the same name -- about clinical reasoning. Next we bring back political scientist Dr. Vlad Kogan (from episode 3.13) to discuss the need to re-open schools in the context of rising COVID-19 cases and a changing political landscape. Finally we intervie...

First up this week we interview constitutional law scholar Leah Litman, an Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Michigan, on Dr. Norman Wang and the intricacies of the laws on affirmative action. Next, we talk with Dr. Patrick DeMartino, a pediatric hematology/oncology fellow at Oregon Health & Science University, on his new paper out now in JAMA Internal Medicine: "Potential Cost Impli...

We have a multitude of interviews for you this week. We start by interviewing Dr. Julia Marcus of the Harvard Medical School and Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute on messaging around public health interventions during the COVID-19 pandemic. We continue talking about COVID-19 with Anne Sosin and Dr. Elizabeth Carpenter-Song, both of Dartmouth College. They join us on the podcast to discuss how...

We talk this week with Dr. Monica Gandhi, Associate Division Chief of the Division of HIV, Infectious Diseases, and Global Medicine at UCSF/ San Francisco General Hospital, and medical director of the HIV Clinic at SFGH. Speaking from decades of experience treating HIV/AIDS patients, she gives us her take on the public health policies enacted in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. We then conclude...

This week we have two fantastic interviews for you: The first is with Dr. Ben Mazer on the interplay between social media and news; the second is with Dr. Tem Bendapudi on whether Caplacizumab should be the standard of care for thrombotic thrombocytopenic purpura (TTP). Back us on Patreon! www.patreon.com/plenarysession Check out our YouTube channel: www.youtube.com/channel/UCUibd0E2kdF9N9e-EmIbUe...

This week we sit down virtually with Dr. Atle Fretheim, Research Director of the Norwegian Institute of Public Health, to talk about how Norway has responded to the COVID-19 crisis - specifically, how they've handled it when it comes to public schools. We also have an interview with Dr. Anthony "Tony" Letai of the Dana Farber Cancer Center on cancer biology. Back us on Patreon! www.patreon.com/ple...

We start this week's episode off with a monologue covering a few current events, notably the recent editorial on the COVID-19 pandemic in the USA published by the New England Journal of Medicine titled "Dying in a Leadership Vacuum". From there we interview Dr. Margaret McCartney on her recent opinion piece in the BMJ titled "We need better evidence on non-drug interventions for covid-19"; we talk...

We start this week's episode by interviewing Dr. Alasdair Munro, a pediatrics infectious disease expert, on the risk of spread of COVID-19 in children and through schools. We end with an interview with Dr. Stefan Baral, a field epidemiologist studying COVID-19, on the nature of public health during a global pandemic. Back us on Patreon! www.patreon.com/plenarysession Check out our YouTube channel:...

This week we have a two-hour-long, far-ranging interview with Dr. John Ioannidis of Stanford University on, broadly, meta-research and COVID-19 - including his recent controversies. We end the episode with an interview with Dr. Mary-Elizabeth Percival of the University of Washington on her new paper out now in Haematologica: "Survival of patients with newly diagnosed high-grade myeloid neoplasms w...

This week's episode is all about COVID-19. We discuss general COVID-19 health policy and how spread of SARS-CoV-2 has been managed and should be managed; we discuss whether or not schools should be re-opened; and we discuss Dr. Scott Atlas's views. Our special guests are political scientist Dr. Vladimir Kogan, epidemiologist Dr. Daniel Morgan, and health economist Dr. Jay Bhattacharya. Back us on...

We start this week's episode by critically examining the new paper titled "Racial/Ethnic Variation in Nasal Gene Expression of Transmembrane Serine Protease 2 (TMPRSS2)" and asking, is it racist? After that, we discuss advances in prostate cancer imaging with two imaging specialists from Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, Drs. Anton Becker and Sungmin Woo. Finally, we have a far-reaching inte...

This week's monologue touches on the credibility of expert speakers, evaluating the COVID-19 lockdown as health policy, and the anti-affirmative action white paper written by Dr. Norman Wang and its controversy. In the second half of the episode we interview Professor Darrel Francis of Imperial College London on COVID-19 cardiology and Vascepa. Anti-Affirmative Action: doi.org/10.1161/JAHA.120.015...

We have a number of topics for you this week! Among them, we cover the issue of colon cancer screening, especially in the light of Chadwick Boseman's recent passing. We interview Jonathan Darrow, an Assistant Professor at Harvard Medical School and faculty at Brigham and Women's Hospital, on patent litigation and the recent patent appeal for Vascepa. Finally, we interview Dr. Toby Richards, Profes...

We start this week's episode by revisiting our discussion from last week on the PNAS study on racial concordance and birthing mortality. We continue our theme of critical appraisal by then tearing apart the recent paper published in BMJ titled "Two metres or one: what is the evidence for physical distancing in covid-19?" and its inability to support its colorful figures. We end the monologue with...

This week we take a deep dive into two recently published studies, their surrounding controversy, and the broader implications. The first study was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA and is titled "Physician–patient racial concordance and disparities in birthing mortality for newborns". The second was published in the New England Journal of Medicine...

We have a lot in store for you this week! We start off by evaluating two recently published studies: "Evaluation of Omics-Based Strategies for the Management of Advanced Lung Cancer" (published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology: Oncology Practice) and "The Effect of Advances in Lung-Cancer Treatment on Population Mortality" (published in the New England Journal of Medicine). We talk a bit about...

We start this week's episode by discussing access to investigational COVID-19 vaccines and recapping the problems with the ADAURA study. We transition from there to a Question of the Week with medical student Audrey Tran of Oregon Health & Science University. Finally, we introduce a new segment - Journal Club with a Fellow. In this inaugural segment we invite Dr. Karine Tawagi of the Oschner Clini...

This is the recording of a LIVE episode of Plenary Session in which Dr. Sue S Yom interviewed our host, Dr. Vinay Prasad, on how he built his career and how he conceptualizes his work. There's also a surprise guest near the end! Thank you to Dr. Kaleigh Doke, Dr. Brian Kavanagh, and the Virtual Visiting Professor Network for hosting this special episode. Back us on Patreon! www.patreon.com/plenary...

This week we respond to several questions sent in by listeners and then we interview Dr. Bishal Gyawali of Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada on MedTwitter, other recent events, and his recently published paper titled "Assessing the risk-benefit profile of ramucirumab in patients with advanced solid tumors: A meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials". Ramucirumab: doi.org/10.1016...

This week we discuss two major papers: The first was just recently released in Nature and it's titled "The National Lung Matrix Trial of personalized therapy in lung cancer". The second is a few years old, but exemplifies the importance of trial design. We discuss the second paper, titled "A Randomized Trial of Intensive versus Standard Blood-Pressure Control" and published in the New England Jour...

This week's BONUS episode is a discussion of the National Clinician Scholars Program with Dr. Hilary Seligman, the head of the program at University of California, San Francisco. The deadline for the application for the 2021-2023 cohort is July 15, 2020 (very soon!), though there may be some leniency due to the pandemic. National Clinician Scholars Program: https://nationalcsp.org/ UCSF National C...

This week we discuss recent research (and the accompanying Twitter thread) on the risk of COVID-19 among users of proton pump inhibitors (PPIs). We also hold a philosophical discussion on the research surrounding time to treatment initiation (TTI) in cancer medicine. We end the episode with an interview with Dr. Lynora Saxinger of the University of Alberta, Edmonton, a specialist in Infectious Dis...