First Opinion Podcast

When data shows that Asian Americans are faring better during the pandemic than other racial groups, physician and researcher Carlos Irwin A. Oronce knows that isn't the whole story. The first nurse to die from Covid-19 in Los Angeles was Filipinx, and more stories continue to emerge about the plight of Filipinx health care workers. Yet it's difficult to find any disaggregated data from within the...

Abortion access is being threatened across the country: Texas has come close to banning abortion as the Supreme Court prepares to take up a challenge to Roe v. Wade. While this has put much of the medical community on the defensive, many are looking ahead toward expanding access to medication abortion and having clinicians "step aside." This conversation is based on a First Opinion by physician Je...

Although billions of dollars have been poured into potential pharmaceutical cures for dementia, particularly Alzheimer's disease, none so far have been proven to slow or stop the disease from progressing. Yet even without an effective drug, incidence rates of dementia in the United States and several other countries have decreased since 1998. Why? Social changes like lower smoking rates and better...

This week, the show returns to a conversation with emergency physician Uché Blackstock about her decision to leave academic medicine. STAT's Usha Lee McFarling recently reported a stunning investigation about how white researchers have colonized research on health disparities and diversity over the past year. When racism persists in academic medicine and in research, it means that talented people...

Research on excess body weight and obesity has long been predicated on the fundamental assumption that weight is gained based on a 'calories in, calories out' equation. If you consume more calories than you expend, you gain weight, right?  Science reporter Gary Taubes and reader-turned-friend Nick Gulino are among a growing faction that says it might not be so simple. As Gulino himself has experie...

The country is in a climate crisis, but it isn't an issue that can be left to the climate scientists — every disaster has consequences that reverberate through the health care system, often acutely affecting people of color, and particularly pregnant people and newborns. This week, flood disaster coordinator Emily Mediate and OB/GYN physician Neel Shah discuss how climate change will continue to w...

Alicia Zhou's son Davi was an early five years old when the pandemic started. Now, he's six and a half, entering the first grade. He's adjusted well to pandemic living as a young child, but Zhou says she's still worried sending him to in-person school. Luckily, as a chief science officer at a health technology company, she happens to be particularly qualified to advise schools on how that can happ...

When the inventors of the iron lung wheeled their contraption into the hospital for the first time, they likely had one thing on their minds: saving the lives of children with polio. And they did. But there exists a darker side of these machines and their successors: people with persistent critical illnesses — like those with Covid-19 today — tethered to ventilators for weeks, if not longer, livin...

Bertrand Might was born with a rare disease that had never before been diagnosed, an odyssey that took four grueling years. He was 12 years old when he died last year — almost a decade older than physicians predicted he would live. This week on the First Opinion Podcast, Bertrand’s father, computer scientist Matthew Might, talks about how he used his coding skills to try to extend his son’s life,...

This week, physician Frank Lin discusses with former patient Anne Madison how difficult it can be for seniors to access care for hearing loss and hearing aids. "When you move into a community with older people, you get on two mailing lists: the hearing aids mailing list and the cemetery lots mailing list," Madison said. But the price tag is sky-high.

This week, Stephen Tourjee shares his experience contracting a breakthrough case of Covid-19, months after he thought he was safe thanks to the vaccine. Céline Gounder provides expert context on just how worried we should — or shouldn't — be about these breakthrough cases.

This week, writer and philosopher Adam Hayden opens up about what it's like to be in the minority of glioblastoma patients that have survived the harrowing brain cancer. Around 93% of patients with the disease will die before 5 years — as long as Hayden has survived so far. As the pandemic began, Hayden knew there were lessons for physicians and the public to learn from his experience.

Episode 25: A journalist on what the Vietnam war taught us about addiction by STAT

Are health care workers more obligated than others to get a Covid-19 vaccine? In this week's episode, physician and bioethicist Ezekiel Emanuel argues that hospitals and healthcare facilities nationwide need to issue vaccine mandates for all employees in order to prevent further deaths from Covid-19.

Why do more women die in and after childbirth in the U.S. than any other industrialized nation? In this week's episode of the "First Opinion Podcast," physician Alissa Erogbogbo argues that the only way the country can change the maternal mortality rates is through addressing the inherent biases and inequities of traditional health care.

What if every time we went to the bathroom, we could say we contributed to a local public health initiative? In this week's episode of the "First Opinion Podcast," biostatistician Aparna Keshaviah digs into the benefits of wastewater testing as a public health measure.

In this week's episode of the "First Opinion Podcast," Lizzy Feliciano talks about her brother, Louis, who died after years of suffering from depression, anxiety, and alcohol abuse. She struggled to help him find a program that could treat all of his issues holistically, not just one at a time. In a cruel twist of fate, just hours after moving into a facility, Louis Feliciano died of natural cause...

Priscilla Chan, co-founder and CEO of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, talks about the urgent need for more single-cell research in pediatrics. Chan broke down the science and reflected on how becoming a parent to two young children has intersected with her professional interests. "Over the course of Covid, I've also asked myself, would I enroll them in a Covid study?" she said. "And I think for me...

This week is a special two-part episode focusing on last week’s controversial — some say inflammatory — decision to approve aducanumab, a new Alzheimer’s drug. In these episodes, I talk with two Alzheimer’s experts with vastly different viewpoints on the news. First up: Dennis J. Selkoe, a physician and scientist whose research is at the core of how Aduhelm works.

This week is a special two-part episode focusing on last week’s controversial — some say inflammatory — decision to approve aducanumab, a new Alzheimer’s drug. In these episodes, I talk with two Alzheimer’s experts with vastly different viewpoints on the news. Second up: Jason Karlawish, an Alzheimer’s physician who wrote a First Opinion in May about how he would not prescribe the drug, were it to...

This week, two First Opinion contributors join Pat to talk about the toll that medicine can take on a professional's mental health, and how the pandemic has only exacerbated those consequences. Corey Feist co-wrote his essay with his wife Jennifer Breen Feist, the sister of Lorna Breen, who died by suicide last year after contracting Covid-19. Wendy Dean is a psychiatrist who wrote an iconic First...

This week, Pat is joined by two members of the National Academy of Medicine’s Committee on the Future of Nursing. We discuss full practice authority, which gives advanced practice nurses the ability to diagnose, write prescriptions, and care independently for patients. It’s a contentious issue, but Regina Cunningham and Marshall Chin believe that with more autonomy, nurses are capable of dismantli...

Danielle Ofri experienced the pandemic firsthand at Bellevue Hospital in New York. As a primary care physician, Ofri makes life-long connections with her patients. She talks about the importance of recognizing the emotion that comes when a patient dies, how her experiences as a medical resident during the AIDS crisis shaped her career, and how the Covid-19 pandemic will have a similar career-sculp...

This week, Pat is joined by Chelsea Clinton, who recently wrote a First Opinion on the health dangers of fracking with two of her colleagues at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health, Terry McGovern, and Micaela Martinez. The conversation covered global public health crises such as fracking, oxygen shortages, and the pandemic.

Reporter and editor Kalpana Jain details how India got to today's crisis with Covid-19. Although some blame hypernationalism, she calls on her two decades of writing about health and health care for the Times of India to show that the real issue is neglect of the health sector during India’s growth and development. Having covered multiple pandemics and epidemics, Jain says that she's seen the toll...