Research Translation Podcast

“ Meet Virginia ” is, I believe, one of the great rock singles of recent decades. It opens with a blue-sy, core-bending bassline and a thirsty guitar riff, as Pat Monahan etches a fantasy vamp. You will not forget Virginia. “Train” is the band’s eponymous first album, and with other tracks like “Free”, “I Am”, “Egglpant”, and “Rat”, it does not falter. Incredibly, it’s nearly matched by “Drops of...

I wrote and posted this last year, but with the respiratory season now gripping local and national stats—and me spending time with my family, including two boys with the flu—I thought I’d repost this for anyone interested. Turns out no new flu research has changed anything below. And for a list of prior dives into flu-related studies (including a treatment that works!) see the links at the bottom...

More than a decade ago, large data reviews found that using drugs to tightly control blood sugar in people with type 2 diabetes does more harm than good. In careful studies, it didn’t save lives, reduce heart problems, or prevent kidney failure. And while on rare occasions it helped to avoid or delay limb amputations (1 in 250 people), forty times more often it caused life-threatening episodes of...

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Every generation of medicine has its totems—high-tech gizmos that measure, promising mastery over the human form if we can just capture the numbers precisely, continuously, and in triplicate. For my teachers the Swan–Ganz, a fancy catheter snaked into the hearts of ICU patients, held this role. It offered heart and capillary pressures, saturations, and cardiac outputs to two decimal places. More n...

During the pandemic we were treated to a common, but curious site in traffic: A driver gliding by, alone in the car, windows up—wearing a mask. Like Covid was hiding in the glove compartment. It’s tough to count the things that went wrong to make such a moment possible. For starters, masking during Covid wasn’t to protect the wearer . It was to protect people from the wearer. Masking alone, in a c...

As you can probably tell I’m frustrated with modern medicine’s apparent immunity to evidence, so I hope you’ll suffer my rant-y, short essay this week. Research Translation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. “Modern medicine tells its own story, one that always begins with control and ends with rescue.” — Arthur...

Imagine a weatherman who’s wrong 97% of the time he predicts rain. Picnics and ballgames canceled, flights rerouted, bikes garaged. Yet somehow, he has fans—devout ones—who revel in warning their neighbors about coming storms. “Stock up!” they cry, taping their windows. “Oh my! Thank you!” the neighbors reply. Worse, this weatherman also misses a third of real storms, sending his fans to the beach...

On September 22nd the most important figures in US government and health performed a bit of research translation at a podium in the White House. That, of course, compelled a new issue of Research Translation. It’s all audio this time, folks, sorry to my dedicated readers but this one was too big to write. Enjoy! Research Translation is totally reader-supported . Maybe consider becoming a free or p...

This week we saw something new: A president of the United States behind a podium, and flanked by the heads of the FDA, the Department of Health, and the NIH, and they were all doing research translation . Well that’s my job, dammit. So today we’ll do a prelude and prep session for our next episode, which will be a review and discussion of the six studies that underpinned that press conference. We’...

Son, I’ve been avoiding this conversation. But it’s important. It will be difficult and I realize you don’t want to hear it, least of all from me. But there are things you have to know. Please try not to think of this as personal. It’s not about your thoughts or feelings. It’s about the future, how to make decisions, and how to understand our bodies and how they interact with the world. So, here g...

Media , Substackers , and authorities are screaming bloody murder about the difference between new Covid vaccine guidelines posted by the American Academy of Pediatrics and guidelines from the CDC . For kids under two the AAP recommends the shot. The CDC says not so fast: discuss it with a doctor. Who’s right? Guidelines are written by panels that review the data, then make judgment calls. The onl...

In case you were wondering: After you crack a knuckle it’s about 20 minutes before you can crack it again. This was established by a series of experiments in 1947 at a research hospital in London. According to the researchers, “the minimum time was 17 minutes… but never more than 22.” Eureka! This may seem like menial work, but efforts to understand knuckle cracking pepper more than a hundred year...

This week I've opted for a slightly longer format, which I sometimes like to do—we'll be back to normal next time. Enjoy. On Friday December 13th, 1799, President George Washington was in a chipper mood. He sat by the fire talking politics with Martha and Tobias Lear, his secretary. At age 67, two years after his presidency, Washington was still America’s most popular public figure. Robustly healt...

I learned years ago that people’s beliefs about medical care are often religious. That is, they’re built on faith, not evidence. That’s not always a bad thing. Faith in the patient-doctor relationship can, quite literally, lead to physical and biological healing. Extensive data proves it. But using faith in the absence of good data is more often harmful than helpful. One historical example is bloo...

In Louisiana there is a supermarket chain called Winn-Dixie. They sell their own soda brand called ‘Chek’, which lines the shelves with bright, colorful, retro-style labels. Thinking about it makes me thirsty. On most days Chek sells for about half the price of standard Coca-Cola products, so when it goes on sale I lean in. Hard. This week I brought home a sample (read: 12-pack) of the diet strawb...

When I was little, my father read classics to me and my sister. In the evenings after dinner we sandwiched him on my parents’ bed, listening to the schemes of Miss Havisham and the adventures of Jim and Long John Silver. I knew they were stories, but I also knew they held truth. Years later I became a doctor and a data scientist, and my sister became a brilliant television writer. Irony: she packs...

Perhaps the most important attribute in science and scientists is humility. A scientist must be passionate about finding truth, but dispassionate about judging it. That’s hard to do, particularly with issues like politics or religion. For instance in a recent NY Times piece titled “ As Congress Debates Cutting Medicaid, a Major Study Shows It Saves Lives .” We are in a complicated and fraught mome...

In Victoria, Australia from 2003 to 2005 thousands of elderly women were enrolled in a study that researchers thought might represent the future of geriatric health. For five years the women were given a single annual dose of Vitamin D, or a placebo. From earlier small studies experts surmised that Vitamin D, which helps bones absorb calcium, would prevent hip and other fractures, potentially redu...

I entered med school in 1994, three years after 60 Minutes’ infamous “French Paradox” segment. In it, Morley Safer traveled to France to investigate why French people live longer and better, despite eating far more cholesterol-rich and fatty foods than Americans. Conclusion? Red wine. Which the French have at lunch, dinner, and as a gargle after brushing their teeth. Like most of America, which sa...

Readers note: Due to time constraints and editing issues this week is podcast/audio ONLY. Sorry to my dedicated readers, I’ll make it available for those who want to try and read the transcribed audio (looks weird to me, guess I should clean up my verbal work…) and I’ll get back to writing soon. Happy to have any thoughts on which you like better or use more, too. Get full access to Research Trans...

Aiming to place a daunting 18-foot model of Stonehenge on the stage, Nigel Tufnel drew the structure on a napkin. Ian, manager of the mockumentary band Spinal Tap, took the napkin to a prop designer, who then built what she saw. Unfortunately the drawing used double quotation marks for size, indicating inches rather than feet. Too frightened to tell the band of the flub, Ian surprised them mid-con...

In 1908, three years after Albert Einstein proposed the Theory of Relativity, Hermann Minkowski offered a theory of his own. Minkowski, one of Einstein’s teachers, said the best way to explain the undeniable math of Relativity was to understand space and time as a single, four-dimensional entity—a continuum of space and time. More than a century later Minkowski Spacetime endures. From Minkowski we...

Franklin Delano Roosevelt had wicked hypertension. When the arteries in his brain finally blew apart, causing a massive stroke and death, his blood pressure had been hovering for months around 300 over 200. As I’ve written previously , Howard Bruenn, the president’s cardiologist, believed strongly in ‘ Essential Hypertension ’. This is a theory suggesting high blood pressure was necessary—essentia...

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