The Weekly Check-Up Podcast

The skin is the largest organ in the body, covering its entire external surface. The skin’s structure is an intricate layered network that serves as the body’s suit of armor protecting against everything from bacteria and fungus to ultraviolet (UV) light, to chemicals and mechanical injury, while also regulating temperature and hydration. In aggregate cancers of the skin are the most common cancer...

The expression “the cure is worse than the disease” is often associated with cancer treatment and rightly so as the first decades of cancer care were as likely to shorten a patient's life as lengthen it.  Most of us have some past or recent experience that justifies the statement. Due to these experiences, we conclude that anything bad that happens to someone once their cancer treatment begins...

Cancer is among the most complex of diseases. For 5,000 years, cancer was thought to be just one disease. Over time, thinking changed, and cancer was viewed as different diseases distinguished by the organ in which it arose. The advent of the microscope revealed cancer to be a cellular disease, different in each of the 200 cell types in the body. The unraveling of the human genome revealed that mu...

The foundations of trauma care in America began with caring for injured military personnel during war. During the Civil War, President Lincoln drove creation of the first trauma manual. During World War II, researchers started going into the battlefield to study care processes and clinical outcomes. The Korean and Vietnam Wars brought advances in medical transportation, including use of helicopter...

At the biological level, aging results from the impact of the accumulation of molecular and cellular damage over time. This leads to a gradual decrease in physical and mental capacity, a growing risk of disease and ultimately death. These changes are neither linear nor consistent, and they are only loosely associated with a person’s age in years. The diversity seen in older age is not random, it’s...

The phrase “caveat emptor” comes from Latin and means “let the buyer beware.” It originated as a legal principle in ancient Rome. Before the Industrial Revolution, caveat emptor became the common law for most land sales and purchases. It is based on the idea that buyers usually have less information about the product than the seller. In healthcare, the patient as a consumer of healthcare always se...

Effective communication is essential in any business, but even more so in healthcare. The effects of poor communication in healthcare can have extremely serious consequences. Poor communication results in misdiagnoses and other medical mistakes that can easily lead to avoidable health complications and the death of patients. Health literacy refers to the ability of individuals to obtain, understan...

Few body parts have been as useful to our function and the representation of our world as has the foot. In literature, a person’s manner or speed of walking or running is known as the fleet of foot. The historical military definition of an infantryman is a foot soldier. In measurement, a unit of linear measure equal to 12 inches is referred to as a foot. However, for this edition of the podcast, w...

When we think of the body's organs, we think of the heart, lungs, kidney, and liver.  When we think of the body's systems, we think of nervous and vascular .  The musculoskeletal system is an organ system that provides structure, support, and movement to the body and much more. It consists of bones, muscles, joints, cartilage, tendons, and ligaments. On this episode, we explore the various...

Possibly the most intricate and elegant of the body’s functions is the immune system. It's designed to recognize and protect your body or “the self” from all that is not the self, such as bacteria, viruses, even splinters. It can also run amok reacting to non threatening invaders like peanuts or even "the self" in what is called auto-immune disease like rheumatoid arthritis. Among the ways in whic...

The differential diagnosis is a systematic method used by physicians to specifically identify or explain a patient's clinical complaint where multiple explanations are possible. Akin to a police who-done-it procedural, the differential diagnosis uses the evidence of symptoms, clinical signs, patient history, family history, and medical knowledge to find the culprit. On this episode, we’ll expl...

Research shows that self-advocacy in healthcare can lead to significantly improved health outcomes, including better quality of care, increased patient satisfaction, reduced symptom burden, and a greater sense of control when patients actively participate in decision making about their goals, treatment, and needs.  However, self-advocacy is often misinterpreted to include self-diagnosis, self-pres...

Atop the textbook list of medical emergencies are the following: bleeding uncontrollably (including coughing or vomiting blood); breathing problems (difficulty breathing, shortness of breath); change in mental status (unusual behavior, confusion); fainting or loss of consciousness; chest pain for two minutes or more; feeling of committing suicide or murder; and accidents and injury (including pois...

There is a unique emotional conflict with diseases of the brain and central nervous system, a need to understand and put a label on the process and a dread or denial when that label is placed.  Whether it’s schizophrenia or dementia, depression or ALS, the pronouncement of the label is as fraught as the absence of one. On this episode, we’ll hear from patients who struggle with both the fear and f...

The first joint replacement surgeries were performed 135 years ago in Germany, shortly followed by efforts in France and England using rubber and steel joints. Refinements in materials and methods progressed slowly, but by 1969 the FDA finally approved the first hip prosthesis, the technical name for the artificial joint. In 2025, it is projected that 2.5 million Americans will undergo hip and kne...

Out-of-network doctors or hospitals, surprise billing, limited benefits, and off-formulary medication are all-too-familiar healthcare hurdles. The list of potential financial disasters awaiting the healthcare consumer is so profound it has earned its own name on the list of medical complications: financial toxicity.  Possibly more than other consumer sector, healthcare is fraught with buyer beware...

The impact of diabetes in America today is nothing short of apocalyptic. It’s a scourge, an epidemic, a catastrophe, a preventable tragedy of enormous proportion, and none of these statements are exaggerations. More than half the country is pre-diabetic or diabetic,  and more than 3/4 of Americans are obese. The extent of obesity in American youth suggests the trend is likely to worsen.

The penis refers to the male sex organ, which combines with the testis and prostate gland to complete the male sex anatomy. It’s a relatively simple organ comprised of the head or glans, the shaft, and the base, which surround the urethra through which urine and semen flow. Despite its anatomical and physiological simplicity, its cultural influence remains profound as does its central role in men’...

Throughout the history of man, most disease was a medical mystery characterized as either a divine response to sin and disobedience, an imbalance of bodily humors, or an unknown pestilence. As we recently learned from Covid, mysteries still persist in medicine. And those who were fond of the TV show “House” may recall that medical mysteries are often of a personal nature. On this episode, several...

When you think about blood, what comes to mind? Blood contains the elaborate systems for clotting and immune regulation that prevent us from bleeding to death or dying from infection. Blood is also integrally linked to the lungs where oxygen and carbon dioxide are exchanged, as well as to the heart, arteries, and veins through which it flows. Blood is life.

Cholesterol was the first measurable biological marker of heart disease discovered in medical research. Biomedical research became obsessed with cholesterol. In fact, studies of cholesterol’s role in disease have garnered 13 Nobel Prizes. This episode touches on what we know about cholesterol, what we don’t know, and the mythology that has been built around it and around the drugs that treat exces...

“Don’t talk with your mouth full” is an expression we’ve all heard. And if we have children or younger siblings, we’ve also spoken it.  Did it arise out of decorum so the listener is not visually confronted with half eaten food or worse, spat upon? Or was it addressing the resulting mumbled and garbled speech? Or was it a medical admonition to prevent choking? The origins are unclear, but it’s fas...

Complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) encompass a broad set of practices and beliefs that are outside evidence-based medicine as they are rarely subjected to well-designed and well-conducted multi-phase clinical trials. On this episode, we focus on a variety of CAM practices that share a common thread in the belief that their benefit is achieved through detoxification: the removal or render...

In 1660, a German physician first described an itch as an unpleasant sensation that inevitably prompts the desire to scratch. Itching and scratching were believed inseparable from one another. Together they constitute a cycle whereby the former is the cause and the latter is the effect. This cycle can become viscous whereby scratching creates an inflammatory response, which induces more itching. I...

On this episode, we focus on the critical function the lungs serve in the exchange of carbon dioxide for oxygen.  Respiration or breathing is an involuntary action that occurs in the lungs, a critical organ for living, that we too often take for granted as we inhale air contaminated by smoke, chemicals, and microorganisms.