Straight Talking Doc Unhinged
A podcast by a doctor telling you all the dark and dirty secrets of my profession and how to understand what docs say and use it to become wiser and healthier! I separate myth from truth so you can be a better advocate for yourself.Remember the three keys to health: eat well, exercise, and stay away from doctors!
Episodes
41 episodes
Early Screening for Cancer: The Perils and Promises
We have always known about basic cancer screening tests, like mammography and colonoscopy. But we have expanded the universe of cancer screening, relying on scans, blood tests, and genetic testing. As we screen more, we find more, w...
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22:29
Overtreating our mental health
Many books and studies have pointed to the fact that we are a nation swimming in mental health diagnoses and drugs. The DSM--the bible of mental health diagnoses--has exploded the numbers of mental health sicknesses you may have, and for ...
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22:29
The Danger of our new Blood Pressure Guidelines
The American Heart Association (AHA) has devised new blood pressure guidelines. In this iteration, the AHA tell us that any blood pressure over 120 is dangerous and must be treated, with pressures over 180 requiring immediate hospitalizat...
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22:06
Too many drugs, Too many falls, Too many deaths
New studies show that as we are drugging our senior more, they are falling more and dying more from their falls. We may think that dramatically lowering blood pressure and sugars, fixing cholesterol with statins, using blood thinners to p...
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21:20
A Simple Fix for our Medical Mess
In Return to Healing we lay out a very simple fix to the medical mess we are in. We spend the first half the book explaining why it is a mess, and then the second half talking about who is profiting from the mess. Then we give the f...
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20:25
The Medical School We Need
Alan and Andy talk about how medical school does not prepare students to be whole-person doctors, focused on numbers and multiple choice answers and slices of the body. William Osler devised an ideal medical school at Hopkins before the F...
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21:03
Primary Care Part Three: The Benefits of Primary Care
As two primary care doctors with a collective 75 years of experience, we understand the benefits of having a primary care doctor who develops strong relationships built on trust, who customizes care to each patient, who takes a patient-centric ...
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19:37
Primary Care Part Two: A Eulogy for Primary Care
There is no question that primary care is dying in this country, much to the detriment of our entire healthcare system and every person who utilizes it. We talk about an article called
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17:26
Primary Care Part One: Why it is so Important
We look at the role of primary care in our health care system and discuss why it is the crucial ingredient to save lives, lower cost, and help people feel better and be healthier. As we gravitate toward a technician-run specialized system...
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19:44
Over testing in the Hospital
We know that at the hospital medical students, residents, and hospitalists dive into a Flexnerian orgy of tests, treatments, and more tests. Is this helpful? We'll go back in time and look at Osler's dream at Hopkins before it becam...
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18:48
Weight loss drugs: What's the problem with a taking a shot?
People are losing weight on the new drugs, but at what cost? First there is the financial cost: we're paying $35 billion a year for these drugs, and don't be fooled, all of us are paying. While insurance pays nothing for nutrition o...
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19:10
The Dangers of Specialty Care: How misplaced incentives lead to high cost and poor outcomes
Alan and Andy discuss specialty care and its inherent dangers. We tell about specific patient examples, why excessive specialization seems appealing but results in over-testing and over-treatment, and how we can instantly change policy to...
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19:14
PSA Screening
Alan Roth and Andy Lazris discuss screening for prostate cancer to explain how screening can be less beneficial, and more dangerous, than advertised. Just finding it early doesn't mean you've done yourself a service.
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13:58
The Impact of the Pharmaceutical Industry on healthcare
The Drug Industry was front and center in the creation of our health care industry. The reforms that created modern healthcare in 1911 and beyond were predicated on developing a research infrastructure in medical schools and in the medica...
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13:58
How to Fix our Messed Up Health Care System: Lower cost = Better health outcomes.
In our book, A Return to Healing, we dissect what is wrong with our health care system, and show how you as a patient can better advocate for your own health in a system that often deceives you for profit. But too, we want to fix the syst...
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10:24
Apple Cider Vinegar: Why doctors stray away from nutrition
In the show Apple Cider Vinegar, the writers create a binary: the good and all-knowing doctors vs the charlatan nutrition gurus. The gap is so wide between the two approaches that the reader is left thinking that in cancer, as in all thin...
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12:19
How "Us vs Them" thinking is used to defend the medical system: David Frum and his Atlantic Article.
Whether it is in attacking Kennedy, or in refusing to acknowledge what is dysfunctional about Medicare, Democrats use us vs them binary thinking to defend the medical system. By finding easy targets that seem inane, or by inventing those ...
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13:16
the cholesterol myth.
We all believe that cholesterol is so bad that we better measure it regularly and lower it by drugs. Just ask your cardiologist: Got to get that LDL cholesterol below 70 or catastrophe will ensue! But as we explain, this is...
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12:44
Episode 23: The human cost of COVID's Religious dogma, one patient at a time
The statistics bounce around about COVID even as the virus wanes and becomes just another recurrent cold. But the religious fanaticism of the COVID faithful, the rituals, the restrictions, those have not disappeared. In my world of ...
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6:26
Episode 22: the Gospel of Infectious Disease, Book One, COVID rituals
From masks to one -way aisles to PPE to 20-second hand washing and 6-foot separation, COVID has demonstrated the religiosity of health care more than any singular event in my lifetime. The Gospel of Infectious Disease, which includes publ...
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20:01
Episode Twenty-One: The Sciency Song and the Voice of the Medical Religion
In my book The Great Stupidity, which ...
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11:14
Episode Twenty: The Gospel of Cancer Book Two, Prostate Cancer
Prostate cancer helps us understand the religion of health care through a very unique lens. For any religion to be effective it must instill fear into its adherents, have priests who offer a means of alleviating that fear, and then provid...
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18:47
Episode Nineteen: The Gospel of Cardiology Book Three: Eliquis
Health Care has taken the shape of a religious theocracy in this country, with Trillions spent for the allure of salvation and eternal life, and a medical industrial complex mimicking the Catholic Church of the Middle Ages driving people down d...
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23:54