Return to Healing: Common Sense Health Care
The authors of A Return to Healing give you tips and advice about how to improve your health and negotiate an often deceptive health care system. And it all comes down to common sense!
Episodes
37 episodes
The Emergency Room: Overtreatment as a Symptom of our System
The Emergency Room can be life saving, but also can be a place to be feared. We discuss several cases in which protocols and robotic thinking put patients in precarious positions, exposing them to unnecessary dangers, creating diseases wh...
Big Pharma
We talk a lot about Big Pharma throughout this podcast but today we discuss its many tentacles. Soon after making the podcast, Alan watched a hockey game and there was a drug ad on the ice! The Pharma industry controls virtually all...
Medical Boards, Protocols, and Censorhip
This week Andy was reported to the Maryland Board of Medicine by a local cardiology group because some studies he included in his practice newsletter offended them. These were major studies, peer reviewed, but did not coincide with the do...
Dementia: Promises and Reality
Dementia tells us a great deal about our healthcare system. Not even noted to be a disease at the time of Medicare's birth in 1965 it is now one of the most onerous and common diseases of the elderly. Why? And why is the incid...
2026 Cholesterol Guidelines: Putting numbers over people and science
As the medical community scripts new cholesterol guidelines, the media has compliantly announced that our nation's top scientists, most respected medical agencies, and academic centers want to prevent heart disease by screening for high cholest...
The Medicalization of Depression
Depression is a very vague concept. How do we determine if someone is depressed? What does depression even mean, and how is it best prevented and treated? The realities of depression veer sharply from how the medical industria...
The Struggle of Primary Care
Alan and Andy discuss why they are dinosaurs, why primary care is becoming extinct and why its disappearance will instigate harm to the health care system, to patients, to our national debt, and to reason and sanity in health care. Talkin...
Dermatology and the Illusion of our Skin Cancer Epidemic
In the 1980's dermatologists were somewhere in the basement of the doctor world in terms of reputation and reimbursement. It was always felt to be an easy job--not too much thinking, a limited scope of care, no after hours calls--but did ...
The Danger of Alternative Medical Providers
We are always amazed watching TV. What used to be ads for car companies, beer, clothes, products are not proliferated by ads for drugs and companies seeking to sell you drugs. These companies, like Hims and Hers, are willing to prov...
Some Nutrition myths and facts
Few people realize how important nutrition is, and it's not all about weight loss. You can lose weight and be less healthy because you are not eating food that will feed your gut bacteria, energize your muscles, and strengthen your brain....
The Corporate Takeover of Healthcare
The very landscape of organized medicine is being altered by corporate takeovers. Whether in long term care, hospitals, or large groups, corporations are taking charge and offering "perks" that enhance the wealth of institutions, their le...
The overuse of antibiotics
Antibiotics are one of the most impactful medical discoveries in the past century. Along with sanitation and sterile technique, antibiotics have led to a dramatic increase in life expectancy. However, now we have moved down a differ...
lifestyle medicine: the crux of what really matters
Drug companies, the media, physician groups, and patient advocacy groups, month others, have convinced the American public that the key to health is more testing, more doctor visits, more drugs, more procedures. We have invented more dise...
Drug Ads
Today we talk about the impact of drug advertisement on both patient and physician decision making. These companies know that a huge investment in ads will result in more prescriptions, one of many ways Big Pharma infiltrates so many aspe...
Pain and Pain Medicines
With the opioid crisis looming on the horizon always, the question comes as to how to treat pain. So many medicines have side effects an are overall dangerous. Some work about as much as placebo. We'll talk about medicines, bu...
The Early Diagnosis of Cancer: Peril or Promise
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...
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 ...
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...
More Drugs, More Falls, More Death
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...
A Simple Fix to 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...
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...
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 ...
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