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
42 episodes
Medical TV Shows: Accurate or Dangerous?
This week we discuss medical TV shows, such as House and the Pitt and Grey's Anatomy, as well as medical moments on non-medical shows. Studies suggest that the message of these shows--the doctor as hero, the benefit of aggressive interven...
A Fight at the American Diabetes Association (ADA)
At the ADA Research Convention several members trying to pass out information were forced out after the police were called. They were ADA leaders who wrote an editorial blasting the current Presidential administration for cuts in research...
The Power of Medical Boards
Both Andy and Alan have been reported to their respective medical boards, both have had to hire lawyers, both have had to fight for their right to speak and to practice medicine. The Board of Physicians is an extrajudicial entity, operati...
Medical Inequities
Alan and Andy work in different medical environments. Alan works in one of the poorest neighborhoods in the county, one with many who are uninsured, undocumented, who have to work multiple jobs, who have limited food options, and who had ...
What Doctors are Saying about the Cholesterol Guidelines
We reviewed what several physician podcasts have to say about the new cholesterol guidelines. We spoke about the guidelines
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...