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
50 episodes
The Medicalization of Aging
Age has become a diagnosis meant to be treated, not a time of your life to enjoy living. More medicines, more specialists, more tests, more fear. We have transformed age itself into a disease as we measure and "fix'" everything we c...
How to Age Well
We grapple with the question many people ask: how do we age well, live longer, live better? That is why many people go to the doctor, why they check their numbers and take medicines, why they buy that apple watch to monitor nearly everyth...
AI and primary care: how to use it responsibly
AI in such mediums as Google, Chat GPT, and Claude is becoming a device through which doctors and patients can make diagnoses, prescribe treatments, and distill symptoms down to diseases. If you are dizzy, what can be causing it, is it an...
Vaccine Nuance: Politics vs Science
The Trump Administration has elected to decrease the recommended vaccine schedule for children, and the political boxing gloves came out immediately. The mere notion of vaccine reduction, and the fact it occurred in Trump's administration...
Saving Primary Care
We are two primary care physicians with 75 years of collective experience. We both are passionate about what we do, we get to know our patients well, we dig into issues and don't accept protocol robotic medicine, we typically offer a counternar...
What to say about Anthony Fauci: Viewing the Past after the Congressional Hearing
Alan and Andy both lived through COVID not on the sidelines but in the center of it all. Both took care of patients directly, Alan in a hospital for weeks at a time in the epicenter of the pandemic, Andy in multiple long term care facilit...
Amyloid: The New Magic Bullet for Specialists and Drug Companies
We are hearing more and more about amyloid, a protein that can be deposited in the organs of humans and cause great harm. Or is that too simplistic? We now have very expensive and poorly tested drugs that will reduce amyloid load in...
The Hypertension Controversey
The cardiology community is quite adamant about their newest guidelines, whether it's about pushing LDL cholesterol below 70 or driving systolic blood pressure under 120. The patient's age, wishes, symptoms, and even the full breadth of s...
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....