Doctoring the Truth
Welcome to Doctoring the Truth, a podcast where two dedicated audiologists dissect the world of healthcare gone rogue. Explore jaw-dropping stories of medical malfeasance, nefariousness, and shocking breaches of trust. The episodes provide deep dives that latch onto your curiosity and conscience. It's a podcast for truth-seekers craving true crime, clinical insights, and a dash of humor.
Episodes
64 episodes
Ep 64-Lucy Letby (Part 3) When Doubt Meets A Verdict and Introducing Mary Beth
A verdict can be final in court and still deserve careful re-testing in public life, especially when the case depends on complex medicine most jurors can only access through experts. We’re back for the third and final part of our Lucy Letby ser...
Ep 63-Lucy Letby (Part Two) When Medicine Meets Reasonable Doubt
A case can feel settled in court and still feel unsettled in science. We take on Part 2 of the Lucy Letby story by walking through what the jury heard, what the Court of Appeal later weighed, and why so many clinicians, statisticians, journalis...
Ep 62-Lucy Letby (Part One) and a Swiss Cheese Smuggler
A neonatal unit is supposed to be the safest room in a hospital and yet this story begins with a run of collapses that staff couldn’t make sense of. We’re finally digging into Part 1 of the Lucy Letby case, starting where so many explanations a...
Ep 61-Twelve Deaths in Thirteen Days: A Nursing Home Death Spike
Five people are reported murdered in their beds at 3 a.m. and the scene makes no sense. No broken windows. No forced entry. No masked intruder. Just a nursing home hallway, a butcher knife, and a night-shift supervisor with a wound that looks m...
Ep 60-Never Never Land: Rhode Island Hospital's Decade of Surgical Scandals
A hospital can have world-class branding and still be dangerously broken where it counts. We’re heading to Rhode Island Hospital, a major teaching hospital tied to Brown University, to follow a decade-plus trail of “never events” like wrong-sit...
Ep 59- Beware the Ice Pick: The Lobotomy Era
An ice pick through the eye socket. Ten minutes of “surgery.” A taxi ride home. That’s not an urban legend, it’s a documented moment in the history of lobotomy, and it captures the sick casualness that let psychosurgery become mainstream.
Ep 58-Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust: A Funeral Home Horror Story
They thought they were holding their loved one one last time, then they learned the urn held concrete. We’re walking through the Return to Nature Funeral Home scandal in Colorado, where investigators say nearly 190 bodies were left to decompose...
Ep 57-Organ Donation Disasters
The scariest part of modern medicine isn’t always the unknown, it’s the moment you realize the system can build momentum before certainty feels complete. We’re talking about organ donation disasters and near misses that force one brutal questio...
Ep 56-Notorious Nurse: The Murders of Jolly Jane
A cheerful bedside smile is supposed to mean safety. That’s why the case of Jane Toppin, nicknamed “Jolly Jane,” still hits like a gut punch more than a century later. We walk through how a Boston woman born Honora Kelly could become one of Ame...
Ep 55-Inside The Psychopath Test: Power, Labels, And The Cost Of Certainty (Part 2)
A checklist that claims to measure danger. A hospital that tried to manufacture empathy with LSD and isolation. A courtroom that treats a number like destiny. We dive into the strange power of labels by tracing the psychopathy story from Oak Ri...
Ep 54-From Checklists To Chaos: Psychopathy, Oak Ridge, And The Mask Of Sanity (Part One)
A bright green room. No clocks. No privacy. And a radical promise: strip away the mask and rebuild empathy from the inside out. We follow that promise from a cryptic book that landed in mailboxes worldwide to the Psychopathy Checklist (PCL-R) a...
Ep 53-Sedation, Secrets, And The Dark Web: Exposing A Predator In A Dental Clinic
A patient under anesthesia is supposed to be safe. What we uncovered is what happens when that safety is only assumed. We dig into the case of Cody Alan Stolfa, a dental assistant in Stillwater, Oklahoma, who pled guilty to 33 felonies for sexu...
Ep 52-Fertility Fraud and Bringing a Gun to a Family Reunion
A phone buzzes, a DNA app refreshes, and a life story tilts. We follow the chain reaction from a single “close relative” match to a web of half-siblings who piece together the sordid truth. What starts as an ancestry curiosity becomes a reckoni...
Ep 51-Burned By Belief: The Truth About Ear Candling
A candle crackles, a brown residue appears, and someone swears their sinuses feel clear. It looks convincing—until you test the physics, check the anatomy, and tally the injuries. We pull back the curtain on ear candling with an audiologist’s e...
Ep 50-Stem Cell Scams and Our Anniversary!
Hope is powerful—but in the wrong hands, it becomes a sales tactic. We’re celebrating one year together by pulling back the curtain on stem cell scams: how slick marketing borrows the language of science, why “FDA registered” is not the same as...
Ep 49-AZ Stands for CrAZy! The Disturbing Case of a Slasher Surgeon
A trusted OB carved his initials into a new mother’s abdomen—and the room stayed silent. That chilling moment became a case study in how personal trust, professional boundaries, and institutional oversight can all fail at once. We walk through ...
Ep 48-Pretty Poison: The Shocking Truth About Skin Whitening Creams, plus Weather Pants Reveal
A face cream that blinds a mother. A washing machine that spreads mercury vapor to kids’ bedding. The story unfolds from two devastating cases and pulls back the curtain on a larger problem: toxic skin lightening products hiding in plain sight,...
Ep 47-Fatal Mismatch: A Transplant Tragedy
A teenage girl crosses a border for a chance at life—and loses it to a mistake so basic it should have been impossible. We dive into the case of Jesica Santillán, the 17-year-old who received an incompatible heart-lung transplant, and trace how...
Ep 46-Don't Die: Bryan Johnson and Longevity Science
A cookie-fueled cold open gives way to one of the thorniest questions in modern medicine: are we getting healthier, or just better at making numbers look good? Using Brian Johnson’s “Blueprint” as a case study, we unpack the science behind epig...
Ep 45-Bristol’s Broken Heart Unit and the Dangers of Club Culture
A newborn’s first breaths should be a promise. For too many families in Bristol during the 1980s and 1990s, that promise was broken by a system that mistook confidence for competence. We walk through how a respected pediatric cardiac unit drift...
Ep 44-Moose, Murder, And Medicine: The Attack of a Nightmare Patient
A quiet clinic. A calm voice in the hall. Then the shots that shattered a July morning in Petaluma, California. We follow the life and death stakes behind headlines: a breast cancer survivor seeking reconstruction, a competent surgeon navigatin...
Ep 43-Vengeful Pathologist: the Murderous Anthony Joseph Garcia
A failed residency, a brittle ego, and years of simmering resentment—then two brutal double homicides that stunned Omaha. We unpack the Anthony Garcia case from the beginning, starting with his trajectory through medical school and pathology tr...
Ep 42-Ruby McCollum And The Price Of Survival
A snowstorm, a noisy house full of pets, and then a hard turn into a story that still shakes the walls of medicine and justice: Ruby McCollum. We walk through Ruby’s path from a disciplined childhood in segregated Florida to a marriage that bro...
Ep 41-No More Pizza Parties: Fix the System, Support Healthcare Worker's Mental Health!
Sirens fade, charts close, and the questions linger: who cares for the caregivers when the system won’t? We share the life and legacy of Dr. Lorna Breen, a brilliant emergency physician whose dedication collided with an unprecedented crisis. He...
Ep 40-Who Owns The Body: The One Who Cuts Or The One Who Bleeds?
A knife that could take a leg in thirty seconds, a theater packed with spectators, and a patient who never got a say—our journey begins with Robert Liston, the unrivaled speed surgeon of the nineteenth century. From there we follow the messy, g...