Your latest hairdryer had 4,000 reviews, but you can’t find any when choosing your surgeon. How does that make sense?  Online rating sites like Yelp, Google and Healthgrades promised to fill that gap. But what do those stars mean? Does a five-star doctor give you better care? And by the way, who’s making money every…

Health policy strategist Ezekiel Emanuel, billionaire Vinod Khosla, and two others just published a viral JAMA article claiming autonomous AI will soon replace human doctors. The result—probably due to the prominence of the authors and the prestige of the journal—created a disturbance in the Force of the medical world, and broke the healthcare internet for…

This is a special mini-episode. It’s about the events of 9/11, but not the ones you you’re thinking of.  Rahul shares a story of what he was doing on that day, 25 years ago. 

That “smart” thing on your wrist, your finger, or wrapped around your bicep—Can you actually trust what it’s telling you? Is it doing real medicine, or just guessing?  It may say in the fine print that it’s not a medical device, but let’s face it a lot of people use it like it is. This…

You booked an appointment with a doctor. You saw a nurse practitioner instead. Was that a downgrade — or the only reason you got in at all?  This week we sort out what actually separates the roles. NPs and PAs handle a huge share of routine care well: the sore throat, the med refill, the…

Every time you see a doctor, somebody has already decided how they get paid for it — and that decision can shape what happens next. Fee-for-service rewards doing more and capitation rewards doing less, but the incentives get more complex, with payors, healthcare delivery organizations, and regulators trying to enforce standards. Sitting in the exam…

Last episode, we sat down with Dr. TR Levin — the gastroenterologist who built one of the most effective colon cancer screening programs in the country — and worked through why screening is so much harder to understand than it looks.  Some tests find things that would never have hurt you. A simple test sent…

Cancer screening saves lives, and it has been thoughtfully constructed to do so. But the version of cancer screening that some of us experience is one where nobody explains the odds, nobody mentions the alternatives, and a positive result sends you into a cascade of procedures that may or may not have been necessary —…

“Will AI replace doctors?” makes for a great headline, a great dinner party argument, and a great way to stress out a podcast co-host. It’s also, unfortunately, the wrong question. In a follow up to our last episode, we respond to our listeners’ feedback. We put co-host and radiologist Jonathan Mates on the spot and…

One in four ChatGPT users — roughly 200 million people a week — use it for health questions. About a third of them end up changing their medications or requesting referrals based on what it tells them. Is that brilliant, terrifying, or both? In this episode, we dig into the question everyone is asking themselves,…