First Opinion Podcast

In a special event as part of STAT's Open Doors initiative, the "First Opinion Podcast" was recorded live this week in front of an audience with returning guest Jay Baruch. Not long after being a guest on the first episode of the "First Opinion Podcast" in February 2021 on the many stories he's written for STAT in his time working as an emergency room physician, Baruch penned a letter to his boss spelling out his intention to leave medicine behind. But the simple act of writing the letter transformed his understanding of his work and hooked him back in.

The idea that the narrowing gap between Covid-19 deaths among white Americans and Americans of color represents a racial equity success story is being bandied about. Not so fast, says Nathan T. Chomilo, a pediatrician and internist at the University of Minnesota Medical School. This conversation emerged from the First Opinion essay "Covid-19 is an inverse equity story, not a racial equity success story" that was written by Marina Del Rio, Chomilo, and Neil A. Lewis, Jr.

As states begin to receive money from the multitude of lawsuits and settlements the opioid makers and distributors have agreed to pay, the number of overdose deaths in the country continue to increase, reaching an all-time high in 2021. Researcher Linda Richter worries that not enough of the settlement funds, upward of $22 billion, are going toward early-stage prevention measures.

Terry Wilcox's grandmother lived in an isolated house at the top of a hill overlooking the magical mountains and valleys of the Ozarks until, as she tells it, "the day we literally had to drag her off of it." Home health care services have helped keep Wilcox's family healthy and safe — and reduce her stress — but they aren't equally accessible to everybody. Wilcox, a co-founder and CEO of the nonprofit advocacy group Patients Rising, discusses how that uneven ground is now being further threatened by Medicare's proposal for deep cuts and clawbacks to payments made during the pandemic for home health care.

After years of deliberation, the FDA recently announced a new set of rules it proposes to regulate claims on food packaging that a product is "healthy." The most basic rule: the product must actually contain food, not just ingredients. This may seem intuitive, but as professor and nutrition policy expert Marion Nestle points out, the food industry works hard to sell their products. This week, Nestle explains the purported intentions behind the confusing food labels, and how it all got so complicated in the first place.

It took the U.S. Supreme Court just seven days last June to set back public health by 50 years. Several cases before the court this term could continue that assault. This week, law professor Lawrence O. Gostin explores how these cases — some of which are not explicitly about public health — might worsen the myriad health inequalities that became so evident throughout the Covid-19 pandemic.

Modern wheelchairs with standing technology have amazing capabilities that can be game-changing for wheelchair users looking to take care of themselves independently whenever they can. This week, two wheelchair users, Paul Amadeus Lane and Jim Meade, talk about how shortsighted it is that Medicare — the primary health insurer for older adults as well as for many people with spinal cord injuries, muscular dystrophy, ALS, and other long-term disabilities — doesn’t cover the cost of wheelchairs equipped with these technologies because they aren't "primarily medical in nature."

The Supreme Court's decision to overturn Roe v. Wade opened the door to allow states to ban or severely restrict abortion. But as biotech CEO Aoife Brennan and her colleagues are coming to realize, it will also affect how — and perhaps where — clinical trials are conducted. This week on the "First Opinion Podcast," Brennan, of Synlogic, talks about how the Supreme Court's ruling is forcing people involved in clinical research to rethink something as simple as pregnancy tests, which had once been taken for granted, and plan for the possibility that research sponsors and study sites will be required to share pregnancy and outcome data with state officials.

Polio has exploded back into Americans' consciousness after being out of the spotlight in the U.S. for half a century or so: In late summer, it paralyzed an adult in New York state, and the poliovirus has been detected in New York City's wastewater. This week on the "First Opinion Podcast," doctors Sallie Permar and Jay Varma make the case that pediatricians are the frontline for fending off this "old foe," but they need help.

Christopher Hartnick never expected his work as a doctor to intersect with political discussions about abortion and the right of pregnant people to make choices about their own bodies. Yet as a pediatric ear, nose, and throat physician who specializes in treating babies and children who have difficulty breathing, he's had up-close looks at how prospective parents make life-or-death decisions over the course of a pregnancy. This week, Hartnick discusses a risky procedure performed at birth for which parents must choose, at multiple stages, whether to prioritize the mother's life or the child's.