
First Opinion Podcast
A weekly podcast about the people, issues and ideas that are shaping health care.
Latest episodes

Feb 23, 2022 • 27min
Episode 45: How a scientist turns into a medical misinformant
Science journalist Faye Flam explores medical information in part by unpacking the three-hour exchange about Covid-19 between scientist-turned-misinformant Robert Malone and Spotify podcaster Joe Rogan. Flam points out the holes in Malone's logic and how listeners can be aware of similar politically motivated tactics.
"People are foregoing vaccines that would save their lives and people are actually dying because they didn't get vaccinated," Flam said. "So I think the consequences of misinformation are enormous for people in this pandemic."

Jan 26, 2022 • 29min
Episode 44: Burnout at the bedside is causing a crisis in nursing
Two years into the pandemic and in the midst of the latest hospital staffing crisis, nurses have finally gotten the country’s attention when it comes to burnout and attrition within the country’s most trusted profession. And it’s an important shift, because nursing is in trouble.
This week, nurse and researcher Jane Muir describes some of the issues that are nudging more and more nurses to trade staff positions for jobs as travel nurses, or to leave nursing entirely, and offers ways to retain staff nurses. She says hospital systems need to put cash toward the nurses who make those systems so profitable.
First Opinion Podcast is technically on a break! We'll have one more episode next month before we're back to our weekly schedule in March.

Dec 22, 2021 • 21min
Looking back on the first year of 'First Opinion Podcast'
We started the "First Opinion Podcast" in February 2021 because we knew there was incredible value in the perspectives shared by our essay contributors. We'd hoped there could be added value in sharing those perspectives through real, in-depth conversations too. Now a little under one year and 43 conversations later, we've been thrilled by the results. To celebrate our last podcast of the year I sat down with producer Theresa Gaffney to look back at some of the year's most memorable moments, both on- and off-the-record.

Dec 15, 2021 • 37min
Episode 43: A parent on advocating for people with autism who can't advocate for themselves
Alison Singer learned how to advocate for a child with autism by watching her mother do it for her brother. When Singer had her own child with autism, Jodie, she immediately got involved with the activist community. But Jodie's condition doesn't look like the kind seen in television shows like "Atypical" or "Love on the Spectrum." She needs special support 24 hours a day. This week on the "First Opinion Podcast," Singer breaks down why she believes the use of the overarching label "autism spectrum disorder" fails to take people like Jodie into account, and why she's pushing for a new, more specific label: "profound autism."

Dec 8, 2021 • 31min
Episode 42: A public health expert passes on football's full body collisions for youth
If there was one moment that led Kathleen Bachynski to a career studying the public health significance of sports injuries and violence, it was blowing out her knee in three places as a high school soccer player. And after years of documenting the many ways that football in particular can harm young players, she's got one rule: no full-body collision sports for kids. This week, she discusses the risks taken by youths in one of the country's most revered sports.

Dec 1, 2021 • 31min
Episode 41: Who owns your health data — and why you should care
It can be hard to fathom that anyone other than you might own your information. But they do. Everything from what's in your electronic medical record to the average jogging speed recorded on an app may be someone else's property. For a profit, the magic is in the aggregate. On an individual scale, it's valuable information that paints a full picture of health for individuals and their health care providers. Juhan Sonin and Annie Lakey Becker explain why it's important to fight for patient ownership of health data across the country and the world.

Nov 24, 2021 • 29min
Revisiting: A medical historian on the deadly epidemics of the Civil War
Diseases like smallpox, measles, and dysentery killed two-thirds of the 1 million people who died in the Civil War. “Chronic diarrhea” and the stigma of smallpox scars plagued soldiers and others for decades afterward. And while Americans no longer depend on digging ditches for latrines, we’re still struggling with faith in national public health measures, racial disparities in health care, and more. Medical historian Jonathan S. Jones discusses the epidemics of the Civil War and the lessons learned and forgotten.

Nov 17, 2021 • 30min
Episode 40: A resident physician on the fire that burned him out
Resident physician Sudhakar Nuti was almost too burnt out to write about burnout. He spent months working to find the energy to start his recent First Opinion essay on how the pandemic has aggravated the already dire mental health situation for many medical trainees around the country, including himself. "I feel like I've gone from doctor to debris," he wrote. Nuti joins "First Opinion Podcast" to further discuss how burnout happens during residency, and how the profession might address its systemic problems with systemic solutions.

Nov 10, 2021 • 38min
Episode 39: A patient and a nephrologist on how using race in kidney testing puts lives at risk
Ever since medicine adopted a race-based formula to assess kidney health in the mid-2000s, some experts have spoken out against it & the life-threatening impact it has on Black patients. Patients like Glenda Roberts, who long self-identified as Black, and who has lived with kidney disease for most of her adult life. The "Black correction" in the eGFR made it look like her kidneys were doing better than they actually were, which delayed her being worked up for a kidney transplant. Roberts and kidney specialist Vanessa Grubbs spoke this week about the impact this equation has had on patients' lives and whether the profession has truly reckoned with it.

Nov 3, 2021 • 35min
Episode 38: An antibiotic expert on her body's stinging betrayal
Natalie Ma knows a lot about antibiotics. She's familiar with the consequences of antibiotic resistance and the side effects of these essential drugs from her work at Felix Biotechnology, the biotherapeutics company she cofounded. So it was particularly daunting when what she thought was a run-of-the-mill urinary tract infection wasn't abated by the standard antibiotics.
The conversation stems from her First Opinion essay, "My company is developing new antibiotics. My resistant infection showed me we need them now." To hear more about antibiotic resistance, you can listen to episode #9 of the First Opinion Podcast with researchers David Hyun and Rachel Zetts on the far-reaching effects of these "superbugs."