Freakonomics, M.D.

Success and failure are hard to measure in medicine. Bapu looks at how surgeons are judged after a bad outcome — and whether men and women are treated the same.

We take it for granted that, when people are acutely ill, they should be in the hospital. Is there a better way?

Figuring out which patients to hospitalize and which to safely send home can be tricky. Is there a way to make this decision easier for doctors — and get better outcomes, too?

A small number of patients with multiple chronic conditions use a lot of resources. Dr. Jeffrey Brenner found a way to identify and treat them. Could it reduce health-care spending too?

Bapu tries to stump master clinician Dr. Gurpreet Dhaliwal with a medical mystery. 

It’s a surprisingly hard question to answer. Bapu talks with a health economist about a natural experiment that led to some unexpected findings. 

At the start of the 20th century, there weren’t many hospitals in the U.S. That changed in 1918, thanks to the Great Influenza pandemic. Its effects on health care are still being felt today. Which makes us wonder: will the impact of Covid-19 also be felt 100 years from now?

Half the world's population uses social media — and a new study suggests that it causes anxiety and depression. Can anything be done, or is it too late?

Some diagnostic tests give distorted results for Black patients. How are doctors trying to change that?

Promising drugs keep failing in trials. Allegations of fraud have cast a shadow over the field. An expert explains why Alzheimer’s treatments have been so hard to find — and why one clue may lie in the Andes Mountains.