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When people receive a medical diagnosis or experience a new symptom, the first thing many of us do is reach for our phone. If a doctor isn't available to provide an answer, someone else is.
On The Dose podcast, host Dr. Joel Bervell talks with Dr. Mike Varshavski, a primary care physician with more than 30 million social media followers, about what it takes to fight health misinformation at scale, what health institutions still get wrong about social media, and why entertainment and education aren't opposites.
Doctor Mike, as he's known, didn't set out to become a popular online figure. He says he was driven to act as he watched misinformation fill a space that medicine was too cautious to engage with.
"We trust you to cut people open, to prescribe all these medicines that have potential side effects — but we don't trust you to make a video on the subject you're an expert on," he says, describing the double standard physicians face online.
Show Notes:
The Checkup with Doctor Mike
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Dr. Kaytura Felix didn't set out to document the Black maternal health crisis. She set out to find the people who are already doing something about it.
On this episode of The Dose podcast, Dr. Joel Bervell talks with Felix, founder of the Black Birthing Futures project, about what she discovered: a constellation of Black community midwives providing "deep care" — clinical, emotional, social, and spiritual support centered on care of the birthing family.
"The family is the sun and all the providers are orbiting them," says Felix.
But keeping the family at the center isn't easy. Felix shares what stands between deep care and the families who need it most.
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Four in 10 Americans have medical debt. Most don't know there's a federal law that could eliminate it.
On this episode of The Dose podcast, host Joel Bervell talks with Jared Walker about his nonprofit, Dollar For, which has helped Americans erase more than $100 million in medical debt by connecting them to the charity care programs that hospitals are legally required to offer but rarely publicize.
"These hospitals are great. They're saving people's lives every single day," says Walker. "The problem is that they're also ruining people's financial lives."
With Medicaid cuts on the horizon and health care costs continuing to rise, Walker explains how Dollar For's free screening tool works, why some states are doing a better job of protecting patients than others, and what it will take to make hospitals do what the law already requires.
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Seventy billion dollars is flowing into health care AI, but the people building it and the patients who need it most are rarely in the same room.
On this episode, host Dr. Joel Bervell talks with pediatrician, researcher, and tech optimist Dr. Ivor Horn about what responsible AI innovation in health care requires. Drawing on her work building open-access datasets and equity frameworks for machine learning, Horn says that rigorous research, community partnership, and critical thinking are not obstacles to the work of building powerful tools — they are the work.
"If you build for the most vulnerable patients," Horn says, "you will build a better product for everyone."
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Uterine fibroids may affect up to 80 percent of women in their lifetime, but they remain under-researched, underfunded, and routinely dismissed. Lupita Nyong'o is working to change that.
"I could not believe that women were partially or wholly losing their reproductive organs because of this noncancerous tumor situation."
On this episode, Dr. Joel Bervell talks with Academy Award–winning actor and activist Lupita Nyong'o about her own diagnosis, and her decision to share an MRI of her body while launching the Make Fibroids Count campaign with the Foundation for Women's Health.
"I realized without research we can't get any further," Nyong'o says. "We need to understand more in order to be able to equip the doctors who can then equip the patients."
Show Notes:
Lupita Nyong'o
Make Fibroids Count (through the Foundation for Women's Health)
The White Dress Project
The Fibroid Foundation
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A new movement in the United States is taking shape in maternal care, one that seeks to restore trust, center women, and protect lives.
On this episode of The Dose podcast, Dr. Joel Bervell talks with author and advocate Elaine Welteroth about her own struggle finding patient-centered care during pregnancy and how the organization she founded, birthFUND, is funding midwifery care, supporting new mothers, and reimagining what safe, empowering birth can look like in America.
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Across Oklahoma, a community-powered doula network is reshaping what equitable maternal care looks like.
On this episode of The Dose, Dr. Joel Bervell talks with Omare Jimmerson of the Oklahoma Birth Equity Initiative about how culturally rooted doulas, smart policies, and practical supports—from rides to diapers—are helping hundreds of families thrive each year.
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AI therapy for children with anxiety, mental health training for staff at nonprofits that work with young people, and an "art pharmacy" that prescribes free museum tickets to kids — these are just some of the things Dr. Kevin Simon and his team are doing to help meet the mental health care needs of Boston's children.
Simon, the city's first chief behavioral health officer, talks to host Dr. Joel Bervell on the new episode of The Dose, which centers on America's youth mental health crisis and the innovative things states and cities are doing for struggling children.
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"The proportion of energy and resources that goes into getting paid instead of taking care of patients is out of whack."
That's Dr. Mai Pham's assessment of how we pay for health care in the United States — where all too often the imperative is volume over value, and billing over better care. In the latest episode of The Dose podcast, host Dr. Joel Bervell talks with Dr. Pham about how we can do better and deliver on the promise of equitable, person-centered care.
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Medical care for people with obesity is changing rapidly. Body mass index, or BMI, was once considered the gold standard for diagnosis but has proven to be less accurate than once thought. Meanwhile, the advent of GLP-1 drugs has provided patients with treatment options that were unimaginable just a decade ago.
Dr. Fatima Cody Stanford, an obesity medicine physician, joins host Dr. Joel Bervell on a new episode of The Dose podcast to talk about the state of obesity care in the United States. Together, they explore why insurers are hesitant to cover medications like Ozempic, how BMI fails to catch real health risks, and what the future of obesity treatment looks like for patients and public health.
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"If people stop trusting science, they stop trusting each other. That has huge implications for everything, not just medicine."
Science, and medical science in particular, is under attack in today's world. Many of our nation's leaders are choosing politics over facts, and prioritizing profit over public health. Online, misinformation about vaccines and medications is spreading at an alarming rate.
On a new episode of The Dose, host Dr. Joel Bervell discusses some of the biggest challenges facing modern medical science with Dr. Francis Collins, who served as director of the National Institutes of Health under three different presidents. They talk about how to assess the trustworthiness of an information source, why every person deserves access to their DNA sequence, what happens when politics meets science, and more.
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Look forward to a new season of The Dose, featuring your host Dr. Joel Bervell, launching this Friday.
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What happens when your zip code threatens your health? Broadband access is often framed as a tech issue, but in some rural communities it's a matter of health equity. Broadband internet is so limited in some areas that patients can't use remote monitoring devices, hospitals can't support telehealth, and electronic health records slow down care instead of streamlining it.
On this week's episode of The Dose, journalist Sarah Jane Tribble joins host Joel Bervell to explain how internet dead zones are deepening chronic illness in rural communities. Drawing from her reporting for KFF Health News, Tribble shares the stories of people managing diabetes and kidney failure without reliable digital tools, and hospitals lacking the internet speeds needed to monitor high-risk patients.
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Data is the engine of health innovation, but too often it can't tell the full story. On this week's episode of The Dose, Dr. Sema Sgaier joins host Joel Bervell to talk about the future of equitable health care: how we collect data, who's included, and what it means for clinical trials, mental health, and the role of AI.
Tune in to hear Dr. Sgaier explain why solving health care's toughest challenges starts with understanding the human side of health — and how inclusive data can lead to smarter policies, safer treatments, and better care.
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We're in a pivotal moment for health care equity and public health. Systems for tracking data on maternal mortality and chronic disease are being dismantled, with consequences that could last generations.
On this week's episode of The Dose, Dr. Marcella Nunez-Smith joins host Joel Bervell to talk about who's represented in the health data we collect, and who isn't, and why it's so important for "people to feel safe in sharing" their data and "to have trust that it's protected." Dr. Nunez-Smith also explains how her experience as a parent of a child with a rare disease frames how she approaches her work in health equity.
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When private equity firms buy your local hospital, your primary care doctor's office, or your local nursing home, they profit. But what happens to those health care institutions, the patients they serve, and the people who work there?
On The Dose this week, Dr. Zirui Song, a renowned expert on private equity in health care, talks with host Joel Bervell about the ways private equity maximizes profits — from cherry-picking patients and reducing staffing to putting the institutions they buy in debt. He also discusses efforts underway to protect patients and communities.
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As the American Medical Association's first chief equity officer, Dr. Aletha Maybank guided the legacy medical institution through a difficult reckoning with its past exclusion of Black and women physicians. In a new episode of The Dose, host Joel Bervell talks to Dr. Maybank about how she did it, what lessons the AMA holds for our current moment, and why she has hope that American institutions can evolve into places that serve all of us.
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Yes, the planet is getting hotter, tropical storms are becoming ever more fierce, and the Arctic is melting — but what's that got to do with health care? This week on The Dose podcast, host Joel Bervell explores the intersection of climate change and public health with Admiral Rachel L. Levine, M.D., the U.S. Assistant Secretary for Health.
Levine, who oversees the federal Office of Climate Change and Health Equity, talks about how weather-related events are already having a serious impact on our fragile health system supply chain, even though those effects can go unnoticed by the broader public. In communities repeatedly ravaged by storms or heat waves, a lack of blood donations is leading to delays in surgeries and treatment for diseases like sickle cell. In rural Alaska, where the melting permafrost is wreaking havoc on wildlife populations, native tribal communities are forced to rely on shipments of food items that are typically high in sugar and salt — a diet contributing to rising rates of hypertension, diabetes, and heart disease."Climate change is the most significant threat to human health in the 21st century, and climate change is having those serious impacts on health right now," says Levine.
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As climate change intensifies and New Yorkers face record-breaking heat, the city is taking new measures to protect residents' health. Landlords will soon have to provide air conditioning to tenants, school bus fleets are going electric, and efforts are underway to make housing more affordable.
Cameron Clarke of WE ACT for Environmental Justice is on the front lines of the push to build a healthier New York City. One recent initiative focused on developing an asthma policy agenda.
"We wanted to talk about housing, transportation, education, and the actual landscape of the built environment and craft a policy agenda that connects all of these different things to environmental justice — all through the lens of asthma," Clarke explains.
On this episode of The Dose podcast, recorded during Climate Week NYC in September, host Joel Bervell talks to Clarke about advancing health and environmental justice in New York and providing people with the tools they need to navigate a complex health system.
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Evidence of a mental health crisis is everywhere — from the recent surgeon general advisory about social media's effects on our youth to the pandemic's documented impact on medical professionals. To whom does a college student turn for help so far from home? And who cares for the mental health of those caring for us?
Enter Dr. Jessi Gold, a psychiatrist and the University of Tennessee's first chief wellness officer, who aims to change the way student mental health is addressed on campus. She favors an open, flexible approach to helping students find the kind of help that's right for them. Off campus, Dr. Gold has been conducting research into the overlooked mental health needs of our medical professionals.
On this episode of The Dose podcast, host Joel Bervell talks with Dr. Gold about the systemic changes needed to support mental wellness across our college campuses and the entire ecosystem of medical professionals.
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