PHIL 3345. Supporting the philosophical study of bioethics, bio-medical ethics, biotechnology, and the future of life, at Middle Tennessee State University and beyond... "Keep your health, your splendid health. It is better than all the truths under the firmament." William James
In 2015, an anti-vaccination campaign in Ireland caused a sudden fall in the uptake of the HPV vaccine. Then Laura Brennan got involved.
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Terminally Ill at 25 and Fighting Fake News on Vaccines
We’ll need more than facts to fight medical misinformation
You all know about how fake news is threatening your democracy. But there’s another type of misinformation that’s threatening our very health. And this time, people are dying. I’m talking about medical misinformation. Roughly 49 percent of Americans believe in at least one medical conspiracy theory. When people are diagnosed, with cancer and they go online, they’re often hit with absolute falsehoods. These scare patients. And they either delay their conventional treatment or they sometimes reject it. My name is Dr. David Robert Grimes. I’m a cancer researcher. And when a vaccination confidence crisis came to Ireland, my home country, I found myself on the front line. Let me tell you about the human papilloma virus or H.P.V. Every year about 270,000 women die of cervical cancer caused by H.P.V. infection. But for the first time in our history, we now have a vaccine that prevents against it. It’s difficult to overstate how effective this vaccine has been. In America, H.P.V. infection in young girls has dropped about 88 percent. But then things changed. In Japan in 2013, sustained anti-vaccine activism led to a panic, which saw vaccination rates for H.P.V. dropped from 70 percent to less than 1 percent within a year or two. In 2014, a similar outbreak of panic came to Denmark. In the U.S.A., H.P.V. vaccination rates in adolescence remain critically low, hovering at around 16 percent. “The uptake rate for the H.P.V. vaccine has dropped.” In 2015, panic about the H.P.V. vaccine came to Ireland. “For some girls and young women, the side effects of Gardasil go well beyond a few months.” I couldn’t believe that I was hearing, such dangerous falsehoods about a vaccine that prevents 5 percent of all cancers. “We only ever wanted what was best for our girls.” Within a year or so, Irish vaccination rates had gone from highs of 87 percent to about 50 percent. It starts with this: As rational as we like to think we are, and as logical, the truth is that we emote first and we reason later. “And I watched my baby go boom and hit the ground.” You’ll often see a scare story that says — particularly a teenage girl — has had an adverse effect to this vaccination. “I believe with all my heart that the Gardasil vaccination did this to her.” And it’ll be delivered in a very frightening way that captures your attention. “I was such an intelligent girl and now I’ve just got this fog over my mind.” It doesn’t matter that the stories lack any veracity. What matters is they scare us and in scaring us we remember them. And in remembering them, we afford them more weight than they deserve. And so starts a vicious cycle. This explains why lies about the H.P.V. vaccine were able to do so much damage in so many countries. But in Ireland, what really changed the situation was a woman called Laura Brennan. When Laura was 24, she was diagnosed with cervical cancer, and by the time she was 25, that was metastatic noncurable. Laura was alarmed that people weren‘t getting this vaccine that could prevent women from being in the situation that she found herself in. Her campaigning started with a series of advertisements where she talked to parents directly to them. “Protect our future.” She was on talk shows. She was interviewed in magazines. “If anything good comes out of this, I would hope parents would get their daughters vaccinated. The vaccine saves lives. It could have saved mine.” She said, I am the reality of an unvaccinated girl. “So it just shows you how fast and aggressive my cancer is. But yeah, that’s life.” It’s no good just throwing facts of people until you can show them why those facts matter. In Ireland, thanks in large part to her campaigning, rates climbed back up over 70 percent, and are continuing to climb. It shows that you can reverse some of this damage. “When I found out that my cancer was terminal, I wanted to use my voice for good, and for the last 12 months, I haven’t shut up.” Laura exemplified something really, really important: That you never change minds without changing hearts as well. All the journal articles in the world, all the physicians and scientists in the world, saying something is for nothing if you can’t reach people on a visceral emotional level and show them why something matters. I was incredibly honored and privileged to be close to Laura Brennan. She passed away on the 20th of March 2019, aged only 26. But she leaves behind a legacy that will extend far beyond most of our lifetimes. And she will save more lives than a library of journal articles and scientific experts in isolation could ever hope to achieve. And that’s some legacy to leave behind.
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5:09Terminally Ill at 25 and Fighting Fake News on Vaccines
We’ll need more than facts to fight medical misinformationCreditCredit...RTÉ TelevisionBy David Robert Grimes Dec. 11, 2019 Video by Adam Westbrook
In 2019, measles cases in the U.S. have been on the rise, much of it driven by false claims about the safety of the vaccine.
In the Video Op-Ed above, a cancer researcher, David Robert Grimes, confronts the rising trend of medical misinformation. From herbal remedies for cancer to vaccination horror stories, fake medical news is spreading fast on social media.
The effects can be severe, with anti-vaccination movements partly responsible for the resurgence of measles and other preventable illnesses.
In 2015, an anti-vaccination campaign in Ireland caused a sudden fall in the number of HPV vaccines administered, given to young girls and boys to prevent cervical cancer. Dr. Grimes tells the story of how, with the help of a remarkable woman named Laura Brennan, they were able to reverse the trend, and what countries like the United States can learn in their fight against medical misinformation.
David Robert Grimes (@drg1985), a cancer researcher and physicist, is author of “The Irrational Ape: Why Flawed Logic Puts Us All at Risk and How Critical Thinking Can Save the World.”
Ethics is a more inclusive matter than morality; it concerns character whereas morality concerns actions. Our actions will mainly of course flow from our character, but the targets of enquiry in ethics (seeking answers to What sort of person shall I be?) and in debates about morality (What is the right thing to do in this case?) are obviously not the same... A.C. Grayling, The History of Philosophy
In 1920s America, a mix of nativist sentiment and pseudoscience led to the first major law curtailing immigration. Okrent focuses on eugenics, which argued that letting in people of certain nationalities and races would harm America’s gene pool...
Written before her death last year from cancer at the age of 42, Yip-Williams’s book is a remarkable woman’s moving exhortation to the living.
== ‘THE UNDYING: Pain, Vulnerability, Mortality, Medicine, Art, Time, Dreams, Data, Exhaustion, Cancer, and Care’ By Anne Boyer (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Boyer’s extraordinary and furious book is partly a memoir of her illness, diagnosed five years ago; she was 41 when she learned that the lump in her breast was triple-negative cancer, one of the deadliest kinds. But her story, told with searing specificity, is just one narrative thread in a book that reflects on the possibility — or necessity — of finding common cause in individual suffering.
Much of what we accept as legal in medical billing would be regarded as fraud in any other sector.
I have been circling around this conclusion for this past five years, as I’ve listened to patients’ stories while covering health care as a journalist and author. Now, after a summer of firsthand experience — my husband was in a bike crash in July — it’s time to call out this fact head-on. Many of the Democratic candidates are talking about practical fixes for our high-priced health care system, and some legislated or regulated solutions to the maddening world of medical billing would be welcome.
My husband, Andrej, flew over his bicycle’s handlebars when he hit a pothole at high speed on a Sunday ride in Washington. He was unconscious and lying on the pavement when I caught up with him minutes later. The result: six broken ribs, a collapsed lung, a broken finger, a broken collarbone and a broken shoulder blade.
The treatment he got via paramedics and in the emergency room and intensive care unit were great. The troubles began, as I knew they would, when the bills started arriving.
I will not even complain here about some of the crazy high charges: $182 for a basic blood test, $9,289 for two days in a room in intensive care, $20 for a pill that costs pennies at a pharmacy. We have great insurance, which negotiates these rates down. And at least Andrej got and benefited from those services... (continues)
COLORADO SPRINGS — Biology textbooks used in American high schools do not go near the sensitive question of whether genetics can explain why African-Americans are overrepresented as football players and why a disproportionate number of American scientists are white or Asian.
But in a study starting this month, a group of biology teachers from across the country will address it head-on. They are testing the idea that the science classroom may be the best place to provide a buffer against the unfounded genetic rationales for human difference that often become the basis for racial intolerance.
At a recent training in Colorado, the dozen teachers who had volunteered to participate in the experiment acknowledged the challenges of inserting the combustible topic of race and ancestry into straightforward lessons on the 19th-century pea-breeding experiments of Gregor Mendel and the basic function of the strands of DNA coiled in every cell.
It also challenges a prevailing belief among science educators that questions about race are best left to their counterparts in social studies.
The history of today’s racial categories arose long before the field of genetics and have been used to justify all manner of discriminatory policies. Race, a social concept bound up in culture and family, is not a topic of study in modern human population genetics, which typically uses concepts like “ancestry” or “population” to describe geographic genetic groupings.
But that has not stopped many Americans from believing that genes cause racial groups to have distinct skills, traits and abilities. And among some biology teachers, there has been a growing sense that avoiding any direct mention of race in their genetics curriculum may be backfiring.
“I know it’s threatening,” said Brian Donovan, a science education researcher at the nonprofit BSCS Science Learning who is leading the study. “The thing to remember is that kids are already making sense of race and biology, but with no guidance.”
Human population geneticists have long emphasized that racial disparities found in society do not in themselves indicate corresponding genetic differences. A recent paper by leading researchers in the field invokes statistical models to argue that health disparities between black and white Americans are more readily explained by environmental effects such as racism than the DNA they inherited from ancestors... (continues)
Supporting the philosophical study of bioethics, biomedical ethics, biotechnology, and the future of life, at Middle Tennessee State University and beyond... "Keep your health, your splendid health. It is better than all the truths under the firmament." William James
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Our anchoring theme: the psychological and social dimensions of medicine and the life sciences from birth to death, with a special emphasis this semester on the “biopolitics” of new and emerging biotechnologies such as assisted reproduction, human genetic modification, and DNA forensics.”
Texts 2020 We’ll begin with these texts:
Bioethics: The Basics (Campbell) ”...the word ‘bioethics’ just means the ethics of life…”
Beyond Bioethics (Obasogie) “Bioethics’ traditional emphasis on individual interests such as doctor-patient relationships, informed consent, and personal autonomy is minimally helpful in confronting the social and political challenges posed by new human biotechnologies…”
Each student will also choose and report on an additional relevant text, thus enabling us to extend our study of the field by “crowd-sourcing” many more of the crucial issues it raises.
For more info contact phil.oliver@mtsu.edu, or visit http://bioethjpo.blogspot.com/
Letting Go Modern medicine is good at staving off death with aggressive interventions—and bad at knowing when to focus, instead, on improving the days that terminal patients have left.by Atul Gawande Thomas Monopoli was pregnant with her first child when her doctors learned that she was going to die. It started with a cough and a pain in her back. Then a chest X-ray showed that her left lung had collapsed, and her chest was filled with fluid. A sample of the fluid was drawn off with a long needle and sent for testing. Instead of an infection, as everyone had expected, it was lung cancer, and it had already spread to the lining of her chest. Her pregnancy was thirty-nine weeks along, and the obstetrician who had ordered the test broke the news to her as she sat with her husband and her parents. The obstetrician didn’t get into the prognosis—she would bring in an oncologist for that—but Sara was stunned. Her mother, who had lost her best friend to lung cancer, began crying.
The doctors wanted to start treatment right away, and that meant inducing labor to get the baby out. For the moment, though, Sara and her husband, Rich, sat by themselves on a quiet terrace off the labor floor. It was a warm Monday in June, 2007. She took Rich’s hands, and they tried to absorb what they had heard. Monopoli was thirty-four. She had never smoked, or lived with anyone who had. She exercised. She ate well. The diagnosis was bewildering. “This is going to be O.K.,” Rich told her. “We’re going to work through this. It’s going to be hard, yes. But we’ll figure it out. We can find the right treatment.” For the moment, though, they had a baby to think about.
“So Sara and I looked at each other,” Rich recalled, “and we said, ‘We don’t have cancer on Tuesday. It’s a cancer-free day. We’re having a baby. It’s exciting. And we’re going to enjoy our baby.’ ” On Tuesday, at 8:55 p.m., Vivian Monopoli, seven pounds nine ounces, was born. She had wavy brown hair, like her mom, and she was perfectly healthy.
The next day, Sara underwent blood tests and body scans. Dr. Paul Marcoux, an oncologist, met with her and her family to discuss the findings. He explained that she had a non-small cell lung cancer that had started in her left lung. Nothing she had done had brought this on. More than fifteen per cent of lung cancers—more than people realize—occur in non-smokers. Hers was advanced, having metastasized to multiple lymph nodes in her chest and its lining. The cancer was inoperable. But there were chemotherapy options, notably a relatively new drug called Tarceva, which targets a gene mutation commonly found in lung cancers of female non-smokers. Eighty-five per cent respond to this drug, and, Marcoux said, “some of these responses can be long-term.”
Words like “respond” and “long-term” provide a reassuring gloss on a dire reality. There is no cure for lung cancer at this stage. Even with chemotherapy, the median survival is about a year. But it seemed harsh and pointless to confront Sara and Rich with this now. Vivian was in a bassinet by the bed. They were working hard to be optimistic. As Sara and Rich later told the social worker who was sent to see them, they did not want to focus on survival statistics. They wanted to focus on “aggressively managing” this diagnosis.
Sara was started on the Tarceva, which produced an itchy, acne-like facial rash and numbing tiredness. She also underwent a surgical procedure to drain the fluid around her lung; when the fluid kept coming back, a thoracic surgeon eventually placed a small, permanent tube in her chest, which she could drain whenever fluid accumulated and interfered with her breathing. Three weeks after the delivery, she was admitted to the hospital with severe shortness of breath from a pulmonary embolism—a blood clot in an artery to the lungs, which is dangerous but not uncommon in cancer patients. She was started on a blood thinner. Then test results showed that her tumor cells did not have the mutation that Tarceva targets. When Marcoux told Sara that the drug wasn’t going to work, she had an almost violent physical reaction to the news, bolting to the bathroom in mid-discussion with a sudden bout of diarrhea.
Dr. Marcoux recommended a different, more standard chemotherapy, with two drugs called carboplatin and paclitaxel. But the paclitaxel triggered an extreme, nearly overwhelming allergic response, so he switched her to a regimen of carboplatin plus gemcitabine. Response rates, he said, were still very good for patients on this therapy.
She spent the remainder of the summer at home, with Vivian and her husband and her parents, who had moved in to help. She loved being a mother. Between chemotherapy cycles, she began trying to get her life back... (continues)
As public-health officials confront the largest outbreak in the U.S. in decades, they’ve been fighting as much against dangerous ideas as they have against the disease.
“People seem to think measles is some happy Norman Rockwell rite of passage,” New York’s health commissioner said.
One day in the early sixties, Saul Zucker, a pediatrician and anesthesiologist in the Bronx, was treating the child of a New York assemblyman named Alexander Chananau. Amid the stethoscoping and reflex-hammering of a routine checkup, the two men got to talking about polio, which was still a threat to the nation’s youth, in spite of the discovery, the previous decade, of a vaccine. At the time, some states had laws requiring the vaccination of schoolchildren, but New York was not one of them. In his office, on the Grand Concourse, Zucker urged Chananau to push such a law, and shortly afterward the assemblyman introduced a bill in the legislature. The proposal encountered resistance, especially from Christian Scientists, whose faith teaches that disease is a state of mind. (The city’s health commissioner opposed the bill as well, writing to Chananau, “We do not like to legislate the things which can be obtained without legislation.”) To mollify the dissenters, Chananau and others added a religious exemption; you could forgo vaccination if it violated the principles of your faith. In 1966, the bill passed, 150–2, making New York the first state to have a vaccination law with a religious exemption. By the beginning of this year, forty-six other states had a version of such a provision; it has proved to be an exploitable lever for people who, for reasons that typically have nothing to do with religion, are opposed to vaccination. They are widely, and disdainfully, known as anti-vaxxers... (continues)
I work for a public medical system, and we have an ethics seminar each month. The last one featured an article by a doctor in one of our hospitals. She discussed patients or their families who insist on having medical providers who are some combination of straight, white, male and/or American-born.
Some seminar participants thought patients should be able to choose such a provider in our system because they can do so in the private care system and because we now encourage them to use the private system if they prefer.
I was shocked that any providers considered it ethical to support patients’ openly making health care decisions based on bias. The point was also made that treatment is often provided in emergency settings where a patient’s life is at stake. Many of our treatment options are aimed at small populations of patients, so there may be only one practitioner available. That practitioner may not be male, straight, white or American-born. Patients cannot receive some types of specialty care outside our system, so they do not have the option of shopping around for all types of medical care. Is it truly ethical for patients to demand that their bigotry dictate who treats them? Name Withheld
Is it ethical for patients to want their bigotry to be accommodated? That’s an easy question: no, because expressing bigotry isn’t ethical. The harder question is whether health care professionals ought to accommodate their bigotry.
Everyone knows that doctors must not discriminate on the basis of gender, sexuality, race, religion or national origin when they select or treat patients: It’s an obligation they accepted when they entered the health care profession. (That doesn’t mean they have to take all comers; they can turn away patients for various other reasons.) But should patients be able to choose clinicians on the basis of such attributes? The answer is: It depends.
In an outpatient setting — in private care, as you note — patients can freely discriminate in choosing whom they want to treat them. That may be unethical as a matter of personal conduct, but we don’t want a system that would try to sift through their motives and correct for invidious ones. We’re in the Zocdoc era — something like Tinder M.D. Patient-consumers, in this context, have the prerogatives enjoyed by suitors to make choices that are biased and boneheaded.
The picture changes when we’re in an institutional setting, one in which patients haven’t chosen their health care practitioner. The picture changes when a man with a swastika tattoo, say, announces that he doesn’t want a black nurse touching his newborn in the neonatal intensive care unit. (That’s a real case, from a hospital in Flint, Mich.) He’s not obliged to choose a particular hospital. But once he has, a hospital that accommodates his request and assigns employees on that basis is effectively instituting his bias.
Your own medical system should be careful not to make that mistake. There are more complicated cases, to be sure. What about a woman who, as a survivor of sexual assault, asks to be seen by a female gynecologist? Here, surely, it would be reasonable to try to accommodate her, not least because the choice doesn’t reflect disrespect for male doctors, as refusing to be touched by an African-American nurse does reflect disrespect for black medical staff. Not every form of discrimination is invidious. It’s perfectly appropriate for a patient who speaks Spanish to ask for a doctor who does, too. It’s a very different thing for patients to reject a doctor because she also speaks Spanish.
For health care professionals who work in hospital systems, incidents of patient bias can be wounding. That’s why hospitals should, when possible, try to accommodate staff members who don’t want to be assigned to patients who display bias toward them. A doctor’s primary concern is the best care of her patients, and we rightly hold physicians to a higher bar than we do patients. But a health care system has to attend, as well, to the welfare of its staff members.
They don’t seem to regret all that time they don’t spend actually riding waves.By Ellis Avery
Ms. Avery was a writer. She died in February 2019.
Aug. 10, 2019
In 2013, at the age of 41, I decided to make a career change and become a nurse practitioner. At the time, an advanced case of reactive arthritis often left me unable to walk. The entire time that I was taking prerequisite classes, I was in a mobility scooter, a 35-pound dragonfly of a three-wheeler made by a company called TravelScoot. I also needed a large surgical boot on my foot to help me walk.
I rode that mobility scooter in the sun and through the snow, on the bike path by the Hudson River, from my home in the West Village to the Borough of Manhattan Community College downtown. I rode it through the intestinal maze of the New York City subway system, through tunnels that trapped the heat and cold of the previous day’s weather, up and down elevators that trapped the odor of urine, to New York City College of Technology in Brooklyn. I rode it and rode it and rode it, and wondered if I’d ever walk again.
This isn’t the real me, I wanted to tell the world. This time doesn’t count. When I walk again, that’s when I’ll be real.
Amid the misery, I let myself hope. A physician assistant at my primary-care doctor’s office told me about one of her fellow students, a man with cerebral palsy, who had completed the program and graduated while using a wheelchair. In 2016, I was accepted into a community college nursing program, but then told to come back when I didn’t need a boot, which might mean never.
I continued to ride my scooter and to believe that some school, somewhere, would make a place for me. I didn’t see my future self briskly striding through hospital corridors. I just needed to get through school so that one day I could sit behind a desk at a health center or work in an outpatient clinic. There was plenty of nursing work that could be done just as well in a surgical boot as in a shoe. I could write a prescription, give a vaccine, insert an IUD. I could look a patient in the eye and listen.
In July 2017, I was out of the boot and walking again for the first time in years. My spouse and I were thinking about moving to Australia, so I applied to programs there and was admitted to nursing school at the University of Melbourne. After completing my first semester, I decamped to Sydney for a month. There, I lived in an apartment overlooking Bondi Beach, perhaps the most beloved urban surfing destination in the world.
Day after day, I watched the surfers. I daydreamed about taking a surfing lesson, but my hold on walking felt so recent and unlikely, I didn’t chance it. And in other ways, it already felt like I was surfing. I was surfing on the arthritis medication I had starting taking in spring 2016. I was surfing on the steroid shot I’d gotten in April of 2017. I was surfing on the immuno-modulating probiotics with which I was experimenting. Just as if I were a surfer, any little thing could knock me off my board and back into arthritic misery, back into the boot and scooter I had come to know and loathe.
Watching the surfers, I noticed that the time they spent standing on their boards, riding waves — doing what nonsurfers would call surfing — was minimal compared with the time they spent bobbing around in the water next to the board, generally going nowhere. Even the really good surfers spend far more time off the board than on it.
If you added up the seconds that a good surfer actually spent riding the waves, it would amount to only the smallest fraction of an entire life. Yet surfers are surfers all the time. They are surfers while they are working their crap jobs, daydreaming about surfing. They are surfers when they wake up at 4 in the morning. They are surfers when they walk the board down the hill to Bondi Beach. They are surfers when they drink their predawn espressos. They are surfers when they paddle out on their boards. They are surfers when they wait and wait for the right wave. They are surfers when they wipe out, thrashing around blindly in the waves, praying the board doesn’t crack their skulls. They are surfers when they sit by their trucks with their friends after surfing, silently eating their grain-bowl meals.
And the thing about surfers? They don’t seem to regret all that time they don’t spend standing on boards and riding waves. Not only are they surfers all the time, they are, it seems to me, happy all the time.
Could I do that? Could I be happy even when I didn’t know whether I’d be able to walk the next day, or whether I’d be alive a year from now? Could the time I might spend in the humiliating, tedious boot and scooter somehow count as mine? Instead of waiting to be well so I could be myself again, could I be me while sick, too? Could I declare myself a surfer all the time, and seize that happiness?
I thought back to my time in New York, when I was rising at dawn to take courses and intern in doctors’ offices, and struggling both to get around and to relocate the real me: I had seen a new light in the faces of my fellow students and patients, in our shared endeavor to live. The dark mystery of bodily suffering had offered itself to me as a new way to love New York City, and life, all over again. I had accepted it, with joy. Watching the surfers at Bondi Beach, I vowed to do so again when I returned home in the fall, no matter what. nyt
== Ellis Avery was the author of two novels, a memoir and a book of poetry. She taught fiction writing at Columbia University and the University of California, Berkeley. She died of cancer in February 2019.
Disability is a series of essays, art and opinion by and about people living with disabilities.
Thinking of my mental illness as preordained missed many of the causes of — and solutions to — my emotional suffering. By Kelli María Korducki
The antidepressant Prozac came on the market in 1986; coincidentally, it was the year I was born. By the time I saw my first psychiatrist, as an early-2000s teenager, another half-dozenantidepressants belonging to the same class of drugs, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or S.S.R.I.s, had joined it on the market — and in the public consciousness.
The despondent cartoon blob from a memorable series of TV ads for the S.S.R.I. drug Zoloft became a near-instant piece of pop culture iconography after its May 2001 debut. It was commonplace through much of my childhood to find ads for other S.S.R.I.s tucked into the pages of the women’s magazines I’d leaf through at the salon where my mother had her hair cut, outlining criteria for determining whether Paxil “may be right for you.” In my depressed, anxious, eating disordered adolescence, I knew by name the pills that promised to help me.
The mainstreaming of S.S.R.I.s and other psychopharmaceuticals didn’t eradicate stigmas against mental illness, but it certainly normalized a sense of their prevalence. (A 2003 study concluded that child and adolescent psychotropic prescription rates alone had nearly tripled since the late 1980s.) It also shaped the tone of conversation...
I also make it a daily priority to get at least some light exercise, whether a walk or a jog or a bicycle commute. I maintain a regular yoga practice, try to eat a balanced diet and get enough sleep, read constantly, and work to nurture social connections and build community. All of these, I’ve learned, I can do to maintain my emotional and psychological well-being, and the key word here is “maintain.” It’s about process, not prognosis...
Medical Intelligence: A Conversation with Eric Topol
In this episode of the Making Sense podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Eric Topol about the way artificial intelligence can improve medicine. They talk about soaring medical costs and declining health outcomes in the U.S., the problems of too little and too much medicine, the culture of medicine, the travesty of electronic health records, the current status of AI in medicine, the promise of further breakthroughs, possible downsides of relying on AI in medicine, and other topics.
Ethan Lindenberger never got vaccinated as a kid. So one day, he went on Reddit and asked a simple question: "Where do I go to get vaccinated?" The post went viral, landing Lindenberger in the middle of a heated debate about vaccination and, ultimately, in front of a US Senate committee. Less than a year later, the high school senior reports back on his unexpected time in the spotlight and a new movement he's leading to fight misinformation and advocate for scientific truth.
