This Podcast Will Kill You
Disease and epidemiology stories; mechanisms and history checkable
57:08Chemistry, not medicine, defeated America's patent medicine epidemic
Nineteenth-century American patent medicines grew through anti-establishment sentiment and newspaper advertising; the real exposé came not from advances in germ theory but from analytical chemistry finally revealing what was actually in the bottle.
1:20:32The Ice Bucket Challenge Raised $220 Million, Yet ALS Still Has No Cure
The 2014 ice bucket challenge drew donations from nearly 30 million people, raising $220 million. Yet more than a decade later, riluzole, the only widely approved drug, extends median survival by just three months.
1:06:46Vitamin K Refusal Rates Have Doubled, and Infant Brain Hemorrhage Is Preventable
Every newborn is physiologically deficient in vitamin K at birth, and a single intramuscular shot drops the risk of late bleeding to near zero; but US refusal rates have risen from 3% to 5.8%, and babies whose parents refuse face 81 times the risk of late bleeding.
52:13Renaissance Doctors Came in Four Tiers, and the Best Healer Was Called a Quack
Bone-setters worked the market circuit every week, far more practiced than a licensed surgeon who did a few cases a year, and the physicians called them quacks — title and skill were never the same thing.
58:21ECT Is Not What You Think: A Century of Drift from Back Room to Routine Treatment
Modern ECT is a procedure performed under anesthesia and muscle relaxants, with strong efficacy, but the evidence on memory-loss side effects is still not fully clear, and social misunderstanding has left it over-stigmatized.
50:30ECT Is Not Torture: 70% Respond, 60% Remit
ECT brings about response in roughly 70% of patients and wipes out symptoms in 60%; it is not the electrocution of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest but the oldest somatic treatment to survive the slaughterhouse, the asylum, and the anti-psychiatry movement.
44:42Warming Doesn't Just Melt Glaciers — It Reshapes Your Brain's Decisions
The brain is a statistical model of the environment, and climate is the human-set baseline for normal. When the baseline itself moves, forgetting becomes an adaptation mechanism — you slide into treating the abnormal as normal without noticing.