Searching for Medicine‘s Soul

On this episode, Aaron is joined by Charlotte Bismuth, author of Killer in a White Coat: The True Story of New York's Deadliest Pill Pusher and the Team That Brought Him to Justice. Bismuth discusses the profit motive behind the opioid crisis and her decision to prosecute Dr. Stan Li, whose criminal medical practice in New York led to 16 overdoses from prescription drugs.

“On this episode, Aaron is joined by Dasha Kiper, author of Travelers to Unimaginable Lands: Stories of Dementia, the Caregiver, and the Human Brain and a clinical trainer at Renewal Memory Partners. Aaron and Dasha discuss the impact dementia has on caregivers. Through cultural pressures, family dynamics, and a lack of support, caregivers have become what Dasha calls “invisible victims.”

Episode description: On this episode, Aaron is joined by Dr. Marc-David Munk, author of Urgent Calls from Distant Places: An Emergency Doctor's Notes about Life and Death on the Frontiers of East Africa. Dr. Munk discusses his travels to the Middle East and Africa, Christianity's role as a trusted institution in places where government has failed, and how to bring the focus back to patients in the American healthcare system.

On this episode, Aaron is joined by Doron Gothelf, a professor of child psychiatry at Tel Aviv University and an integral member of the medical team involved in treating Israeli children hostages who have been released. Aaron and Doron discuss childhood trauma, how traumatic events affect the young, and Doron's work with the victims of Hamas' violence.

On this episode, Aaron is joined by Lewis Grossman, professor of law at the Washington College of Law and author of the book Choose Your Medicine, to discuss the history of drug regulation and medical freedom.

On this episode, Aaron talks with Dr. James O'Connell, author of Stories from the Shadows: Reflections of a Street Doctor.  Dr. O'Connell discusses his work providing medical care for the homeless in Boston, his experience working as a doctor for the homeless during the AIDS crisis, and the perverse incentives of the medical profession.

In this episode, Aaron is joined by psychiatrist and novelist Samuel Shem, who wrote the satirical novel House of God. Aaron and Samuel discuss Samuel's latest and final novel in the House of God series, Our Hospital. The book serves as a reflection of the truth of medicine during COVID in which hospitals are driven by profit over humanity.

In this episode, Aaron is joined by Drs. Christopher Worsham and Anupam B. Jena, professors at Harvard Medical School and authors of Random Acts of Medicine: The Hidden Forces That Sway Doctors, Impact Patients, and Shape Our Health. The three discuss natural experiments and the biases and outside forces that impact doctors and health policy.

In this episode of Searching for Medicine's Soul, Aaron was joined by Dr. Ronald Dworkin, a 30-year practicing anesthesiologist, professor of political philosophy at George Washington University, and author of Medical Catastrophe: Confessions of an Anesthesiologist. Aaron and Ronald discuss the importance of medical physicians having a liberal arts education and the consequences of a lack thereof. 

What we choose to measure can distort our organizations, impact our workforce, and hijack our attention and resources. In this episode shared from the Moral Matters podcast, Simon Talbot and Wendy Dean talk to Jerry Muller, professor emeritus of history at the Catholic University of America and the author of The Tyranny of Metrics, about how that happens and how to create metrics that matter. Listen to more episodes from Simon and Wendy here.

In the second installment of a two-part conversation, Aaron is joined by Dr. Norman Doidge, a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who served on the faculty at Columbia University's Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research and the University of Toronto's Department of Psychiatry. Dr. Doidge is the author of the New York Times bestselling book, The Brain that Changes Itself, and The Brain's Way of Healing. Aaron and Norman turn their conversation to mainstream medicine, which in Dr. Doidge's view, has neglected the human soul through the deification of science. They also discuss the corruption of the scientific method by industry and government overreach.

The US went from small scale, local healthcare institutions to multibillion dollar megaproviders in barely a generation. In this episode shared from the Moral Matters podcast, Simon Talbot and Wendy Dean talk to Lawton R. Burns, MBA about his perspective on how it happened, what the true costs are, and what we all can do about it. Listen to more episodes from Simon and Wendy here.

In the first installment of a two-part conversation, Aaron is joined by Dr. Norman Doidge, a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who served on the faculty at Columbia University's Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research and the University of Toronto's Department of Psychiatry. Dr. Doidge is the author of the New York Times bestselling book, The Brain that Changes Itself, and The Brain's Way of Healing. Aaron and Norman discuss the mind-body problem and how the brain's ability to change provides a different perspective to the age-old debate.

In this episode of Searching for Medicine's Soul, Aaron was joined by Dr. Ilana Yurkiewicz, a physician practicing oncology and internal medicine at Stanford University, published medical journalist, and author of Fragmented: A Doctor's Quest to Piece Together American Health Care. Aaron and Ilana discuss how America's healthcare system functions in a way that blocks physicians from possessing complete knowledge of a patient's medical history, and the detrimental effects of physicians being partially blindfolded as they practice.

In this episode of Searching for Medicine's Soul, Aaron was joined by Dr. Wendy Dean, a physician trained in surgery and psychiatry who is now focusing on finding innovative ways to make medicine better for both patients and physicians through her nonprofit, Fix Moral Injury. She is the recent co-author of If I Betray These Words: Moral Injury in Medicine and Why It's So Hard for Clinicians to Put Patients First and co-host of the podcast Moral Matters, Moral Injury of Healthcare. Aaron and Wendy discuss the difference between moral injury of doctors and physician burnout, as well as how the healthcare system contributes to symptoms of moral injury. 

In this episode of Searching for Medicine's Soul, Aaron was joined by ethicist Dr. Simon Whitney, author of From Oversight to Overkill: Inside the Broken System That Blocks Medical Breakthroughs—And How We Can Fix It. Aaron and Simon discussed the system of Institutional Review Boards that has come to dominate and distort our system of medical research.

In this episode of Searching for Medicine's Soul, Aaron was joined by Dr. Elisabeth Rosenthal, senior contributing editor at Kaiser Health News, former New York Times reporter, and New York Times Best Selling author of An American Sickness: How Healthcare Became Big Business and How You Can Take It Back. Dr. Rothstein and Dr. Rosenthal talked about the failures of the American healthcare system and the untenable costs and burdens it foists on patients and doctors. 

In this episode, Aaron was joined by Dr. David Yaden, who studies the measurement and experimental manipulation of mental states called altered states of consciousness. The two discussed spiritual experiences, religion, psychedelics and mental illness, and the ability to embrace a positive worldview through psychedelic substances. 

In this episode of Searching for Medicine's Soul, Aaron was joined by fellow EPPC scholar Dr. Aaron Kheriaty. Drs. Rothstein and Kheriaty discussed the biomedical security state, especially in light of the COVID-19 pandemic.

In this episode of Searching for Medicine's Soul, Aaron is joined by Jim Capretta, Senior Fellow and Milton Friedman Chair at the American Enterprise Institute. In the face of rising healthcare costs, the pair discuss the government's role in healthcare policy with an eye for providing patients with meaningful choice in quality treatment.

On this episode of Searching for Medicine's Soul, Aaron interviews Dr. David Slusky of the University of Kansas. David is the Executive Director of the American Society of Health Economists as well as the De-Min and Chin-Sha Wu Associate Professor of Economics at KU. He is a co-founder and co-organizer of the Electronic Health Economics Colloquium, for which he recently successfully negotiated a partnership with ASHEcon for the spring. He is also the founder and the lead organizer of the Kansas Health Economics Conference, for which he was awarded a multiyear National Science Foundation grant. Slusky is also a co-editor at the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, serving in a managing editor capacity.

In this episode of Searching for Medicine's Soul, Aaron is joined by Avik Roy, the President of the Foundation For Research on Equal Opportunity, a non-profit think tank focused on expanding economic opportunity to those who least have it. He trained as a scientist at MIT and as a physician at Yale Medical School.  In 2012, Avik joined Mitt Romney's presidential campaign as a health care policy advisor. By 2014, Avik was Forbes' Opinion Editor. In 2015, Avik ran the foreign and domestic policy shops for Texas Governor Rick Perry's presidential campaign. He writes frequently about healthcare economics and healthcare policy for numerous publications including Forbes and National Review. He serves on the Boards of Advisors of the Bitcoin Policy Institute and Sats Center, and on the Board of Directors of the Texas Bitcoin Foundation. Avik, thanks for joining the podcast. 

In this episode of Searching for Medicine's Soul, Aaron is joined by Jeffrey P. Bishop, M.D., Ph.D. Jeffrey is Professor of Philosophy and Theological Studies at St. Louis University where he also holds the Tenet Endowed Chair in Bioethics. He is the author of The Anticipatory Corpse and most recently the co-author of Biopolitics After Neuroscience: Morality and the Economy of Virtue. The two discuss the confluence of medical practice and human mortality in light of Jeffrey's research and experience.

On this episode of Searching for Medicine's Soul, Aaron is joined by Meghan O'Rourke. She is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness and The Long Goodbye, as well as the poetry collections Sun In Days, Once, and Halflife. Her writing has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, and The New York Times, and more. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Radcliffe Fellowship, and a Whiting Nonfiction Award, she resides in New Haven, where she teaches at Yale University and is the editor of The Yale Review. The two discuss the place of chronic illness and pain in a wholly human anthropology.

On this episode of Searching for Medicine's Soul, Aaron is joined by Wes Ely, the Grant W. Liddle Endowed Chair in Medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, physician-scientist, and author of Every Deep-Drawn Breath, a work chronicling the human element active in ICU medical practice. The two discuss Wes' humanistic approach to his patients and how it shapes his views on the ethical use of sedation, cognitive rehabilitation from neurological diseases, changing treatments acute cases of COVID-19, and more. Note that all proceeds from Every Deep-Drawn Breath will be paid into a fund for Covid and ICU survivors. See also: Every Deep-Drawn Breath Wes' article on ‘long-COVID'  

On this episode of Searching for Medicine's Soul, Aaron is joined by EPPC President Ryan T. Anderson and Fellow Alexandra DeSanctis. Ryan and Alexandra's expert testimony from years of work in the pro-life movement and co-authorship of Tearing Us Apart: Why Abortion Harms Everything and Solves Nothing sheds light on the philosophical and medical grounds for the pro-life cause, common pro-abortion objections including the famous fetal violinist argument, and how the handling of the abortion issue has hurt public life in America in the last fifty years. See also: Tearing Us Apart: Why Abortion Harms Everything and Solves Nothing

On this episode of Searching for Medicine's Soul, Aaron Rothstein is joined by Danielle Ofri, Clinical Professor of Medicine at the New York University School of Medicine and founder of the Bellevue Literary Review. The two discuss Ofri's work chronicling the challenges to the relationship between doctor and patient: administrative creep in the medical field, nonprofit hospital (mis)behavior, and the application of the adversarial patient compensation system to unintended medical errors. See also: Danielle's website When We Do Harm, Danielle's latest book The Bellevue Literary Review  

Charles Piller joins Aaron to discuss his latest investigative reporting for Science on potentially fraudulent Alzheimer's research. 

Dr. Margaret Chisolm joins Aaron to discuss her book, From Survive to Thrive, as well as human flourishing, the field of psychiatry, and the importance of visual arts in medicine.

Dr. Tom Catena joins Aaron to discuss his experience as a physician in the Nuba Mountains in the Sudan. Dr. Catena attended Brown University where he earned a degree in Mechanical Engineering, but felt called to missionary work. He attended the Duke University School of Medicine on a U.S. Navy scholarship. After graduating, he completed his Navy commitment and later began missionary work in Africa. He volunteered at St. Mary's Hospital in Nairobi for six years before helping establish the Mother of Mercy Hospital, where he currently works day and night to help heal the sick and the wounded victims of jihadist war. Dr. Catena typically treats up to 400 patients in a day and is on call 24/7. Learn more about Dr. Catena and the Sudan Relief Fund on their website. Please visit the Ethics and Public Policy's Bioethics and American Democracy program page for more information.

Samuel Shem joins Aaron to continue their conversation about The House of God, and its recent sequel, Man's 4th Best Hospital. Samuel Shem, Professor of Medicine in Medical Humanities at NYU Medical School, is a novelist, playwright, and activist. His first novel, The House of God, was called “one of the two most important American medical novels of the 20th century” by The Lancet and was chosen by Publishers Weekly as #2 on its list of “The 10 Best Satires of All Time” (#1 Don Quixote, #3 Catch-22). Graduating from Harvard and Harvard Medical School, Shem was a Rhodes Scholar with a DPhil in Physiology at Oxford and on the Harvard Medical faculty for decades. Honored as a Visiting Artist/Scholar at The American Academy in Rome, he is an in-demand speaker around the world and has given over sixty commencement speeches on “How to Stay Human in Medicine.” Learn more about Sam and his work at his website. Please visit the Ethics and Public Policy's Bioethics and American Democracy program page for more information.

Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor joins Aaron to discuss her book, The Grieving Brain: The Surprising Science of How We Learn from Love and Loss. Mary-Frances O'Connor is an associate professor of psychology at the University of Arizona, where she directs the Grief, Loss, and Social Stress (GLASS) Lab in investigating the effects of grief on the brain and the body. O'Connor earned a doctorate from the University of Arizona in 2004 and completed a fellowship at UCLA. Following a faculty appointment at UCLA Cousins Center for Psychoneuroimmunology, she returned to the University of Arizona in 2012. Her work has been published in the American Journal of Psychiatry, Biological Psychiatry, and Psychological Science, and featured in Newsweek, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. Learn more about her book, A Grieving Brain. Please visit the Ethics and Public Policy's Bioethics and American Democracy program page for more information.

Dr. Jon Fielder joins Aaron to discuss his medical mission work in Africa. Dr. Fielder has served as a medical missionary to Africa for almost 20 years. Graduating with a Bachelor of Arts (BA) in Chemistry from Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, in 1999, he earned his Doctor of Medical degree (MD) from The John Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, MD, in 2002. Dr. Fielder was a physician at AIC Kijabe Hospital in Kenya from 2002 to 2006, overseeing a US government-funded HIV program for nearly 2,000 patients. He served as a consultant physician at the Partners in Hope Medical Center in Lilongwe, Malawi, from 2009 to 2014. His handbook, Tuberculosis in the Era of HIV, has been used widely in several African countries. In 2010, Dr. Fielder co-founded African Mission Healthcare (AMH) with the investor, entrepreneur, and philanthropist Mark Gerson, a college friend, to support the work of mission hospitals across Africa. Dr. Fielder serves as chief executive of AMH, which since its inception has provided financial support totaling more than $26 million and expertise to more than 40 hospital partners in 18 African countries. Learn more about Dr. Fielder and African Mission Healthcare. Please visit the Ethics and Public Policy's Bioethics and American Democracy program page for more information.

Samuel Shem joins Aaron to discuss his book, The House of God, and its recent sequel, Man's 4th Best Hospital. Samuel Shem, Professor of Medicine in Medical Humanities at NYU Medical School, is a novelist, playwright, and activist. His first novel, The House of God, was called “one of the two most important American medical novels of the 20th century” by The Lancet and was chosen by Publishers Weekly as #2 on its list of “The 10 Best Satires of All Time” (#1 Don Quixote, #3 Catch-22). Graduating from Harvard and Harvard Medical School, Shem was a Rhodes Scholar with a DPhil in Physiology at Oxford and on the Harvard Medical faculty for decades. Honored as a Visiting Artist/Scholar at The American Academy in Rome, he is an in-demand speaker around the world and has given over sixty commencement speeches on “How to Stay Human in Medicine.” Learn more about Sam and his work at his website. Please visit the Ethics and Public Policy's Bioethics and American Democracy program page for more information.

Dr. Christine Hancock joins Aaron to discuss how she became interested in medicine and her experience serving an underserved population during the Covid-19 pandemic. Dr. Hancock is a medical director and family physician at Sea Mar Community Health Centers in Bellingham, Washington, and the clinical director for Sea Mar's opioid initiatives. She is an alumna of the UC Berkley UC San Francisco joint medical program and she completed her residency in Family Medicine at the Santa Rosa Family Medicine Residency. Dr. Hancock's research and teaching focus on rural and community health with an emphasis on chronic pain and opioid use disorders. The Pandemic Didn't Unfold How Dr. Christine Hancock Expected Please visit the Ethics and Public Policy's Bioethics and American Democracy program page for more information.

Dr. Ariane Lewis joins Aaron to discuss the concept of death by neurologic criteria. Dr. Lewis is a professor in the departments of neurology and neurosurgery and the director of NYU Langone's Division of Neurocritical Care. As an expert on end of life social ethical and legal controversies related to death by neurologic criteria, she served on the steering committee for the World Brain Death Project, is an observer on the Determination of Death Act Drafting Committee, and is the international advisor to the Canadian Critical Care Society Definition and Determination of Death Committee. She is also chair of the NYU Langone Medical Center Ethics Committee, the past chair of the Neurocritical Care Society Ethics Committee, and a member of the American Academy Neurology, Ethics, Law, and Humanities Committee. Dr. Lewis has over a hundred publications and is a deputy editor of the Disputes and Debates section of the Neurology Publication and Seminars in Neurology. She's also a fellow in the Neurocritical Care Society. Please visit the Ethics and Public Policy's Bioethics and American Democracy program page for more information.

Dr. Lydia Dugdale joins Aaron to discuss her book—The Lost Art of Dying—and the place of death and dying in our culture. Dr. Lydia Dugdale, MD is a New York City internal medicine primary care doctor and medical ethicist. She is Associate Professor of Medicine and Director of the Center for Clinical Medical Ethics at Columbia University. Prior to her 2019 move to Columbia, she was the Associate Director of the Program for Biomedical Ethics and founding Co-Director of the Program for Medicine, Spirituality, and Religion at Yale School of Medicine. In addition to her book, she edited Dying in the Twenty-First Century, a volume that articulates a bioethical framework for a contemporary art of dying. The Lost Art of Dying: Reviving Forgotten Wisdom Please visit the Ethics and Public Policy's Bioethics and American Democracy program page for more information.

Ari Schulman, editor of The New Atlantis, joins Aaron to discuss our mishandling of the pandemic, the faults of the CDC, and our misconceptions about science and scientific authority. Ari Schulman is editor of The New Atlantis, as well as editor of TheNewAtlantis.com and of the New Atlantis Books series. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, The Hedgehog Review, Commentary, First Things, and Slate. He has previously been a research assistant in the Opinion department at The New York Times, an ontological engineer at Cycorp, and has degrees in computer science and English from the University of Texas at Austin. Please visit the Ethics and Public Policy's Bioethics and American Democracy program page for more information.

Dr. Paul McHugh joins Aaron to discuss the purpose of psychiatry and psychiatric overreach in medicine. Dr. Paul R. McHugh is University Distinguished Service Professor in the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, where he served as Director of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and Psychiatrist-in-Chief at Johns Hopkins Hospital from 1975 to 2001. In a distinguished career that began with his training at Harvard Medical School, Brigham and Women's Hospital, and Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, Dr. McHugh has taught at Cornell, the University of Oregon, and since 1975 at Johns Hopkins. He was the co-creator of the Mini Mental States Examination, one of the most widely used tests of cognitive function, and he sponsored the work that resulted in The 36-Hour Day, a bestselling guide for families and caregivers of patients with Alzheimer's and other dementia conditions. In the 1980s and 1990s, Dr. McHugh and Dr. Phillip R. Slavney published The Perspectives of Psychiatry and Psychiatric Polarities, which may be said to have embodied the tenets of the influential “Hopkins School” of the discipline. For the wider public, Dr. McHugh has published on psychiatry — both its findings and its failings — in The American Scholar, First Things, Commentary, Public Discourse, the Weekly Standard, and The New Atlantis. His books for general readers are The Mind Has Mountains (2006), a collection of his essays, and Try to Remember (2008), which concerns his role in debunking the “recovered memory” fad in psychotherapy. In 2015, the Paul McHugh Program for Human Flourishing was established in the Johns Hopkins Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences. Please visit the Ethics and Public Policy's Bioethics and American Democracy program page for more information.

Ross Douthat joins Aaron to discuss his new book: The Deep Places. They address the difficulties of living with chronic illness and the weaknesses of modern medicine and the medical establishment. Ross Douthat joined The New York Times as an Opinion columnist in April 2009. Previously, he was a senior editor at The Atlantic and a blogger on its website. He is the author of The Deep Places: A Memoir of Illness and Discovery, which was published in October 2021. His other books include To Change the Church: Pope Francis and the Future of Catholicism, published in 2018; Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics (2012); Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class (2005); The Decadent Society (2020); and, with Reihan Salam, Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream (2008). He is the film critic for National Review. Ross lives with his wife and four children in New Haven. The Deep Places: A Memoir of Illness and Discovery Please visit the Ethics and Public Policy's Bioethics and American Democracy program page for more information.

Dr. Kristin Collier joins Aaron to discuss primary care, spirituality, and burnout in the medical profession. Dr. Collier is Assistant Professor of Internal Medicine, Director of the Health, Spirituality, and Religion program, and the Associate Director of the Internal Medicine Residency Training program at the University of Michigan Medical School. She completed her internal medicine residency and chief medical resident year at the University of Michigan Health System. Her special clinical interests include preventative medicine, primary care, depression and heart disease. Her work was published in JAMA, the American Journal of Internal Medicine, and the American Journal of Hospice and Palliative Medicine, among others. She enjoys cooking, sports and spending time with her husband and sons. Please visit the Ethics and Public Policy's Bioethics and American Democracy program page for more information.

Yuval Levin joins Aaron to discuss scientific urgency and morality, political polarization, and mistrust in the institutions of science and medicine. Yuval Levin is the director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where he also holds the Beth and Ravenel Curry Chair in Public Policy. The founder and editor of National Affairs, he is also a senior editor at The New Atlantis, a contributing editor at National Review, and a contributing opinion writer at The New York Times. Please visit the Ethics and Public Policy's Bioethics and American Democracy program page for more information.

Professor Charles Camosy joins Aaron to discuss his new book: Losing Our Dignity. They address religion and medicine, secularized medicine, moral theology, medical ethics and the conundrum of limited resources in healthcare. Professor Charles Camosy is associate professor of theological and social ethics at Fordham University. His work on bioethics and policy moves beyond stale and lazy arguments which artificially pit liberals and conservatives against each other. Instead, Camosy finds common ground by unpacking the real complexities of some of today's most passionately debated issues. You can learn more about Professor Camosy and purchase Losing Our Dignity at his website. Please visit the Ethics and Public Policy's Bioethics and American Democracy program page for more information.

Dr. Farr Curlin and Professor Christopher Tollefsen join Aaron to discuss their new book: The Way of Medicine: Ethics and the Healing Profession. They address the purpose of medicine, physician burnout, patient and physician autonomy, conscientious objection, and the future of the profession. The Way of Medicine: Ethics and the Healing Profession Please visit the Ethics and Public Policy's Bioethics and American Democracy program page for more information

On this inaugural episode of Searching for Medicine's Soul, Dr. Aaron Rothstein is joined by Dr. Aaron Kheriaty to discuss his journey as a physician, his work as a bioethicist, and his ongoing lawsuit over the University of California's vaccine mandate. Dr. Kheriaty is a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, where he directs EPPC's program in Bioethics and American Democracy. He is Professor of Psychiatry at UCI School of Medicine and Director of the Medical Ethics Program at UCI Health. He serves as chairman of the medical ethics committees at UCI Hospital and at the CA Department of State Hospitals. Human Flourishing, Dr. Kheriaty's Substack newsletter aaronkheriaty.com Please visit the Ethics and Public Policy's Bioethics and American Democracy program page for more information

Hosted by Dr. Aaron Rothstein and featuring expert guests, Searching for Medicine's Soul explores medicine's purpose: Why do physicians do what they do? How does the practice of medicine relate to scientific progress and human flourishing? The result is an in-depth analysis of the history and aim of medicine, and its collision with a thrilling and sometimes tragic age of discovery. Please visit the Ethics and Public Policy's Bioethics and American Democracy program page for more information