Podcasts about Massachusetts General Hospital

Today, we have a special episode recorded in Southern California just after Veterans Day.We gathered the day before the unforgettable 4th Annual Torchbearer Ball, hosted by VETS (Veterans Exploring Treatment Solutions), which raised $960,000 for veterans and families with its continued mission to end veteran suicide and support psychedelic-assisted therapy.My four guests discuss this critical time, and we dial in on the progress and the specific need to expand this care and research. You'll hear from Marcus Capone, Retired Navy SEAL and co-founder of VETS; Amber Capone, co-founder of VETS, Home Base PAT clinician, and actor Eliza Dushku Palandjian; and COO of Home Base, Michael Allard.We also talk about the impact of PAT for veteran health, from suicide prevention to brain health, in the new documentary, In Waves and War, just released on Netflix, brought to the screen by award-winning directors Jon Schenk and Bonni Cohen. The Washington Post just released its Top 10 movies of 2025, listing this film at #7.  So, if you are tuning into this podcast, you will want to see this movie!Home Base is also excited and honored to become the newest member of the VALOR Coalition (Veterans Alliance for Leadership, Outreach, and Recovery), alongside VETS, the Navy SEAL Foundation, the Green Beret Foundation, and the Wounded Warrior Project. Home Base Nation is the official podcast for the Home Base Program for Veterans and Military Families. Our team sees veterans, service members, and their families addressing the invisible wounds of war at no cost. This is all made possible thanks to a grateful nation. To learn more about how to help, visit us at www.homebase.org. If you or anyone you know would like to connect to care, you can also reach us at 617-724-5202.Follow Home Base on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedInThe Home Base Nation Team is Steve Monaco, Army Veteran Kelly Field, Justin Scheinert, Chuck Clough, with COO Michael Allard, Brigadier General Jack Hammond, and Peter Smyth.Producer and Host: Dr. Ron HirschbergAssistant Producer, Editor: Chuck CloughChairman, Home Base Media Lab: Peter SmythThe views expressed by guests on the Home Base Nation podcast are their own, and their appearance on the program does not imply an endorsement of them or any entity they represent. Views and opinions expressed by guests are those of the guests and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Massachusetts General Hospital, Home Base, the Red Sox Foundation, or any of its officials.

Welcome to today's episode of Wisdom Talk Radio! This is where we explore the depths of conscious living and how to live an expanded life. Join us to be inspired, encouraged, transformed and to tap into a deeper sense of joy and possibility.   I'm always drawn to collaborative efforts that bring together people with different perspectives who want to effect change. Health care is one arena where this doesn't often happen. But it needs to. And it can. My guest today has been a pivotal force in addressing this need. Stay tuned.I'm Laurie Seymour, host of Wisdom Talk Radio and CEO and founder of The Baca Institute, home of the Quantum Connection Process. You can go there to discover your unique connection with the essence of who you are by taking the Quantum Connection quiz. Why quantum connection? We are each designed to directly connect with Source differently. Knowing your own style opens a deeper connection with the Universe. It's the secret to creating what you truly want in your life. Because who you are is exactly who is needed.Kathryn Hayward, MD, is the Medical Director of Living Whole immersion retreats and Living Whole Online, a global community she co-founded. She started her 20-year career in primary care internal medicine at the Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, gradually transitioning to the practice of integrative, whole health. She also founded the private practice Odyssey Journey and published Odyssey Family Systems Companion Guide, bringing together conventional medicine; movement of the body; whole, plant-based food; and mind/body/spirit disciplines.Find Kathryn Hayward at: https://livingwholeonline.com/ Facebook. https://www.facebook.com/Livingwholeonline Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/livingwholeonline/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@livingwholeonlineFind Laurie Seymour at https://thebacainstitute.com/ .Follow Wisdom Talk Radio on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/wisdomtalkradio Subscribe on Apple.Want to reach out to me? You can email me directly at laurie@thebacainstitute.com If you are enjoying our show and you'd like to spread the love, please subscribe, download, comment, and tell your friends and family about us. We want to thank you for your continued support. We really appreciate it! Find more episodes of Wisdom Talk Radio HERE Discover your Quantum Connection Style! (QUIZ)The first step to mastering your Quantum Connection is to know your natural style of being in the world.We are each designed to connect with Source differently. Knowing your style, with both your superpowers and your learning edge, is the first step of aligning with your inner guidance at a deeper level than you ever thought you could. It's the doorway to creating what you truly want in your life.Click here to take the quiz now: Quantum Connection QuizFind Laurie's new book, Unconditional Remembrance: Your Connection to Source HEREGet Laurie's New Book, Unconditional Remembrance: Your Connection to Source: https://mybook.to/UnconditionalRememSupport this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/wisdom-talk-radio/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

In this episode, Bernard R. Jones, Vice President, MGB Behavioral & Mental Health, Mass General Brigham; Vice President, MGB Department of Psychiatry, Massachusetts General Hospital, Brigham & Women's Hospital, McLean Hospital, Brigham & Women's Faulkner Hospital, discusses his dual leadership roles across Mass General Brigham and the system's work to integrate psychiatric services, expand innovative treatments, and improve both patient and provider experience.

In this episode, Bernard R. Jones, Vice President, MGB Behavioral & Mental Health, Mass General Brigham; Vice President, MGB Department of Psychiatry, Massachusetts General Hospital, Brigham & Women's Hospital, McLean Hospital, Brigham & Women's Faulkner Hospital, discusses his dual leadership roles across Mass General Brigham and the system's work to integrate psychiatric services, expand innovative treatments, and improve both patient and provider experience.

Dr Jeremy S Abramson from Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston and Dr Loretta J Nastoupil from CommonSpirit Mercy Hospital in Durango, Colorado, discuss the clinical applications of chimeric antigen receptor T-cell therapy for patients with non-Hodgkin lymphoma. CME information and select publications here.

In cancer research, the “seed and soil” hypothesis posits that the tumor is like a seed of misbehaving cells taking root in the body. Whether it grows—and where it grows—depends on the conditions, or soil. Since this hypothesis was proposed more than 100 years ago, most research and treatments have focused on the seed, or tumor. For nearly 50 years, Rakesh Jain has been studying the soil. But in a seed-focused field, his work was seen as wasteful and radical. Now, that very same research has led to seven FDA-approved treatments for diseases including lung and liver cancer, and earned him a National Medal of Science in 2016. Host Flora Lichtman talks with Jain about how his fringe idea led to lifesaving cancer treatments. Guest: Dr. Rakesh K. Jain studies the biology of tumors at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital as a professor of radiation oncology.Transcripts for each episode are available within 1-3 days at sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

We talk with Peter Grinspoon, MD—an internationally renowned expert on medical cannabis, drug policy, and addiction—about the U.S. Congress recriminalizing most hemp-derived products. The measure is set to take effect one year from enactment — around November 12, 2026. Dr. Grinspoon is a primary care physician and cannabis specialist at Massachusetts General Hospital and an Instructor in Medicine at Harvard Medical School. A certified Health and Wellness Coach, he has provided medical cannabis care for patients for two decades. He is a board member of the advocacy group Doctors for Drug Policy Reform and an advisor to the Parabola Group, which advocates for social justice in the cannabis space. He spent two years as an associate director of the Massachusetts Physician Health Service, treating and monitoring hundreds of physicians with addiction. Dr. Grinspoon is the author of "Free Refills: A Doctor Confronts His Addiction," “Seeing Through the Smoke: A Cannabis Specialist Untangles the Truth About Marijuana,” and he has a new book coming out in May 2026—"Aging Well with Cannabis: Feel Better, Sleep Better, and Live Better with Marijuana and CBD." ◘ Related Links: Dr. Grinspoon's website, www.petergrinspoon.com ◘ Transcript: bit.ly/3JoA2mz ◘ This podcast features the song “Follow Your Dreams” (freemusicarchive.org/music/Scott_Ho…ur_Dreams_1918) by Scott Holmes, available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial (01https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) license. ◘ Disclaimer: The content and information shared in GW Integrative Medicine is for educational purposes only and should not be taken as medical advice. The views and opinions expressed in GW Integrative Medicine represent the opinions of the host(s) and their guest(s). For medical advice, diagnosis, and/or treatment, please consult a medical professional.

In this episode of the SHEA Podcast, host Dr. Jonathan Ryder moderates a lively pro/con debate on one of the most discussed biomarkers in infectious diseases: procalcitonin. Joining the conversation are two experts with distinct perspectives: Dr. Michael Mansour, Clinician Investigator and Associate Professor of Infectious Diseases at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, and Dr. Sheetal Kandiah, Senior Physician and Assistant Clinical Professor of Medicine in the Division of Infectious Diseases at Emory University; Director of the Antibiotic Stewardship Program at Grady Hospital. Together, they explore where PCT may (or may not) add value in antimicrobial stewardship programs. Tune in for an insightful exchange that will help stewards, clinicians, and ID professionals better understand where PCT fits into today's rapidly evolving diagnostic landscape.

 If you're a scientist, and you apply for federal research funding, you'll ask for a specific dollar amount. Let's say you're asking for a million-dollar grant. Your grant covers the direct costs, things like the salaries of the researchers that you're paying. If you get that grant, your university might get an extra $500,000. That money is called “indirect costs,” but think of it as overhead: that money goes to lab space, to shared equipment, and so on.This is the system we've used to fund American research infrastructure for more than 60 years. But earlier this year, the Trump administration proposed capping these payments at just 15% of direct costs, way lower than current indirect cost rates. There are legal questions about whether the admin can do that. But if it does, it would force universities to fundamentally rethink how they do science.The indirect costs system is pretty opaque from the outside. Is the admin right to try and slash these indirect costs? Where does all that money go? And if we want to change how we fund research overhead, what are the alternatives? How do you design a research system to incentivize the research you actually wanna see in the world?I'm joined today by Pierre Azoulay from MIT Sloan and Dan Gross from Duke's Fuqua School of Business. Together with Bhaven Sampat at Johns Hopkins, they conducted the first comprehensive empirical study of how indirect costs actually work. Earlier this year, I worked with them to write up that study as a more accessible policy brief for IFP. They've assembled data on over 350 research institutions, and they found some striking results. While negotiated rates often exceed 50-60%, universities actually receive much less, due to built-in caps and exclusions.Moreover, the institutions that would be hit hardest by proposed cuts are those whose research most often leads to new drugs and commercial breakthroughs.Thanks to Katerina Barton, Harry Fletcher-Wood, and Inder Lohla for their help with this episode, and to Beez for her help on the charts.Let's say I'm a researcher at a university and I apply for a federal grant. I'm looking at cancer cells in mice. It will cost me $1 million to do that research — to pay grad students, to buy mice and test tubes. I apply for a grant from the National Institutes of Health, or NIH. Where do indirect costs come in?Dan Gross: Research generally incurs two categories of costs, much as business operations do.* Direct or variable costs are typically project-specific; they include salaries and consumable supplies.* Indirect or fixed costs are not as easily assigned to any particular project. [They include] things like lab space, data and computing resources, biosecurity, keeping the lights on and the buildings cooled and heated — even complying with the regulatory requirements the federal government imposes on researchers. They are the overhead costs of doing research.Pierre Azoulay: You will use those grad students, mice, and test tubes, the direct costs. But you're also using the lab space. You may be using a shared facility where the mice are kept and fed. Pieces of large equipment are shared by many other people to conduct experiments. So those are fixed costs from the standpoint of your research project.Dan: Indirect Cost Recovery (ICR) is how the federal government has been paying for the fixed cost of research for the past 60 years. This has been done by paying universities institution-specific fixed percentages on top of the direct cost of the research. That's the indirect cost rate. That rate is negotiated by institutions, typically every two to four years, supported by several hundred pages of documentation around its incurred costs over the recent funding cycle.The idea is to compensate federally funded researchers for the investments, infrastructure, and overhead expenses related to the research they perform for the government. Without that funding, universities would have to pay those costs out of pocket and, frankly, many would not be interested or able to do the science the government is funding them to do.Imagine I'm doing my mouse cancer science at MIT, Pierre's parent institution. Some time in the last four years, MIT had this negotiation with the National Institutes of Health to figure out what the MIT reimbursable rate is. But as a researcher, I don't have to worry about what indirect costs are reimbursable. I'm all mouse research, all day.Dan: These rates are as much of a mystery to the researchers as it is to the public. When I was junior faculty, I applied for an external grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) — you can look up awards folks have won in the award search portal. It doesn't break down indirect and direct cost shares of each grant. You see the total and say, “Wow, this person got $300,000.” Then you go to write your own grant and realize you can only budget about 60% of what you thought, because the rest goes to overhead. It comes as a bit of a shock the first time you apply for grant funding.What goes into the overhead rates? Most researchers and institutions don't have clear visibility into that. The process is so complicated that it's hard even for those who are experts to keep track of all the pieces.Pierre: As an individual researcher applying for a project, you think about the direct costs of your research projects. You're not thinking about the indirect rate. When the research administration of your institution sends the application, it's going to apply the right rates.So I've got this $1 million experiment I want to run on mouse cancer. If I get the grant, the total is $1.5 million. The university takes that .5 million for the indirect costs: the building, the massive microscope we bought last year, and a tiny bit for the janitor. Then I get my $1 million. Is that right?Dan: Duke University has a 61% indirect cost rate. If I propose a grant to the NSF for $100,000 of direct costs — it might be for data, OpenAI API credits, research staff salaries — I would need to budget an extra $61,000 on top for ICR, bringing the total grant to $161,000.My impression is that most federal support for research happens through project-specific grants. It's not these massive institutional block grants. Is that right?Pierre: By and large, there aren't infrastructure grants in the science funding system. There are other things, such as center grants that fund groups of investigators. Sometimes those can get pretty large — the NIH grant for a major cancer center like Dana-Farber could be tens of millions of dollars per year.Dan: In the past, US science funding agencies did provide more funding for infrastructure and the instrumentation that you need to perform research through block grants. In the 1960s, the NSF and the Department of Defense were kicking up major programs to establish new data collection efforts — observatories, radio astronomy, or the Deep Sea Drilling project the NSF ran, collecting core samples from the ocean floor around the world. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) — back then the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) — was investing in nuclear test detection to monitor adherence to nuclear test ban treaties. Some of these were satellite observation methods for atmospheric testing. Some were seismic measurement methods for underground testing. ARPA supported the installation of a network of seismic monitors around the world. Those monitors are responsible for validating tectonic plate theory. Over the next decade, their readings mapped the tectonic plates of the earth. That large-scale investment in research infrastructure is not as common in the US research policy enterprise today.That's fascinating. I learned last year how modern that validation of tectonic plate theory was. Until well into my grandparents' lifetime, we didn't know if tectonic plates existed.Dan: Santi, when were you born?1997.Dan: So I'm a good decade older than you — I was born in 1985. When we were learning tectonic plate theory in the 1990s, it seemed like something everybody had always known. It turns out that it had only been known for maybe 25 years.So there's this idea of federal funding for science as these massive pieces of infrastructure, like the Hubble Telescope. But although projects like that do happen, the median dollar the Feds spend on science today is for an individual grant, not installing seismic monitors all over the globe.Dan: You applied for a grant to fund a specific project, whose contours you've outlined in advance, and we provided the funding to execute that project.Pierre: You want to do some observations at the observatory in Chile, and you are going to need to buy a plane ticket — not first class, not business class, very much economy.Let's move to current events. In February of this year, the NIH announced it was capping indirect cost reimbursement at 15% on all grants.What's the administration's argument here?Pierre: The argument is there are cases where foundations only charge 15% overhead rate on grants — and universities acquiesce to such low rates — and the federal government is entitled to some sort of “most-favored nation” clause where no one pays less in overhead than they pay. That's the argument in this half-a-page notice. It's not much more elaborate than that.The idea is, the Gates Foundation says, “We will give you a grant to do health research and we're only going to pay 15% indirect costs.” Some universities say, “Thank you. We'll do that.” So clearly the universities don't need the extra indirect cost reimbursement?Pierre: I think so.Dan: Whether you can extrapolate from that to federal research funding is a different question, let alone if federal research was funding less research and including even less overhead. Would foundations make up some of the difference, or even continue funding as much research, if the resources provided by the federal government were lower? Those are open questions. Foundations complement federal funding, as opposed to substitute for it, and may be less interested in funding research if it's less productive.What are some reasons that argument might be misguided?Pierre: First, universities don't always say, “Yes” [to a researcher wishing to accept a grant]. At MIT, getting a grant means getting special authorization from the provost. That special authorization is not always forthcoming. The provost has a special fund, presumably funded out of the endowment, that under certain conditions they will dip into to make up for the missing overhead.So you've got some research that, for whatever reason, the federal government won't fund, and the Gates Foundation is only willing to fund it at this low rate, and the university has budgeted a little bit extra for those grants that it still wants.Pierre: That's my understanding. I know that if you're going to get a grant, you're going to have to sit in many meetings and cajole any number of administrators, and you don't always get your way.Second, it's not an apples-to-apples comparison [between federal and foundation grants] because there are ways to budget an item as a direct cost in a foundation grant that the government would consider an indirect cost. So you might budget some fractional access to a facility…Like the mouse microscope I have to use?Pierre: Yes, or some sort of Cryo-EM machine. You end up getting more overhead through the back door.The more fundamental way in which that approach is misguided is that the government wants its infrastructure — that it has contributed to through [past] indirect costs — to be leveraged by other funders. It's already there, it's been paid for, it's sitting idle, and we can get more bang for our buck if we get those additional funders to piggyback on that investment.Dan: That [other funders] might not be interested in funding otherwise.Why wouldn't they be interested in funding it otherwise? What shouldn't the federal government say, “We're going to pay less. If it's important research, somebody else will pay for it.”Dan: We're talking about an economies-of-scale problem. These are fixed costs. The more they're utilized, the more the costs get spread over individual research projects.For the past several decades, the federal government has funded an order of magnitude more university research than private firms or foundations. If you look at NSF survey data, 55% of university R&D is federally funded; 6% is funded by foundations. That is an order of magnitude difference. The federal government has the scale to support and extract value for whatever its goals are for American science.We haven't even started to get into the administrative costs of research. That is part of the public and political discomfort with indirect-cost recovery. The idea that this is money that's going to fund university bloat.I should lay my cards on the table here for readers. There are a ton of problems with the American scientific enterprise as it currently exists. But when you look at studies from a wide range of folks, it's obvious that R&D in American universities is hugely valuable. Federal R&D dollars more than pay for themselves. I want to leave room for all critiques of the scientific ecosystem, of the universities, of individual research ideas. But at this 30,000-foot level, federal R&D dollars are well spent.Dan: The evidence may suggest that, but that's not where the political and public dialogue around science policy is. Again, I'm going to bring in a long arc here. In the 1950s and 1960s, it was, “We're in a race with the Soviet Union. If we want to win this race, we're going to have to take some risky bets.” And the US did. It was more flexible with its investments in university and industrial science, especially related to defense aims. But over time, with the waning of these political pressures and with new budgetary pressures, the tenor shifted from, “Let's take chances” to “Let's make science and other parts of government more accountable.” The undercurrent of Indirect Cost Recovery policy debates has more of this accountability framing.This comes up in this comparison to foundation rates: “Is the government overpaying?” Clearly universities are willing to accept less from foundations. It comes up in this perception that ICR is funding administrative growth that may not be productive or socially efficient. Accountability seems to be a priority in the current day.Where are we right now [August 2025] on that 15% cap on indirect costs?Dan: Recent changes first kicked off on February 7th, when NIH posted its supplemental guidance, that introduced a policy that the direct cost rates that it paid on its grants would be 15% to institutions of higher education. That policy was then adopted by the NSF, the DOD, and the Department of Energy. All of these have gotten held up in court by litigation from universities. Things are stuck in legal limbo. Congress has presented its point of view that, “At least for now, I'd like to keep things as they are.” But this has been an object of controversy long before the current administration even took office in January. I don't think it's going away.Pierre: If I had to guess, the proposal as it first took shape is not what is going to end up being adopted. But the idea that overhead rates are an object of controversy — are too high, and need to be reformed — is going to stay relevant.Dan: Partly that's because it's a complicated issue. Partly there's not a real benchmark of what an appropriate Indirect Cost Recovery policy should be. Any way you try to fund the cost of research, you're going to run into trade-offs. Those are complicated.ICR does draw criticism. People think it's bloated or lacks transparency. We would agree some of these critiques are well-founded. Yet it's also important to remember that ICR pays for facilities and administration. It doesn't just fund administrative costs, which is what people usually associate it with. The share of ICR that goes to administrative costs is legally capped at 26% of direct costs. That cap has been in place since 1991. Many universities have been at that cap for many years — you can see this in public records. So the idea that indirect costs are going up over time, and that that's because of bloat at US universities, has to be incorrect, because the administrative rate has been capped for three decades.Many of those costs are incurred in service of complying with regulations that govern research, including the cost of administering ICR to begin with. Compiling great proposals every two to four years and a new round of negotiations — all of that takes resources. Those are among the things that indirect cost funding reimburses.Even then, universities appear to under-recover their true indirect costs of federally-sponsored research. We have examples from specific universities which have reported detailed numbers. That under-recovery means less incentive to invest in infrastructure, less capacity for innovation, fewer clinical trials. So there's a case to be made that indirect cost funding is too low.Pierre: The bottom line is we don't know if there is under- or over-recovery of indirect costs. There's an incentive for university administrators to claim there's under-recovery. So I take that with a huge grain of salt.Dan: It's ambiguous what a best policy would look like, but this is all to say that, first, public understanding of this complex issue is sometimes a bit murky. Second, a path forward has to embrace the trade-offs that any particular approach to ICR presents.From reading your paper, I got a much better sense that a ton of the administrative bloat of the modern university is responding to federal regulations on research. The average researcher reports spending almost half of their time on paperwork. Some of that is a consequence of the research or grant process; some is regulatory compliance.The other thing, which I want to hear more on, is that research tools seem to be becoming more expensive and complex. So the microscope I'm using today is an order of magnitude more expensive than the microscope I was using in 1950. And you've got to recoup those costs somehow.Pierre: Everything costs more than it used to. Research is subject to Baumol's cost disease. There are areas where there's been productivity gains — software has had an impact.The stakes are high because, if we get this wrong, we're telling researchers that they should bias the type of research they're going to pursue and training that they're going to undergo, with an eye to what is cheaper. If we reduce the overhead rate, we should expect research that has less fixed cost and more variable costs to gain in favor — and research that is more scale-intensive to lose favor. There's no reason for a benevolent social planner to find that a good development. The government should be neutral with respect to the cost structure of research activities. We don't know in advance what's going to be more productive.Wouldn't a critic respond, “We're going to fund a little bit of indirect costs, but we're not going to subsidize stuff that takes huge amounts of overhead. If universities want to build that fancy new telescope because it's valuable, they'll do it.” Why is that wrong when it comes to science funding?Pierre: There's a grain of truth to it.Dan: With what resources though? Who's incentivized to invest in this infrastructure? There's not a paid market for science. Universities can generate some licensing fees from patents that result from science. But those are meager revenue streams, realistically. There are reasons to believe that commercial firms are under-incentivized to invest in basic scientific research. Prior to 1940, the scientific enterprise was dramatically smaller because there wasn't funding the way that there is today. The exigencies of war drew the federal government into funding research in order to win. Then it was productive enough that folks decided we should keep doing it. History and economic logic tells us that you're not going to see as much science — especially in these fixed-cost heavy endeavors — when those resources aren't provided by the public.Pierre: My one possible answer to the question is, “The endowment is going to pay for it.” MIT has an endowment, but many other universities do not. What does that mean for them? The administration also wants to tax the heck out of the endowment.This is a good opportunity to look at the empirical work you guys did in this great paper. As far as I can tell, this was one of the first real looks at what indirect costs rates look like in real life. What did you guys find?Dan: Two decades ago, Pierre and Bhaven began collecting information on universities' historical indirect cost rates. This is a resource that was quietly sitting on the shelf waiting for its day. That day came this past February. Bhaven and Pierre collected information on negotiated ICR rates for the past 60 years. During this project, we also collected the most recent versions of those agreements from university websites to bring the numbers up to the current day.We pulled together data for around 350 universities and other research institutions. Together, they account for around 85% of all NIH research funding over the last 20 years.We looked at their:* Negotiated indirect cost rates, from institutional indirect cost agreements with the government, and their;* Effective rates [how much they actually get when you look at grant payments], using NIH grant funding data.Negotiated cost rates have gone up. That has led to concerns that the overhead cost of research is going up — these claims that it's funding administrative bloat. But our most important finding is that there's a large gap between the sticker rates — the negotiated ICR rates that are visible to the public, and get floated on Twitter as examples of university exorbitance — and the rates that universities are paid in practice, at least on NIH grants; we think it's likely the case for NSF and other agency grants too.An institution's effective ICR funding rates are much, much lower than their negotiated rates and they haven't changed much for 40 years. If you look at NIH's annual budget, the share of grant funding that goes to indirect costs has been roughly constant at 27-28% for a long time. That implies an effective rate of around 40% over direct costs. Even though many institutions have negotiated rates of 50-70%, they usually receive 30-50%.The difference between those negotiated rates and the effective rates seems to be due to limits and exceptions built into NIH grant rules. Those rules exclude some grants, such as training grants, from full indirect cost funding. They also exclude some direct costs from the figure used to calculate ICR rates. The implication is that institutions receive ICR payments based on a smaller portion of their incurred direct costs than typically assumed. As the negotiated direct cost falls, you see a university being paid a higher indirect cost rate off a smaller — modified — direct cost base, to recover the same amount of overhead.Is it that the federal government is saying for more parts of the grant, “We're not going to reimburse that as an indirect cost.”?Dan: This is where we shift a little bit from assessment to speculation. What's excluded from total direct costs? One thing is researcher salaries above a certain level.What is that level? Can you give me a dollar amount?Dan: It's a $225,700 annual salary. There aren't enough people being paid that on these grants for that to explain the difference, especially when you consider that research salaries are being paid to postdocs and grad students.You're looking around the scientists in your institution and thinking, “That's not where the money is”?Dan: It's not, even if you consider Principal Investigators. If you consider postdocs and grad students, it certainly isn't.Dan: My best hunch is that research projects have become more capital-intensive, and only a certain level of expenditure on equipment can be included in the modified total direct cost base. I don't have smoking gun evidence, it's my intuition.In the paper, there's this fascinating chart where you show the institutions that would get hit hardest by a 15% cap tend to be those that do the most valuable medical research. Explain that on this framework. Is it that doing high-quality medical research is capital-intensive?Pierre: We look at all the private-sector patents that build on NIH research. The more a university stands to lose under the administration policy, the more it has contributed over the past 25 years — in research the private sector found relevant in terms of pharmaceutical patents.This is counterintuitive if your whole model of funding for science is, “Let's cut subsidies for the stuff the private sector doesn't care about — all this big equipment.” When you cut those subsidies, what suffers most is the stuff that the private sector likes.Pierre: To me it makes perfect sense. This is the stuff that the private sector would not be willing to invest in on its own. But that research, having come into being, is now a very valuable input into activities that profit-minded investors find interesting and worth taking a risk on.This is the argument for the government to fund basic research?Pierre: That argument has been made at the macro-level forever, but the bibliometric revolution of the past 15 years allows you to look at this at the nano-level. Recently I've been able to look at the history of Ozempic. The main patent cites zero publicly-funded research, but it cites a bunch of patents, including patents taken up by academics. Those cite the foundational research performed by Joel Habener and his team at Massachusetts General Hospital in the early 1980s that elucidated the role of GLP-1 as a potential target. This grant was first awarded to Habener in 1979, was renewed every four or five years, and finally died in 2008, when he moved on to other things. Those chains are complex, but we can now validate the macro picture at this more granular level.Dan: I do want to add one qualification which also suggests some directions for the future. There are things we still can't see — despite Pierre's zeal. Our projections of the consequence of a 15% rate cap are still pretty coarse. We don't know what research might not take place. We don't know what indirect cost categories are exposed, or how universities would reallocate. All those things are going to be difficult to project without a proper experiment.One thing that I would've loved to have more visibility into is, “What is the structure of indirect costs at universities across the country? What share of paid indirect costs are going to administrative expenses? What direct cost categories are being excluded?” We would need a more transparency into the system to know the answers.Does that information have to be proprietary? It's part of negotiations with the federal government about how much the taxpayer will pay for overhead on these grants. Which piece is so special that it can't be shared?Pierre: You are talking to the wrong people here because we're meta-scientists, so our answer is none of it should be private.Dan: But now you have to ask the university lawyers.What would the case from the universities be? “We can't tell the public what we spend subsidy on”?Pierre: My sense is that there are institutions of academia that strike most lay people as completely bizarre.Hard to explain without context?Pierre: People haven't thought about it. They will find it so bizarre that they will typically jump from the odd aspect to, “That must be corruption.” University administrators are hugely attuned to that. So the natural defensive approach is to shroud it in secrecy. This way we don't see how the sausage is made.Dan: Transparency can be a blessing and a curse. More information supports more considered decision-making. It also opens the door to misrepresentation by critics who have their own agendas. Pierre's right: there are some practices that to the public might look unusual — or might be familiar, but one might say, “How is that useful expense?” Even a simple thing like having an administrator who manages a faculty's calendar might seem excessive. Many people manage their own calendars. At the same time, when you think about how someone's time is best used, given their expertise, and heavy investment in specialized human capital, are emails, calendaring, and note-taking the right things for scientists [to be doing]? Scientists spend a large chunk of their time now administering grants. Does it make sense to outsource that and preserve the scientist's time for more science?When you put forward data that shows some share of federal research funding is going to fund administrative costs, at first glance it might look wasteful, yet it might still be productive. But I would be able to make a more considered judgment on a path forward if I had access to more facts, including what indirect costs look like under the hood.One last question: in a world where you guys have the ear of the Senate, political leadership at the NIH, and maybe the universities, what would you be pushing for on indirect costs?Pierre: I've come to think that this indirect cost rate is a second-best institution: terrible and yet superior to many of the alternatives. My favorite alternative would be one where there would be a flat rate applied to direct costs. That would be the average effective rate currently observed — on the order of 40%.You're swapping out this complicated system to — in the end — reimburse universities the same 40%.Pierre: We know there are fixed costs. Those fixed costs need to be paid. We could have an elaborate bureaucratic apparatus to try to get it exactly right, but it's mission impossible. So why don't we give up on that and set a rate that's unlikely to lead to large errors in under- or over-recovery. I'm not particularly attached to 40%. But the 15% that was contemplated seems absurdly low.Dan: In the work we've done, we do lay out different approaches. The 15% rate wouldn't fully cut out the negotiation process: to receive that, you have to document your overhead costs and demonstrate that they reached that level. In any case, it's simplifying. It forces more cost-sharing and maybe more judicious investments by universities. But it's also so low that it's likely to make a significant amount of high-value, life-improving research economically unattractive.The current system is complicated and burdensome. It might encourage investment in less productive things, particularly because universities can get it paid back through future ICR. At the same time, it provides pretty good incentives to take on expensive, high-value research on behalf of the public.I would land on one of two alternatives. One of those is close to what Pierre said, with fixed rates, but varied by institution types: one for universities, one for medical schools, one for independent research institutions — because we do see some variation in their cost structures. We might set those rates around their historical average effective rates, since those haven't changed for quite a long time. If you set different rates for different categories of institution, the more finely you slice the pie, the closer you end up to the current system. So that's why I said maybe, at a very high level, four categories.The other I could imagine is to shift more of these costs “above the line” — to adapt the system to enable more of these indirect costs to be budgeted as direct costs in grants. This isn't always easy, but presumably some things we currently call indirect costs could be accounted for in a direct cost manner. Foundations do it a bit more than the federal government does, so that could be another path forward.There's no silver bullet. Our goal was to try to bring some understanding to this long-running policy debate over how to fund the indirect cost of research and what appropriate rates should be. It's been a recurring question for several decades and now is in the hot seat again. Hopefully through this work, we've been able to help push that dialogue along. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.statecraft.pub

This week on Health Matters, Courtney sits down with Dr. Braden Kuo, Chief of the Division of Digestive & Liver Diseases at NewYork-Presbyterian and Columbia. Dr. Kuo covers common gut problems during the holiday season, a time of indulgent meals and treats. From bloat to heartburn to travel-related stomach issues, Dr. Kuo is a trove of information and practical tips for navigating holiday festivities with good choices for your gut.  ___ Dr. Braden Kuo is a leading neurogastroenterologist specializing in gastrointestinal motility and the relationship between the brain, nervous system and digestive system. He is the Chief of the Division of Digestive and Liver Diseases at NewYork-Presbyterian/ColumbiaUniversity Irving Medical Center and Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians andSurgeons. Dr. Kuo received his medical degree from Jefferson Medical College and completed his residency at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center before arriving at Massachusetts General Hospital, where he served as director of the Center for Neurointestinal Health. He also completed formal training in clinical research, earning a Master of Science from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and subspecialty training in neurogastroenterology and motility at Mayo Clinic.___Health Matters is your weekly dose of health and wellness information, from the leading experts. Join host Courtney Allison to get news you can use in your own life. New episodes drop each Wednesday.If you are looking for practical health tips and trustworthy information from world-class doctors and medical experts you will enjoy listening to Health Matters. Health Matters was created to share stories of science, care, and wellness that are happening every day at NewYork-Presbyterian, one of the nation's most comprehensive, integrated academic healthcare systems. In keeping with NewYork-Presbyterian's long legacy of medical breakthroughs and innovation, Health Matters features the latest news, insights, and health tips from our trusted experts; inspiring first-hand accounts from patients and caregivers; and updates on the latest research and innovations in patient care, all in collaboration with our renowned medical schools, Columbia and Weill Cornell Medicine.To learn more visit: https://healthmatters.nyp.org

Synopsis: This episode is proudly sponsored by Quartzy. In this far-reaching conversation, Rahul Chaturvedi speaks with John Lepore, CEO & President of ProFound Therapeutics and CEO-Partner at Flagship Pioneering, tracing a career shaped by a deep commitment to understanding the causal machinery of human disease. John shares how a Harvard-trained physician-scientist evolved into a biotech leader building one of the industry's most ambitious platform companies. Reflecting on 17 years at GSK — from academic cardiologist to running global research — John describes the moment he realized traditional target discovery had reached its limits. That insight propelled him into Flagship's venture-creation ecosystem and ultimately into leading ProFound Therapeutics, where the team is uncovering tens of thousands of previously unknown human proteins that could fundamentally reshape drug discovery and unlock true first-in-class opportunities. John also offers a candid look at today's biotech leadership realities: navigating capital-tight markets, fostering high-trust pharma partnerships, making disciplined early kill decisions, and using AI to extract causal insights from vast proteomic datasets. Together, he and Rahul explore why the expanded human proteome may be medicine's next great frontier — and what it takes, scientifically and psychologically, to lead a company bold enough to pursue it. Biography: John Lepore, M.D., is CEO and President of ProFound Therapeutics and CEO-Partner at Flagship Pioneering, where he is leading a new era of drug discovery by harnessing the expanded proteome to build a pipeline of first-in-class medicines. A physician-scientist and accomplished pharma executive, he joined ProFound following a 17-year career at GSK, where he was most recently SVP, Head of Research, leading a 2,500+ person global team and driving a renewed focus on immunology and human genetics across target discovery and validation, modality platforms, drug discovery, and clinical translation. He also chaired GSK's Research Review and Investment Board, guiding capital allocation and R&D strategy. Under his leadership, GSK advanced 15 Phase 1 programs with first- or best-in-class potential and executed $1B+ in strategic R&D deals. Before joining the biopharma industry, Dr. Lepore was a faculty cardiologist and research investigator at the University of Pennsylvania, where his lab investigated the transcription regulation of cardiovascular development. He currently serves on the boards of ProFound, KSQ Therapeutics, and the Innovation Growth Board of Mass General Brigham. Dr. Lepore received his B.S. in Biology from the University of Scranton and his M.D. from Harvard Medical School, after which he completed his residency and post-doctoral training at Massachusetts General Hospital and the Harvard School of Public Health.

In episode 62 of Going anti-Viral, Dr Rochelle Walensky joins host Dr Michael Saag on World AIDS Day 2025 to discuss her experience as the Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) during the COVID-19 pandemic and the current state of public health in the United States. Dr Walensky is a Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and has published over 300 research articles that have motivated changes to US HIV testing and immigration policy and promoted expanded funding for HIV-related research, treatment, and the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). Dr Walensky reflects on her experience during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic in Massachusetts where she was the Chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases at Massachusetts General Hospital. Dr Saag and Dr Walensky then discuss her transition to the Director of the CDC and her management of the agency during the pandemic. Dr Walensky and Dr Saag emphasize the dedication of public health professionals and the need for continued support and understanding of the challenges they face. They discuss the risk of proposed budget cuts to the CDC and the impacts this will have on the agency as well as state and local public health departments. Finally, they discuss the future of public health and their shared optimism for public health over the long-term.0:00 – Introduction1:41 – Management of the early outbreak of COVID-19 in Massachusetts and reflections on the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI) in March of 202011:50 – Transition to lead the CDC and reflections on the difficult job of management of the CDC during a pandemic24:00 – Navigating COVID-19 variants and the challenge of public health recommendations for wearing masks and vaccination28:24 – Outlook on the future of public health and the CDC and the risks of proposed budget cuts on state and local public health agencies __________________________________________________Produced by IAS-USA, Going anti–Viral is a podcast for clinicians involved in research and care in HIV, its complications, and other viral infections. This podcast is intended as a technical source of information for specialists in this field, but anyone listening will enjoy learning more about the state of modern medicine around viral infections. Going anti-Viral's host is Dr Michael Saag, a physician, prominent HIV researcher at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, and volunteer IAS–USA board member. In most episodes, Dr Saag interviews an expert in infectious diseases or emerging pandemics about their area of specialty and current developments in the field. Other episodes are drawn from the IAS–USA vast catalogue of panel discussions, Dialogues, and other audio from various meetings and conferences. Email podcast@iasusa.org to send feedback, show suggestions, or questions to be answered on a later episode.Follow Going anti-Viral on: Apple Podcasts YouTubeXFacebookInstagram...

Nishant Uppal is an instructor in medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital. Stephen Morrissey, the interviewer, is the Executive Managing Editor of the Journal. N. Uppal and Z. Song. Venture Capital Investments by U.S. Academic Medical Centers. N Engl J Med 2025;393:2077-2080.

Obesity is a chronic disease. So why are we still not treating it as such?Enter Dr. Fatima Cody Stanford, Associate Professor of Medicine and Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital.Dr. Stanford is a global voice on obesity - redefining it as a chronic disease, not a personal failure.In taking us through the science behind it, Dr. Stanford guides us to the heart of several patient stories, highlighting the need for treating patients with dignity, improving access to care, and eliminating biases in global healthcare.——We spoke about genetic, environmental, and systemic factors that contribute to obesity, the efficacy of treatments like GLP-1 receptor agonists, real-life examples, the emotional and practical aspects of this chronic disease, and the need to involve healthcare professionals, government, and the community to tackle the global obesity epidemic.Follow me on Instagram and Facebook @ericfethkemd and checkout my website at www.EricFethkeMD.com. My brand new book, The Privilege of Caring, is out now on Amazon! https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CP6H6QN4

Dr. Gominak grew up and attended college in California, moved to Houston for medical school at Baylor College of Medicine, where she received an MD degree in 1983. Her Neurology residency was done at the Harvard affiliated, Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. She practiced Neurology in the San Francisco Bay area from 1991-2004 then moved with her husband to Tyler, Texas.  Starting in 2004 she began to dedicate more of her practice to the treatment of sleep and sleep disorders. In 2012 and 2016 she published two pivotal articles about the global struggle with worsening sleep, the possible causes and solutions, related to vitamin D deficiency and the intestinal microbiome.  In 2016 she retired from her office practice to have more time to teach. She currently divides her time between RightSleep® coaching sessions for private individuals, teaching about sleep and sleep disorders on her channel, youtube.com/@DrStashaGominak and teaching other clinicians the RightSleep® method of sleep repair.  In this episode, we chat about: The cause of your headaches you're not looking into What does fat bear week have to do with hormones Is vitamin D at the root of endometriosis and PCOS Thoughts and feelings about sunscreen How medicine has lost critical thinking ability Covid and vitamin D Why your doctor is saying no to vitamin D testing Learn more about working with me  Shop my masterclasses (learn more in 60-90 minutes than years of dr appointments) Follow me on IG Follow Empowered Mind + Body on IG  Learn more about working with Dr. Stasha Gominak Follow Dr. Stasha Gominak on IG  

Earlier this season, we visited the Ether Dome at the Massachusetts General Hospital to learn about the first public use of an anesthetic in surgery. On this bonus episode of The Object of History, we return to Mass General to visit the Paul S. Russell, MD Museum of Medical History and Innovation. MHS Podcast Producer Sam Hurwitz joins the Director of the Museum, Sarah Alger, for a tour where they examine some of the museum's most significant items related to the history of medicine. Learn more about episode objects here: https://www.masshist.org/podcast/season-4-bonus-episode-Russell-Museum  Email us at podcast@masshist.org. Listen to Episode 3 Episode Special Guest: Sarah Alger is the George and Nancy Putnam Director of Mass General Hospital's Paul S. Russell, MD Museum of Medical History and Innovation. She was a founding editor of Proto, a thought leadership publication that was sponsored by MGH for 17 years. This episode uses materials from: The Bond (Instrumental) by Chad Crouch (Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International)        Psychic by Dominic Giam of Ketsa Music (licensed under a commercial non-exclusive license by the Massachusetts Historical Society through Ketsa.uk)        Curious Nature by Dominic Giam of Ketsa Music (licensed under a commercial non-exclusive license by the Massachusetts Historical Society through Ketsa.uk)

Dr Jeremy S Abramson from Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston and Dr Manali Kamdar from the University of Colorado Cancer Center in Aurora discuss patient questions and experiences with CAR T-cell therapy for non-Hodgkin lymphoma. Educational information and select publications here.

Prof Francois-Clement Bidard from the Institut Curie in Paris, France, Dr Hope S Rugo from the City of Hope Comprehensive Cancer Center in Duarte, California, Dr Rebecca Shatsky from the University of California San Diego Moores Cancer Center and Dr Seth Wander from Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston discuss recent updates on available and emerging treatment strategies involving oral SERDs for ER-positive metastatic breast cancer. CME information and select publications here.

Dr. Pria Anand joins Google to discuss her book, "The Mind Electric: A Neurologist on the Strangeness and Wonder of Our Brains." The book demonstrates the compelling paradox at the heart of neurology; that even the most peculiar symptoms can show us something universal about ourselves as humans. Dr. Anand is a neurologist at the Boston Medical Center and an Assistant Professor at the Boston University School of Medicine. She is a graduate of Yale University and Stanford Medical School, and she trained in neurology, neuro-infectious diseases, and neuroimmunology at Johns Hopkins Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital. Watch this episode at youtube.com/TalksAtGoogle.

Reclaim your cognitive sovereignty by harnessing precision frequency medicine to counteract digital overload. This breakthrough Restorative Audio combines ancestral sound wisdom with cutting-edge neuroscience research from Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, utilizing three therapeutic frequency protocols—alpha wave entrainment (8-12 Hz), the Perfect Fifth interval for autonomic balance, and precision binaural beats—to measurably restore your overwhelmed neural networks.The ScienceResearch demonstrates that chronic digital saturation suppresses the parasympathetic nervous system while hyperactivating the amygdala, creating perpetual cognitive overload. Brain wave entrainment through therapeutic frequencies reverses this damage: studies show 23% cortisol reduction, improved heart rate variability, and enhanced cognitive performance within 20-minute sessions. The Perfect Fifth interval (C 256 Hz with G 384 Hz) stimulates nitric oxide production and pituitary endogenous opiates, while alpha-theta frequencies synchronize neural oscillations with Earth's Schumann Resonance, promoting measurable systemic coherence.Real-World Benefits- Reduces cortisol levels and restores autonomic nervous system balance- Enhances cognitive flexibility and creative problem-solving capacity- Improves focus without tension through optimal alpha-theta threshold- Decreases perceived stress and mental fatigue- Upregulates cellular repair genes and promotes neuroplasticity- Measurable improvements in heart rate variability and inflammatory markersUsage GuideFrequency:Daily 15-20 minute sessions for optimal neurological recalibration  Equipment:Quality headphones for precise binaural beat delivery  Environment:Low-EMF settings enhance therapeutic response  Best Results:4-6 weeks consistent practice for epigenetic gene expression changes  Hydration:Increase water intake to enhance cellular conductivity and frequency responseSubscribe for extended 30, 60, and 90-minute sessions and full Restorative Audio library access.Send us a textSupport the show

Reclaim your cognitive sovereignty by harnessing precision frequency medicine to counteract digital overload. This breakthrough Restorative Audio combines ancestral sound wisdom with cutting-edge neuroscience research from Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, utilizing three therapeutic frequency protocols—alpha wave entrainment (8-12 Hz), the Perfect Fifth interval for autonomic balance, and precision binaural beats—to measurably restore your overwhelmed neural networks.The ScienceResearch demonstrates that chronic digital saturation suppresses the parasympathetic nervous system while hyperactivating the amygdala, creating perpetual cognitive overload. Brain wave entrainment through therapeutic frequencies reverses this damage: studies show 23% cortisol reduction, improved heart rate variability, and enhanced cognitive performance within 20-minute sessions. The Perfect Fifth interval (C 256 Hz with G 384 Hz) stimulates nitric oxide production and pituitary endogenous opiates, while alpha-theta frequencies synchronize neural oscillations with Earth's Schumann Resonance, promoting measurable systemic coherence.Real-World Benefits- Reduces cortisol levels and restores autonomic nervous system balance- Enhances cognitive flexibility and creative problem-solving capacity- Improves focus without tension through optimal alpha-theta threshold- Decreases perceived stress and mental fatigue- Upregulates cellular repair genes and promotes neuroplasticity- Measurable improvements in heart rate variability and inflammatory markersUsage GuideFrequency:Daily 15-20 minute sessions for optimal neurological recalibration  Equipment:Quality headphones for precise binaural beat delivery  Environment:Low-EMF settings enhance therapeutic response  Best Results:4-6 weeks consistent practice for epigenetic gene expression changes  Hydration:Increase water intake to enhance cellular conductivity and frequency responseSubscribe for extended 30, 60, and 90-minute sessions and full Restorative Audio library access.Send us a textSupport the show

Nothing beats a good cup of coffee, but nothing also beats a good night's sleep. With the switch back to standard time right around the corner, our bodies will once again feel the disorientation of the 1 hour shift. The sun will rise and set earlier, and maybe it's time we move with the light instead of trying to ignore nature's clock. Host Maria Kestane speaks to Dr. Elizabeth Klerman, a professor of neurology at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. They break down the dos and don'ts of sleep, how to take advantage of the time change to catch some extra zzz's, and how it's important to actually listen to your body when it's telling you something. We love feedback at The Big Story, as well as suggestions for future episodes. You can find us:Through email at hello@thebigstorypodcast.ca Or @thebigstoryfpn on Twitter

Send us a textC4 Leaders – the ONLY nonprofit to utilize the pizza making process to create space for our companions to be seen, heard, and loved.   We work with businesses, sports teams, hospitals, churches…anyone looking to RISE TOGETHER.  We also write children's books and use the most amazing handmade, hand-tossed, sourdough pizza to bring out the best in each other.   Please check out PIZZADAYS.ORG to support our important work. Season 5 Episode #23 Dr. Kate Lund is coming from Edmonds, Washington (inform, inspire, & transform)You can find via her website katelundspeaks.comAbout our guest: Growing up with Hydrocephalus took the ordinary out of her childhood. Numerous surgeries, countless doctor visits and relentless recovery periods had become the norm for Kate.  But through it all, she found one thing that kept her thriving – the power of resilience in extraordinary circumstances. Building her life around finding incredible possibility on the other side of challenge kept her driven and ultimately helped Kate find her true calling.Today, Kate is a licensed clinical psychologist of 15 years, peak performance coach, best-selling author and TEDx speaker. Her specialized training in medical psychology includes world-renowned Shriners Hospital for Children, Boston, Massachusetts General Hospital, and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, all of which are affiliated with Harvard Medical School. Kate uses a strengths-based approached to help her clients improve their confidence in school, sports and life while helping them to become more resilient and reach their full potential at all levels.Thanks for sharing your many gifts, for putting your courage, thoughts, experience, and insight on paper (three times) and for guiding all people to see life's adversities as opportunities for growth and understanding.   Welcome to the show! TOTD – “Your actions are your only true belongings.”  Thich Nhat HanhBuild a habit - to create intention - to live your purpose! In this episode:What was life like growing up?What are your life's essential ingredients?What is ResilienceThe power of managing our emotions – RULER…Self-Awareness, Social Awareness, Self-Management, Practical tools to use to help maintain homeostasis…Mantra…FriendshipSocial Demands of being humanBooks you recommendLegacy 

In this episode, I'm joined by Dr. Alexandra Fuss, Ph.D., Director of Behavioral Medicine in Inflammatory Bowel Diseases at Massachusetts General Hospital and Instructor in Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. Alexandra previously served as Director of Behavioral Health in Digestive Diseases and Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at Yale, and is a National Scientific Advisor for the Crohn's & Colitis Foundation and Associate Editor of Crohn's & Colitis 360 Journal. Together, we unpack the topic of medical gaslighting and invalidation in gastrointestinal care, what it is, why patients with gut–brain disorders are particularly vulnerable, and how subtle or systemic factors can leave patients feeling dismissed. Alexandra also shares practical strategies clinicians can use to build trust, improve communication, and ensure patients feel genuinely heard and cared for. Whether you've ever felt your symptoms weren't taken seriously, or you're a clinician wanting to better support your patients, this episode offers insightful and actionable guidance you won't want to miss. Please enjoy my conversation with Dr. Alexandra Fuss.

Is it possible to deliver life-changing news—with compassion—without sacrificing precious time or the physician's own well-being? It's a burning question for healthcare professionals everywhere, and the impact of getting it right goes far beyond the exam room. Not only does compassionate communication ease patient anxiety and foster loyalty, but it also drives better outcomes, even in the face of a system that pressures doctors to prioritize speed and productivity (those infamous RVUs!). As the demands on clinicians mount, many struggle with “compassion fatigue,” and patients often experience rushed, impersonal conversations when they need empathy and understanding most. This episode offers a solution—and hope—for both sides of the stethoscope. You should listen to this episode because my guest, Dr. Rachel Hitt, delivers a masterclass in patient communication. As Chief of Breast Imaging at Tufts Medical Center and Medical Director of Patient Experience for Tufts Medicine Integrated Network, she brings more than 20 years of clinical expertise and a passion for improving the way difficult news is shared with patients. Dr. Hitt is not only a practicing clinician; she's a certified facilitator in healthcare communication and a certified patient experience professional, dedicating herself to coaching and elevating the next generation of physicians. Her insights are practical, inspiring, and applicable well beyond healthcare—for anyone who faces moments of tough conversations and wants to make those moments matter. Here are three powerful questions Rachel answers on the show: Why do so many healthcare professionals struggle with delivering difficult news compassionately—and how can they overcome barriers like exhaustion, lack of time, and institutional pressure? What is the ART model for patient communication, and how does it transform a monologue into a meaningful dialogue, even when sharing devastating diagnoses? How do small gestures—like a brief pause, gentle touch, or simply asking permission to enter—impact patient experience, loyalty, and even the bottom line for hospitals and health systems? Listen in and subscribe! Find this episode on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, and catch all future episodes on your favorite podcast platforms: Apple Podcasts Spotify (Available wherever you get your podcasts—just search for “Delighted Customers”!) Meet Dr. Rachel Hitt Dr. Rachel Hitt, MD, MPH, is the Chief of Breast Imaging at Tufts Medical Center and Medical Director of Patient Experience for the Tufts Medicine Integrated Network. With more than two decades of experience, she has touched thousands of lives, guiding patients and their families through some of their most vulnerable moments. Rachel graduated from Harvard Medical School and completed her residency in radiology and fellowship in breast imaging at Massachusetts General Hospital—two of the nation's most prestigious medical institutions. She also holds a Master's in Public Health from the University of Michigan and is a certified facilitator in healthcare communication through the Academy of Communication and Healthcare. Rachel is a Certified Patient Experience Professional (CPXP), and she's equally comfortable in academic medical centers and private practice settings. She has dedicated much of her career to teaching, coaching clinicians, and speaking at conferences about how medical professionals can improve the patient experience—“chunking and checking” information, meeting people where they are, and nurturing authentic, empathetic relationships. Connect with Rachel on LinkedIn. References and Show Notes Academy of Communication in Healthcare Dr. Steven Tresiak's “power of 40 seconds” research (Ted Talk) LinkedIn: Dr. Rachel Hitt Book reference: "All Business is Personal" by Dr. Joseph Michelli (from prior episodes) RVU (Relative Value Units) model in healthcare Techniques for improving patient loyalty and experience Thanks for listening—subscribe and share if you want more episodes just like this!

Today our guest is Dr. Ryan Sherman, Director of Wellness at Medway Public Schools in Medway, Massachusetts. We talk to Dr. Sherman about how his healthcare background is helping schools rethink what student wellness means, and how he is helping to modernize MTSS. He shares how Medway added a fourth tier of support that brings mental health care directly into schools through care coordination, in-school outpatient services, and telehealth partnerships. Dr. Sherman also unpacks the mindset shift from “we don't do mental health” to shared ownership of student wellbeing, and how this approach is improving access, attendance, and GPA. Learn More About CharacterStrong:  Access FREE MTSS Curriculum Samples Request a Quote Today! Learn more about CharacterStrong Implementation Support Visit the CharacterStrong Website   Ryan Sherman, Ph.D., has been Medway School's Director of Wellness for ten years. Prior to coming to Medway, Ryan was a clinician in cardiology at Boston Medical Center and in internal medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital. Ryan is the author of several peer-reviewed behavioral health research studies and the co-author of The Fourth Tier: Modernizing MTSS for Student Mental Health.  Ryan is also a senior professor and researcher of social and emotional learning at Bay Path University.  Dr. Sherman is the recipient of the Massachusetts Interscholastic Athletic Association Wellness Coordinator of the Year Award and the Massachusetts General Hospital Innovation Award.  Ryan resides in Massachusetts with his wife, two children, and boxer.

Join Dr. Cecilia Lansang, Associate Editor of Endocrine Practice, Professor of Medicine, and Director of Endocrinology at Cleveland Clinic, as she speaks with Dr. Kristen Flint, Interim Director of Quality and Safety for Endocrinology at Massachusetts General Hospital, Attending Endocrinologist at MGH, and Instructor at Harvard Medical School, about her team's quality improvement project, “Expanding Access to Continuous Glucose Monitoring in Medicare Patients Receiving Specialty Diabetes Care.” This episode covers:Strategies for implementing quality improvement interventions in a large academic diabetes specialty clinicKey interventions that increased CGM utilization, including targeted provider education, workflow optimization, and patient outreachLessons for advancing equitable implementation and sustaining quality improvement over time Tune in for practical insights on bridging policy changes and clinical practice to improve CGM access for Medicare patients. Read the full article in the August 2025 issue of Endocrine Practice here.

HOST: Hildy Grossman, CO-HOST: Jordan Rich GUEST: Chi Fu Jeffrey Yang. MD, Thoracic surgeon at Massachusetts General Hospital, Professor of surgery at Harvard Medical School For any cancer patient facing surgery, there are always questions and worries. Hildy interviews an outstanding thoracic surgeon at Massachusetts General Hospital, Chi Fu Jeffrey yang, MD. They discuss the … Continue reading CUT IT OUT! What To Know About Lung Cancer Surgery →

What do you do when someone you love - whether it's your kids, a spouse, or a friend - keeps doing the same maddening things?  This week, we're tackling how to approach the most frustrating dynamics in any relationship. Dr. Alison is joined by award-winning psychologist Dr. J. Stuart Ablon, founder of Think:Kids at Massachusetts General Hospital, and Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School.  He shares a game-changing mindset shift: most challenging behavior is about skill, not will. If you've ever thought, “They just don't care,” about someone you love, this conversation provides a proven, practical path to real solutions.  This episode explores: The five core skills that drive every behavior The real reason most people struggle How to keep your cool and trade judgment for curiosity The exact words that lower defensiveness fast Why boundaries still matter—and how to set them collaboratively A step-by-step walkthrough of Collaborative Problem Solving in action For more from Dr. Stuart Ablon, check out his many free resources:

Today is World Anaesthesia Day, which marks the first successful demonstration of the inhalation of ether vapour as a means of overcoming pain of surgery.It happened on October 16th, 1846 at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, during a surgery performed by dentist William T. G. Morton.Ireland followed suit with a second successful trial, which was administered on an 18-year-old girl during the famine.Consultant Anaesthesiologist Dr. Patrick Seigne says today is an important opportunity to celebrate a practice that is often taken for granted, as well as Ireland's contribution to the field. He joins Seán to discuss.

Dr. Danielle Cameron knew that she was interested in medicine when she was a girl growing into her teenage and adolescent years while watching her father who had a career as a Cardiac Surgeon. Danielle talks about that on today's podcast as well as her many interests in the field of Pediatric Oncology, especially when it concerns solid tumors. Danielle also lends her voice as a member of a number of National committees for Organizations that are concerned with a wide variety of Pediatric Cancer issues. 

Dr Jeremy S Abramson from Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, Dr Jennifer Crombie from Dana-Farber Cancer Institute also in Boston and Dr Laurie H Sehn from the BC Cancer Centre for Lymphoid Cancer in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, discuss recent updates on available and novel treatment strategies for follicular lymphoma.  CE information and select publications here.

In this episode, Dr. Jagmeet Singh of Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital and Dr. Sanjay Gandhi of Philips Healthcare Informatics discuss how AI, sensors, and digital tools are reshaping cardiovascular care. They share insights on moving from reactive to proactive care, improving efficiency, and empowering both clinicians and patients in an evolving healthcare landscape.This episode is sponsored by Philips EI.

When her husband was diagnosed with frontotemporal degeneration at just 29, Katie Brandt's life changed overnight. What began as confusion and heartbreak became a lifelong calling to transform how we see, support, and study dementia. Today, Katie is the Director of Caregiver Support Services and Public Relations at the Massachusetts General Hospital Frontotemporal Disorders Unit, and the Founder & CEO of Katie Brandt Advocacy. In this conversation, we talk about what it means to become a “caregiver detective”, the quiet observer, the record keeper, the advocate who pieces together the truth when something feels off. We explore how early and accurate diagnosis brings dignity, how research becomes more human when it includes caregiver voices, and why supporting caregivers isn't just compassionate, it's strategic. Katie shares the lessons she's learned through love, loss, and leadership, and how her belief that “love will end FTD” continues to guide her work and the families she serves.   To buys tickets and learn more about A Night with the Arts for FTD, an annual gala featuring the Sermos Memorial Art Show, benefitting the clinical research program in the MGH Frontotemporal Disorders Unit. Visit HERE. The MGH Frontotemporal Disorders Unit hosts From Care to Cure podcast. Listen HERE. Thank you to our Sponsor Zinnia TV is a therapeutic dementia care platform that supports caregivers. We are not medical professionals and are not providing any medical advice. If you have any medical questions, we recommend that you talk with a medical professional of your choice. willGather has taken care in selecting its speakers but the opinions of our speakers are theirs alone. Thank you for your continued interest in our podcasts. Please follow for updates, rate & review! For more information about our guest, podcast & sponsorship opportunities, visit www.willgatherpodcast.com

Send us a textDr. Kate Lund is a licensed clinical psychologist of 15 years, peak performance coach, best-selling author and TEDx speaker. Her specialized training in medical psychology includes world-renowned Shriners Hospital for Children, Boston, Massachusetts General Hospital, and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, all of which are affiliated with Harvard Medical School. She uses a strengths-based approach to help her clients improve their confidence in school, sports and life while helping them to become more resilient and reach their full potential at all levels. She is also the author of Step Away: The Keys to Resilient Parenting and has a podcast called ”The Optimized Mind.”You can find Dr. Lund online at https://www.katelundspeaks.com/Dyslexia Journey has conversations and explorations to help you support the dyslexic child in your life. Content includes approaches, tips, and interviews with a range of guests from psychologists to educators to people with dyslexia. Increase your understanding and connection with your child as you help them embrace their uniqueness and thrive on this challenging journey!Send us your questions, comments, and guest suggestions to parentingdyslexiajourney@gmail.comAlso check out our YouTube channel! https://www.youtube.com/@ParentingDyslexiaJourney

Prof Meletios-Athanasios (Thanos) C Dimopoulos from Alexandra Hospital in Athens, Greece, Dr Hans Lee from Sarah Cannon Research Institute in Nashville, Tennessee, Dr Joseph Mikhael from City of Hope Cancer Center in Phoenix, Arizona, and Dr Noopur Raje from Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston discuss recent updates on available and novel treatment strategies for relapsed/refractory multiple myeloma.  CE information and select publications here.

In this episode of the Epigenetics Podcast, we talked with Mo Motamedi from the Center for Cancer Research at Massachusetts General Hospital about his work on RNA-mediated epigenetic regulation. The Interview starts with Dr. Motamedi sharing his personal journey into the realm of biology, sparked by a familial inclination towards science and a challenge to excel in a field that initially felt daunting. His passion was ignited during a genetics class, as he recognized the quantitative nature of the discipline amidst the evolution of modern techniques like qPCR and high-throughput sequencing. Dr. Motamedi goes on to articulate the importance of understanding the interplay between genetics and broader biological systems, emphasizing that an insightful grasp of evolution is vital for decoding cellular mechanisms. He reflects on his time in a postdoctoral lab under Danish Moazet, investigating RNA interference (RNAi) and its unexpected nuclear roles, contributing significantly to the understanding of how RNAi is involved in gene silencing via chromatin interaction. As his narrative unfolds, Dr. Motamedi provides deep insights into his own lab's work, which focuses on the establishment and maintenance of epigenetic states and their implications in cancer epigenetics. He discusses groundbreaking discoveries related to RNAi and heterochromatin, detailing experiments that unveil how specific proteins contribute to transcriptional and post-transcriptional gene silencing. A pivotal theme emerges: the complex dynamics of genome evolution and chromatin organization can be reshaped under various biological contexts, including the quiescent state of cells under stress. Moreover, the discussion traverses recent publications from Dr. Motamedi's lab, revealing how they identify long non-coding RNAs that function as silencers at centromeres, an essential mechanism that aids in the establishment of heterochromatin independently of RNAi. His findings advocate for the idea that well-structured genome organization can lead to more efficient gene regulation, which can also be crucial in therapeutic contexts for various cancers. References Motamedi, M. R., Hong, E. J., Li, X., Gerber, S., Denison, C., Gygi, S., & Moazed, D. (2008). HP1 proteins form distinct complexes and mediate heterochromatic gene silencing by nonoverlapping mechanisms. Molecular cell, 32(6), 778–790. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.molcel.2008.10.026 Joh, R. I., Khanduja, J. S., Calvo, I. A., Mistry, M., Palmieri, C. M., Savol, A. J., Ho Sui, S. J., Sadreyev, R. I., Aryee, M. J., & Motamedi, M. (2016). Survival in Quiescence Requires the Euchromatic Deployment of Clr4/SUV39H by Argonaute-Associated Small RNAs. Molecular cell, 64(6), 1088–1101. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.molcel.2016.11.020 Joh, R. I., Lawrence, M. S., Aryee, M. J., & Motamedi, M. (2021). Gene clustering drives the transcriptional coherence of disparate biological processes in eukaryotes. Systems Biology. https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.04.17.440292 Related Episodes Evolutionary Forces Shaping Mammalian Gene Regulation (Emily Wong) Chromatin Evolution (Arnau Sebé-Pedrós) The Role of lncRNAs in Tumor Growth and Treatment (Sarah Diermeier) Contact Epigenetics Podcast on Mastodon Epigenetics Podcast on Bluesky Dr. Stefan Dillinger on LinkedIn Active Motif on LinkedIn Active Motif on Bluesky Email: podcast@activemotif.com

Brett Owens, MD, Professor of Orthopaedic Surgery at the Brown University Alpert Medical School in Providence, Rhode Island and Editor-in-Chief of the American Journal of Sports Medicine, and Miho Tanaka, MD, PhD, Director of the Women's Sports Medicine Program at the Massachusetts General Hospital, Associate Professor of Orthopaedic Surgery at Harvard Medical School, and Associate Editor at the American Journal of Sports Medicine, discuss the exciting future of AJSM, challenges in patellofemoral care, women's sports medicine, their secret and not-so-secret talents, and more.

In this episode, Dr. Jagmeet Singh of Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital and Dr. Sanjay Gandhi of Philips Healthcare Informatics discuss how AI, sensors, and digital tools are reshaping cardiovascular care. They share insights on moving from reactive to proactive care, improving efficiency, and empowering both clinicians and patients in an evolving healthcare landscape.This episode is sponsored by Philips EI.

Join Elizabeth M. Bauer, MD, FACP, FACE, Dipl ABOM, as she interviews Nicholas A. Tritos, MD, DSc, Professor of Clinical Medicine at Harvard Medical School and faculty of the Neuroendocrine Unit/Neuroendocrine and Pituitary Tumor Clinical Center at Massachusetts General Hospital, about his Endocrine Practice article, Impulse Control Disorders in Patients with Hyperprolactinemia on Dopamine Agonist Therapy – How Concerned Should We Be? The conversation explores the prevalence and risk factors for impulse control disorders, underlying biological mechanisms, clinical screening strategies, and approaches to patient counseling and management. Read the full article in the July 2025 issue of Endocrine Practice here: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eprac.2025.04.018

"We may worry we'll say the wrong thing and worsen someone's hopelessness. We may think depression is a medical condition outside our scope or assume sufferers will reach out if they desire help. Uncertain how to act, many don't act at all, lapsing into silence and avoidance." Today's show will take a look at technology as we walk through chapter 8 of Andrew and Christian Walker's new book, "What Do I Say When...?: A Parents' Guide to Navigating Cultural Chaos for Children & Teens." Bring your questions! There will be time for Q&A and callers! Kathryn Butler (MD, Columbia University) is a trauma surgeon who retired from practice at Massachusetts General Hospital. She is the author of numerous works on medical topics from a Christian perspective, appearing on Desiring God, the Gospel Coalition, and Christianity Today. She authored today's book, "What Does Depression Mean for My Faith?" that is part of the TGC Hard Questions series.

In this episode of Deep Cuts: Exploring Equity in Surgery, Dr. Brandon Baird provides an overview of ENT, or ear, nose, and throat surgery. We discuss key aspects of the specialty, from management of polyps to advanced head and neck cancers. We also touch on disparities in cancer care and the importance of speech and swallow pathologists. Finally, we examine which populations lack access to ENT care and the reasons behind these barriers.Brandon Jackson Baird, MD, is a laryngeal surgeon specializing in a wide range of laryngeal diseases with an emphasis on medical and surgical management of voice and swallowing disorders.  He completed residency in Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery at Stanford University and fellowship at Harvard University – Massachusetts General Hospital.As a trained singer himself, Dr. Baird understands the importance of expert laryngeal care, and he has the skill and experience to treat professional voice artists for voice conditions. Dr. Baird has a subspecialty focus in medical and surgical management for singers with phonotraumatic vocal fold pathology, like nodules and polyps. While at Massachusetts General Hospital, he also trained under Dr. Steven Zeitels, the laryngeal surgeon credited with treating professional performers Steven Tyler, Sam Smith and Adele. As a dedicated researcher, Dr. Baird is identifying and developing novel biotechnology within the field of laryngeal surgery. Additionally, Dr. Baird is evaluating and investigating minimally invasive treatment options for early laryngeal cancerDeep Cuts: Exploring Equity in Surgery comes to you from the Department of Surgery at the University of Chicago, which is located on Ojibwe, Odawa and Potawatomi land.Our senior production coordinator is Nihar Rama. Our production team also includes Beryl Zhou and Daniel Correa Bucio. Our senior editors are Alia Abiad, Caroline Montag, and Chuka Onuh. Our editorial team also includes Megan Teramoto and Ria Sood. The intro song you hear at the beginning of our show is “Love, Money Part 2” from Chicago's own Sen Morimoto off of Sooper Records. Our cover art is from Leia Chen. Special thanks to Tony Liu, our founding producer/editor.If you've liked this podcast, please leave a rating, comment, and review wherever you get your podcasts. Please reach out to us as well — let us know what have you most enjoyed about our podcast, and where you see room for improvement. You can reach out to us on Instagram @deepcutssurgery. Find out more about our work at deepcuts.surgery.uchicago.edu.

Send us a textIn this podcast episode, a pediatric gastroenterologist, Pediatric GI expert Dr. Victoria Martin joins me to demystify milk intolerance in babies—what FPIAP and cow's milk protein intolerance really mean, why these diagnoses are tricky, and how families can find practical, evidence-based solutions.shares her expertise on milk intolerances in infants. Dr. Martin emphasizes the importance of supporting breastfeeding mothers, addressing misconceptions about milk allergies, and the potential benefits of early allergen exposure. Additionally, Dr. Martin and the host discuss the role of lactose intolerance, and nutritional considerations for infants. Dr. Victoria (Tori) Martin is an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School, Co-Director of the Pediatric Gastroenterology Section of the Food Allergy Center at Massachusetts General Hospital for Children, and Associate Program Director of the MGHfC Pediatric GI Fellowship. Her research focuses on early-life GI health, food antigens, and the infant microbiome.Key takeaways“Lactose intolerance” is not a typical infant diagnosis; infant concerns are usually protein related.Microscopic stool blood alone has limits—treat the baby, not just the test.For breastfed infants with visible blood and discomfort, consider short, targeted milk-protein elimination, then a re-challenge in ~1 month to confirm diagnosis and avoid unnecessary long-term restriction.Hypoallergenic formulas are an option; prioritize growth, feeding comfort, and family well-being.Early, safe introduction of other allergens (e.g., peanut, egg) should still proceed on schedule unless otherwise directed by your clinician.Your Child is Normal is the trusted podcast for parents, pediatricians, and child health experts who want smart, nuanced conversations about raising healthy, resilient kids. Hosted by Dr. Jessica Hochman — a board-certified practicing pediatrician — the show combines evidence-based medicine, expert interviews, and real-world parenting advice to help listeners navigate everything from sleep struggles to mental health, nutrition, screen time, and more. Follow Dr Jessica Hochman:Instagram: @AskDrJessica and Tiktok @askdrjessicaYouTube channel: Ask Dr Jessica If you are interested in placing an ad on Your Child Is Normal click here or fill out our interest form.-For a plant-based, USDA Organic certified vitamin supplement, check out : Llama Naturals Vitamin and use discount code: DRJESSICA20-To test your child's microbiome and get recommendations, check out: Tiny Health using code: DRJESSICA The information presented in Ask Dr Jessica is for general educational purposes only. She does not diagnose medical conditi...

In this SEE YOU NOW Insight, nurse leaders Gaurdia Banister, PhD, RN, NEA-BC, FAAN, and Hiyam Nadel, MBA, CCG RN, share how the Ether Dome Challenge at Massachusetts General Hospital is using open innovation to surface frontline solutions and strengthen care delivery. Against a backdrop of persistent nurse staffing shortages and a global talent emergency, they show how including every role group in innovation, and ensuring leadership engagement, communication, and follow-through, creates a culture where staff feel heard, valued, and supported. Innovation, they remind us, isn't just about solving problems; it's about caring for patients and caregivers, and building strong systems for the future.      To listen to this Insight clip's full episode visit SEE YOU NOW Podcast Episode 77: Fostering a Culture of Inquiry at APPLE, SPOTIFY, or YOUTUBE or at your favorite streaming platform. For more information on the podcast bundles visit ANA's Innovation Website at https://www.nursingworld.org/practice-policy/innovation/education.  Have questions or feedback for the SEE YOU NOW team?  Future episode ideas? Contact us at hello@seeyounowpodcast.com.  

The power of empathy for organizational success is not just proven in all the data. Neuroscience backs up our human need to connect and form relationships. But why does empathic communication lead to better business results, improved wellness, decreased burnout, and better workforce retention? We explore that today with Dr. Helen Riess. Persuaded by the belief that empathy can transform healthcare, Dr. Riess founded Empathetics to meet medicine's most pressing challenges. We talk about whether empathy can be taught or if it's an inborn trait, the evidence for how empathy improves measurable outcomes, and what shifts we need to make to more fully bring empathy into work. Dr. Riess shares how the brain works on empathy and how it looks different for different people of all abilities. Finally, we discuss the importance of getting people into the right seat to lead with empathy and why self-regulation skills are critical to leadership success.To access the episode transcript, please scroll down below.Listen and discover:Why empathy is a key survival trait of the human species.Effective shifts to bring more personal compassion, kindness, and empathy to the workplace.The best ways to start your day for effective, empathetic leadership.Advice for dealing with people at different stages and levels of empathy.Why practicing empathy at work spills over into other aspects of your life. "Neuroscience shows that when the brain is at rest, we're not doing nothing. The default mode is all about working out relationships. It just shows how critical human relationship and connectedness really is." — Dr. Helen RiessFrom Our Partner:SparkEffect partners with organizations to unlock the full potential of their greatest asset: their people. Through their tailored assessments and expert coaching at every level, SparkEffect helps organizations manage change, sustain growth, and chart a path to a brighter future.Go to sparkeffect.com/edge now and download your complimentary Professional and Organizational Alignment Review today.About Dr. Helen Riess, Founder and Chief Medical Officer, EmpatheticsDr. Helen Riess, a psychiatrist at Massachusetts General Hospital and an Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, is renowned for her groundbreaking research into the neurobiology of empathy. Dr. Riess has shown that empathy can be taught and learned. Her work has reshaped how healthcare professionals connect with patients and colleagues, fostering trust and greater patient and clinician satisfaction. Her award-winning research has been published in leading peer-reviewed journals.Persuaded by the belief that empathy can transform healthcare, Dr. Riess founded Empathetics to meet medicine's most pressing challenges. As Chief Medical Officer, she translates her research into programs that help healthcare teams navigate the communication demands of modern practice. Her empathy training programs improve wellness, reduce burnout and employee turnover, and improve workforce cultures.Her best-selling book, The Empathy Effect, has resonated globally. Her TEDx talk, “The Power of Empathy,” has nearly one million views. A Founding Member of Newsweek's Expert Forum, Dr. Riess continues to champion the transformative power of empathy to improve healthcare for everyone.Connect with Helen: Empathetics, Inc: empathetics.comInstagram: instagram.com/helen.riessLinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/helen-riessTEDx: The Power of EmpathyBook: The Empathy Effect: empathetics.com/empathy-effect-bookConnect with Maria:Get Maria's books on empathy: Red-Slice.com/booksLearn more about Maria's work: Red-Slice.comHire Maria to speak: Red-Slice.com/Speaker-Maria-RossTake the LinkedIn Learning Course! Leading with EmpathyLinkedIn: Maria RossInstagram: @redslicemariaFacebook: Red SliceThreads: @redslicemaria

Dr. Kathleen Horst, Dr. Rachel Jimenez, and Dr. Yara Abdou discuss the updated guideline from ASTRO, ASCO, and SSO on postmastectomy radiation therapy. They share new and updated recommendations on topics including PMRT after upfront surgery, PMRT after neoadjuvant systemic therapy, dose and fractionation schedules, and delivery techniques. They comment on the importance of a multidisciplinary approach and providing personalized care based on individual patient characteristics. Finally, they review ongoing research that may impact these evidence-based guidelines in the future. Read the full guideline, “Postmastectomy Radiation Therapy: An ASTRO-ASCO-SSO Clinical Practice Guideline” at www.asco.org/breast-cancer-guidelines" TRANSCRIPT This guideline, clinical tools, and resources are available at www.asco.org/breast-cancer-guidelines. Read the full text of the guideline and review authors' disclosures of potential conflicts of interest in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, https://ascopubs.org/doi/10.1200/JCO-25-01747  Brittany Harvey: Hello and welcome to the ASCO Guidelines podcast, one of ASCO's podcasts delivering timely information to keep you up to date on the latest changes, challenges, and advances in oncology. You can find all the shows, including this one, at asco.org/podcasts. My name is Brittany Harvey, and today I am interviewing Dr. Kathleen Horst, expert panel chair from Stanford University; Dr. Rachel Jimenez, expert panel vice chair from Massachusetts General Hospital; and Dr. Yara Abdou, ASCO representative from the University of North Carolina, authors on "Postmastectomy Radiation Therapy: An American Society for Radiation Oncology, American Society of Clinical Oncology, and Society of Surgical Oncology Clinical Practice Guideline." Thank you for being here today, Dr. Horst, Dr. Jimenez, and Dr. Abdou. Dr. Kathleen Horst: Thank you for having us. Brittany Harvey: And then just before we discuss this guideline, I would like to note that ASCO takes great care in the development of its guidelines and ensuring that the ASCO conflict of interest policy is followed for each guideline. The disclosures of potential conflicts of interest for the guideline panel, including Dr. Horst, Dr. Jimenez, and Dr. Abdou who have joined us here today, are available online with the publication of the guideline in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, which is linked in the show notes. Then to dive into the content that we are here today to talk about, Dr. Horst, could you start us off by describing what prompted the update for this joint guideline between ASTRO, ASCO, and SSO, and what is the scope of this 2025 guideline on postmastectomy radiation therapy? Dr. Kathleen Horst: Thank you. This joint guideline was last updated in 2016. Over the past decade, the treatment of breast cancer has evolved substantially. Newer systemic therapy regimens have increasingly personalized treatment based on tumor biology, and local therapy management has explored both the de-escalation of axillary surgery and more abbreviated courses of radiation therapy. Given these advances, it was important to revisit the role of postmastectomy radiotherapy in this modern era of breast cancer therapy. This updated guideline addresses four key questions, including postmastectomy radiation therapy after upfront surgery as well as after neoadjuvant systemic therapy. It also reviews the evolving role of various dose and fractionation schedules and optimal treatment techniques and dose constraints. Brittany Harvey: Excellent. I appreciate that background, Dr. Horst. So then, next, Dr. Jimenez, I would like to review the recommendations of this guideline across those four key questions that Dr. Horst just mentioned. So first, what does the panel recommend for PMRT for patients who received initial treatment with mastectomy? Dr. Rachel Jimenez: The panel provided pretty strong consensus that patients with positive lymph nodes or patients with large tumors involving the skin or the chest wall should receive postmastectomy radiation. However, the panel also recognized that the omission of postmastectomy radiation may be appropriate for select patients who have positive lymph nodes and have an axillary lymph node dissection if they have a low nodal burden and other favorable clinical or pathologic features. For patients without lymph node involvement at the time of surgery and no involvement of the skin or chest wall, postmastectomy radiation was not advised by the panel. Brittany Harvey: Understood. It is helpful to understand those recommendations for that patient population. Following that, Dr. Abdou, what are the key recommendations for PMRT for patients who received neoadjuvant systemic therapy before mastectomy? Dr. Yara Abdou: When we think about PMRT after neoadjuvant treatment, the key point is that the initial stage of presentation still matters a lot. So for example, if a patient comes in with more advanced disease, say a large primary tumor, like a clinical T4, or more extensive nodal disease, like an N2 or N3 disease, those patients should get PMRT, no matter how well they respond to neoadjuvant therapy, because we know it reduces the risk of recurrence and that has been shown pretty consistently. On the other hand, if there are still positive lymph nodes after neoadjuvant treatment, basically residual nodal disease, PMRT is also strongly recommended because the risk of local-regional recurrence is much higher in that setting. The gray area is the group of patients who start with a lower burden of nodal disease, such as N1 disease, but then become node negative at surgery. For those patients, we tend to individualize the decision. So if the patient is young or has triple-negative disease, or if there is a lot of residual disease in the breast even though the nodes are cleared, then radiation is probably helpful. But if everything has melted away with pCR in both the breast and the nodes, then it may be safe to omit PMRT in those patients. For patients with smaller tumors and no nodal involvement to begin with, like a clinical T1-T2 N0, if they are still node negative after neoadjuvant treatment, then PMRT is generally not recommended because their baseline recurrence risk is low. And finally, if the margins are positive and cannot be re-excised, then PMRT is recommended after neoadjuvant therapy. Brittany Harvey: Yes, those distinctions are important for appropriate patient selection. So then, Dr. Horst, we have just reviewed the indications for PMRT, but for those patients who receive PMRT, what are the appropriate treatment volumes and dose fractionation regimens? Dr. Kathleen Horst: The guideline addresses coverage of the chest wall and regional nodes with a specific discussion of the data regarding internal mammary nodal irradiation, which has been an area of controversy over many years. The guideline also reviews the data exploring moderate hypofractionation, or shorter courses of radiation therapy. The task force recommends utilizing moderate hypofractionation for the majority of women requiring postmastectomy radiation, which is likely to have a large impact on clinical practice. This recommendation is based on the evolving data demonstrating that a 3-week course of radiotherapy after mastectomy provides similar oncologic outcomes and minimal toxicity for most patients compared to the standard 5-week treatment course. Brittany Harvey: Thank you for reviewing that set of recommendations as well. So then, Dr. Jimenez, to wrap us up on the key questions here, what delivery techniques are recommended for treating patients who receive PMRT? Dr. Rachel Jimenez: So this portion of the guideline is likely to be most helpful for radiation oncologists because it represents the most technical part of the guideline, but we do believe that it offers some important guidance that has, to this point, been lacking in the postmastectomy radiation setting. So first, the panel recommends that all patients should undergo 3-dimensional radiation planning using CAT scan based imaging, and this includes contouring. So contouring refers to the explicit identification, using a drawing interface on the CAT scan imaging, by the radiation oncologist to identify the areas that are targeted to receive radiation, as well as all of the nearby normal tissues that could receive unintended radiation exposure. And we also provide radiation oncologists in the guideline with suggestions about how much dose each target tissue should receive and what the dose limits should be for normal tissues. Additionally, we make some recommendations regarding the manner in which radiation is delivered. So for example, we advise that when conventional radiation methods are not sufficient for covering the areas of the body that are still at risk for cancer, or where too high of a dose of radiation would be anticipated to a normal part of the body, that providers employ a technique called intensity modulated radiation therapy, or IMRT. And if IMRT is going to be used, we also advise regular 3-dimensional imaging assessments of the patient's body relative to the treatment machine to ensure treatment fidelity. When the treatments are delivered, we further advise using a deep inspiration breath-hold technique, which lowers the exposure to the heart and to the lungs when there is concern for cardiopulmonary radiation exposure, and again, that image guidance be used along with real-time monitoring of the patient's anatomy when those techniques are employed. And then finally, we advise that patients receiving postmastectomy radiation utilize a bolus, or a synthetic substance placed on the patient's skin to enhance radiation dose to the superficial tissue, only when there is involvement of the skin with cancer or other high-risk features of the cancer, but not for every patient who receives postmastectomy radiation. Brittany Harvey: Understood. And then, yes, you just mentioned that section of the guideline is probably most helpful for radiation oncologists, but I think you can all comment on this next question. What should all clinicians, including radiation oncologists, surgical oncologists, medical oncologists, and other oncologic professionals, know as they implement all of these updated recommendations? Dr. Rachel Jimenez: So I think one of the things that is most important when we consider postmastectomy radiation and making recommendations is that this is a multidisciplinary panel and that we would expect and encourage our colleagues, as they interpret the guidelines, to employ a multidisciplinary approach when they are discussing each individual patient with their surgical and medical oncology colleagues, that there is no one size fits all. So these guidelines are intended to provide some general guidance around the most appropriate techniques and approaches and recommendations for the utilization of postmastectomy radiation, but that we recognize that all of these recommendations should be individualized for patients and also represent somewhat of a moving target as additional studies, both in the surgical and radiation oncology realm as well as in the systemic therapy realm, enter our milieu, we have to adjust those recommendations accordingly. Dr. Kathleen Horst: Yeah, I would agree, and I wanted to comment as a radiation oncologist, we recognize that local-regional considerations are intertwined with systemic therapy considerations. So as the data evolve, it is critical to have these ongoing updates in a cross-disciplinary manner to ensure optimal care for our patients. And as Dr. Jimenez mentioned, these multidisciplinary discussions are critical for all of us to continue to learn and understand the evolving recommendations across disciplines but also to individualize them according to individual patients. Dr. Yara Abdou: I could not agree more. I think from a medical oncology perspective, systemic therapy has gotten much better with adjuvant CDK4/6 inhibitors, T-DM1, capecitabine, and immune therapy. So these are all newer adjuvant therapies, so the baseline recurrence risks are lower than what they were in the trials that established PMRT. So the absolute benefit of radiation varies more now, so smaller for favorable biology but still relevant in aggressive subtypes or with residual disease. So it is definitely not a one-size-fits-all. Brittany Harvey: Yes, I think it is important that you have all highlighted that multidisciplinary approach and having individualized, patient-centric care. So then, expanding on that just a little bit, Dr. Abdou, how will these guideline recommendations affect patients with breast cancer? Dr. Yara Abdou: So basically, reiterating what we just talked about, these guidelines really move us towards personalized care. So for patients at higher risk, so those with larger tumors, multiple positive nodes, or residual nodal disease after neoadjuvant therapy, PMRT remains essential, consistently lowering local-regional recurrence and improving survival. But for patients at intermediate or lower risk, the recommendations support a more selective approach. So instead of a blanket rule, we now integrate tumor biology, response to systemic therapy, and individual patient factors to decide when PMRT adds meaningful benefit. So the impact for patients is really important because those at high risk continue to get the survival advantage of radiation while others can be spared the unnecessary treatment and side effects. So in short, we are aligning PMRT with modern systemic therapy and biology, making sure each patient receives the right treatment for their situation. Brittany Harvey: Absolutely. Individualizing treatment to every patient will make sure that everyone can achieve the best outcomes as possible. So then, Dr. Jimenez, to wrap us up, I believe Dr. Horst mentioned earlier that data continues to evolve in this field. So in your opinion, what are the outstanding questions regarding the use of PMRT and what are you looking to for the future of research in this space? Dr. Rachel Jimenez: So there are a number of randomized phase III clinical trials that are either in active accrual or that have reported but not yet published that are exploring further de-escalation of postmastectomy radiation and of axillary surgery. And so we do not yet have sufficient data to understand how those two pieces of information integrate with each other. So for example, if you have a patient who has a positive lymph node at the time of diagnosis and forgoes axillary surgery aside from a sentinel lymph node biopsy, we do not yet know that we can also safely forgo radiation entirely in that setting. So we expect that future studies are going to address these questions and understand when it is appropriate to simultaneously de-escalate surgery and radiation. Additionally, there is a number of trials that are looking at ways in which radiation could be omitted or shortened. So there is the RT CHARM trial, which has reported but not yet published, looking at a shorter course of radiation. And so we do make recommendations around that shorter course of radiation in this guideline, but we anticipate that the additional data from the RT CHARM study will provide further evidence in support of that. Additionally, there is a study called the TAILOR RT trial, which looks at forgoing postmastectomy radiation in patients who, to Dr. Abdou's point, have a favorable tumor biology and a low 21-gene recurrence score. And so we are going to anticipate the results from that study to help guide who can selectively forgo postmastectomy radiation when they fall into that favorable risk category. So there are a number of questions that I think will help flesh out this guideline. And as they publish, we will likely publish a focused update on that information to help provide context for our colleagues in the field and clarify some of these recommendations to suit the latest data. Brittany Harvey: Absolutely. We will look forward to those de-escalation trials and ongoing research in the field to build on the evidence and look for future updates to this guideline. So I want to thank you for your work to update these guidelines, and thank you for your time today, Dr. Horst, Dr. Jimenez, and Dr. Abdou. Dr. Rachel Jimenez: Thank you. Dr. Yara Abdou: Thank you. Dr. Kathleen Horst: Thank you. Brittany Harvey: And then finally, thank you to all of our listeners for tuning in to the ASCO Guidelines podcast. To read the full guideline, go to www.asco.org/breast-cancer-guidelines. You can also find many of our guidelines and interactive resources in the free ASCO Guidelines app, which is available in the Apple App Store or the Google Play Store. If you have enjoyed what you have heard today, please rate and review the podcast and be sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode. The purpose of this podcast is to educate and to inform. This is not a substitute for professional medical care and is not intended for use in the diagnosis or treatment of individual conditions. Guests on this podcast express their own opinions, experience, and conclusions. Guest statements on the podcast do not express the opinions of ASCO. The mention of any product, service, organization, activity, or therapy should not be construed as an ASCO endorsement.  

Darshali Vyas is a pulmonary and critical care fellow at Massachusetts General Hospital. Stephen Morrissey, the interviewer, is the Executive Managing Editor of the Journal. D.A. Vyas, L.G. Eisenstein, and D.S. Jones. The Race-Correction Debates — Progress, Tensions, and Future Directions. N Engl J Med 2025;393:1029-1036.

Joining me is Dr. Stuart Ablon, a psychologist, Harvard Medical School professor, founder and director of Think:Kids at Massachusetts General Hospital, and author of several books, including Changeable: How Collaborative Problem Solving Changes Lives at Home, at School, and at Work.   Together we explore:   Why kids' struggles are more about lagging skills than lack of motivation. The importance of empathy, co-regulation, and relationship-building in reducing conflict. The 3 “plans” parents can choose from when kids aren't meeting expectations—and how to use them effectively. How Collaborative Problem Solving offers a structured yet compassionate alternative to “tough love” or “gentle parenting.” Practical ways to use this approach proactively and in the heat of the moment. How practicing this method not only improves behavior, but also fosters resilience, flexibility, and stronger parent–child bonds.   Whether you're a parent, teacher, or clinician, this conversation offers practical tools and a fresh perspective to help you support kids with understanding, structure, and collaboration   LEARN MORE ABOUT MY GUEST:

You are in for a dose of inspiration in this episode of Raise the Line as we introduce you to a rare disease patient who was a leading force in establishing the diagnosis for her own condition, who played a key role in launching the first phase three clinical trials for it, and who is now coordinating research into the disease and related disorders at one of the nation's top hospitals. Rebecca Salky, RN, was first afflicted at the age of four with MOGAD, an autoimmune disorder of the central nervous system that can cause paralysis, vision loss and seizures. In this fascinating conversation with host Lindsey Smith, Rebecca describes her long and challenging journey with MOGAD, her work at the Neuroimmunology Clinic and Research Lab at Massachusetts General Hospital, and the importance of finding a MOGAD community in her early twenties. “There's a sense of power and security when you have others on your side. You're not alone in this journey of the rare disease,” she explains. Be sure to stay tuned to learn about Rebecca's work in patient advocacy, her experience as a nurse, and the three things she thinks are missing in the care of rare disease patients as our Year of the Zebra series continues.Mentioned in this episode:The MOG ProjectNeuroimmunology Clinic & Research Lab at Mass General If you like this podcast, please share it on your social channels. You can also subscribe to the series and check out all of our episodes at www.osmosis.org/raisethelinepodcast

This week, Dr. Fatima Cody Stanford joins us for a compassionate conversation about weight, health, and healing. We're exploring why obesity should be understood as a chronic disease, not a moral failing, and discussing new treatment options like GLP-1 medications that are changing lives. Dr. Stanford is an obesity medicine Physician-Scientist at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. What makes her perspective so valuable is that she understands the unique experiences of Black women navigating weight and health in a world that often judges us harshly. As one of the few Black women leading research in this field, she sees how chronic stress, systemic barriers, and generational trauma show up in our bodies in ways that traditional medicine has often overlooked. During our conversation, we talk about the science behind weight regulation, how new medications actually work, and why it's time to move beyond BMI as the only measure of health. About the Podcast The Therapy for Black Girls Podcast is a weekly conversation with Dr. Joy Harden Bradford, a licensed Psychologist in Atlanta, Georgia, about all things mental health, personal development, and all the small decisions we can make to become the best possible versions of ourselves. Resources & Announcements Did you know you can leave us a voice note with your questions for the podcast? If you have a question you'd like some feedback on, topics you'd like to hear covered, or want to suggest movies or books for us to review, drop us a message at memo.fm/therapyforblackgirls and let us know what’s on your mind. We just might share it on the podcast. Grab your copy of Sisterhood Heals. Find obesity medicine physicians Where to Find Our Guest Website: https://www.askdrfatima.com Instagram: @askdrfatima LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/askdrfatima/ X (Twitter): https://x.com/askdrfatima Stay Connected Join us in over on Patreon where we're building community through our chats, connecting at Sunday Night Check-Ins, and soaking in the wisdom from exclusive series like Ask Dr. Joy and So, My Therapist Said. ​ Is there a topic you'd like covered on the podcast? Submit it at therapyforblackgirls.com/mailbox. If you're looking for a therapist in your area, check out the directory at https://www.therapyforblackgirls.com/directory. Grab your copy of our guided affirmation and other TBG Merch at therapyforblackgirls.com/shop. The hashtag for the podcast is #TBGinSession. Make sure to follow us on social media: Twitter: @therapy4bgirls Instagram: @therapyforblackgirls Facebook: @therapyforblackgirls Our Production Team Executive Producers: Dennison Bradford & Maya Cole Howard Director of Podcast & Digital Content: Ellice Ellis Producers: Tyree Rush & Ndeye Thioubou See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.