Healthcare Triage
Hospitals Charge Uninsured People a LOT More Money
Health insurance: the holy grail of the US hospital patient. While it isn’t perfect, it does often make a big difference in a patient’s bottom line. That’s not only because it helps pay the bills - it turns out that when you don’t have...
Healthcare Triage
There Are Way too Many False Positives in Prenatal Screenings
Prenatal testing can provide valuable information for anyone with a baby on the way. However, a recent report suggests that for some syndromes, these tests are wrong a majority of the time. It’s not because the tests are “bad”, though,...
Healthcare Triage
How Can We Fix the Culture of Science? A Podcast
Healthcare Triage has a podcast, and that podcast recently dropped a special limited series. We've spent a lot of time thinking about the culture of science and how researchers can improve the reproducibility of research. We also talked...
Healthcare Triage
The Stigma of Mental Illness: Is it All in Your Head?
All too often, mental issues are dismissed with some form of the expression, "it's all in your head." To which we say, duh. Mental illness is very often in your head, as the brain is the primary organ impacted in many, many varieties of...
Healthcare Triage
Is Butt Legs? The Scientific View
In 2019, Hank Green set the internet ablaze with his highly divisive question: Is Butt Legs? Like, the the human butt a thing unto itself, or is it part of your leg? Today, Healthcare Triage, in collaboration with the powers of science,...
Healthcare Triage
Do you Really Need 10,000 Steps a Day?
Your fitness tracker encourages you to take 10,000 steps a day for better health. Science doesn't exactly support that. Today we're talking about the research around step counts and all-cause mortality.
Healthcare Triage
Can a Low Sugar Diet "Starve Cancer?"
Cancer is scary. And fear can lead us to try and find hope in some pretty dubious treatment suggestions. There's a myth circulating in internet health circles that eating a low-sugar diet can somehow starve the cancer and shrink tumors....
Healthcare Triage
How Can a Tick Bite Make You Allergic to Red Meat?
Can you really become allergic to red meat? Yes. Alpha-gal is a sugar molecule found in many mammals, including pigs, cattle, and lamb. And yes, it is possible for the human immune system to become reactive to alpha-gal, and growing...
Healthcare Triage
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy: Mental Health Awareness Month 2022
May is mental health awareness month and in honor of that, we’re dedicating the next four episodes to different treatments for depression, a major mental health issue across the globe. We’ll cover medications – approved and unapproved –...
Healthcare Triage
Can Dosing with Psilocybin Mushrooms Treat Depression?
May is mental health month, and we're talking about treatments for depression. Today, we're looking at the evidence for using psilocybin mushrooms to treat depression. There's lots of studies to look at, so here we goooo!
Healthcare Triage
Ketamine as a Treatment for Depression?
Ketamine is a controlled substance approved by the FDA for use as an anesthetic. It is also used recreationally to create a dissociative state. But what about ketamine for depression? The FDA has approved Spravato (esketamine) for...
Healthcare Triage
Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation: How Does that Work?
May is Mental Awareness Month, and today we're talking about Transcrainial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS). We'll look at how this treatment is administered, dive into the research on how effective this treatment is, compare the results to...
Healthcare Triage
How Do Drugs Get Invented?
With support from the National Institute for Health Care Management, we’re spending the next three episodes talking about how drugs get approved in the United States. In this first episode, we discuss the drug approval process from the...
Healthcare Triage
Not All Drugs Get Approved the Same Way: Exceptions to FDA Rules
All drugs have to follow the same path to approval at the US Food and Drug Administration, except when they don't. Today, with the support of NIHCM, we're learning about the exceptions to the rules that can happen when drugs get...
Healthcare Triage
Just Because a Drug is FDA Approved Doesn't Mean it Works
The drug approval process in the United States is complicated. There are many stakeholders and varying agendas when bringing a drug to market, and profit motives often are as big a factor as helping patients. The loopholes and shortcuts...
Healthcare Triage
100% Remission Rate in Cancer Drug Study is Unprecedented
Recently, a small trial of a drug for colorectal cancer saw a 100% remission rate. That means ALL the people in the study who received the drug experienced a remission of their cancer. It's a small trial, and more study is needed, but...
Healthcare Triage
What's the Research on Abortion Access and Public Health?
Health policies, including those related to abortion, should be guided by data. So what do the data have to say about restricting abortion access? How might it impact public health in the United States and what are some of the best ways...
Healthcare Triage
Covid Vaccine for Kids is Safe and Effective
The day has finally come: We have covid vaccines for kids under five. There are lots of questions and a few concerns. Let’s address them!
Healthcare Triage
Can Weighted Blankets Help Insomnia?
Insomnia is terrible, and it can be more prevalent among individuals with other psychiatric disorders. Treatment is available, but there can be a lot of barriers,. Medication is generally only a short term solution. There are proponents...
Healthcare Triage
Monkeypox: What is It and Who is at Risk?
All this news about the Monkeypox virus as we’re still trying to grapple with Covid. What is Monkeypox, how is it treated, and who is at risk?
Healthcare Triage
Emergency Contraception and Abortion Medications
Pharmaceutical options for both emergency contraception and abortion are available to those who can get pregnant. In this episode we take a look at the availability of these medications, how they work, and the differences between them.
Healthcare Triage
What Makes Covid Omicron Variants More Contagious?
The Omicron variant of Covid-19 emerged a little while ago, and its latest variants are particularly contagious. It is currently the dominant strain of Covid 19 in the US. Why is it more contagious and what are we doing about it?
Healthcare Triage
Misunderstanding the Data on Diet, Exercise and Mortality
We’ve got another nutrition study making a splash in the media. This time we’ve got a combination of diet and exercise claims, complete with all our favorite things: Observational study, limited self-reports, and way too many factors to...
Healthcare Triage
Medical Training Can Reinforce Racial Bias
Racial disparities are rampant in healthcare. In addition to structural inequalities, the issues are partly due to racial bias among healthcare workers. These biases stem, in part, from the way race is presented in medical curricula.