Radio Health Journal – Urban City Podcast Group

Powerful Emotion, Weight, Spine, Health, and Intelligence Truths That Could Change Your Life

Urban City Podcast Group — Sat, 03 Jan 2026 19:45:59 +0000

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Major Takeaways

Emotional intelligence plays a major role in how people manage stress, health, and daily life decisions
• Even small amounts of weight gain can place serious long term strain on the spine and joints
• Strong emotional awareness and physical fitness together lead to better overall health outcomes

The Science Behind Happiness And Human Emotion

You’re listening to Radio Health Journal, the trusted news source for medicine, science and technology. I’m Elizabeth Westfield. I’m Mayan Vastabetancourt.

And I’m Greg Johnson. This week, how those extra few pounds of weight gain are impacting your spine health. Guys tend to gain 10 pounds every 10 years.

So somebody who is ultra fit in their 20s, if you think about that, could be extremely disabled in their 60s and 70s. But first, why can’t scientists agree on what emotions are? It’s a field that is characterized as much by sense of opinions than by actual facts. All that and more this week on Radio Health Journal.

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Just download the free Upside app and use promo code NEW5 to get up to a $5 bonus on your first tank. That’s code NEW5 to get up to a $5 bonus on your first tank. What would you say happiness looks like? Some may point to a person who looks relaxed or content, while others would say it’s someone who’s smiling or laughing.

It’s no secret that on any given day, humans feel a wide variety of emotions. While they’re present in nearly every aspect of our lives, Andrew Ortoni says we still don’t know much about them. Ortoni is a professor emeritus of psychology, education, and computer science at Northwestern University and has been researching emotions since the 1980s.

He says a lot of the discussions are opinion-based because researchers can’t agree on any one theory about what emotions exactly are. However, we do know that they help us navigate our daily lives. They help organisms manage the vicissitudes of everyday life.

They help them deal with problems which they’re confronted. Emotions help them learn from experience what’s beneficial, what’s potentially harmful, what’s helpful and so on. This explanation is based around one of the most prominent theories at the moment, called appraisal theory.

It’s the idea that we’re constantly assessing the world around us and responding to it through our emotions. Ortoni believes that emotions are our reactions to the psychologically important situations we encounter. They can be real world things or they can be memories.

They can be generated externally or internally. But they’re things that we’re processing that are important to us. Put another way, if you don’t care about something, you’re not going to have an emotional reaction to it.

Emotion presupposes caring in the sense of, this matters to me, you know, this impinges on my goals and my interests and my concerns in some way, or at least I see it as so impinging. While appraisal theory is well accepted by scientists, there are still some critics. A popular debate is whether all humans have a main set of basic emotions.

Many researchers say yes, but there’s still been no consensus on what these emotions are. When you say to them, well, what are your criteria for something being a basic emotion? They’ll either say, well, it’s obvious, anger, fear, happiness, sadness, and maybe a couple of others. But again, when you look at the field, the number of proposed basic emotions amongst basic emotion theorists ranges from about two to 30 or more.

So again, they kind of, in one sense, they don’t agree as to what they’re talking about. My claim is they don’t even know what they’re talking about. The debate even hits on seemingly simple feelings.

For example, some scientists believe hunger and thirst are emotions, while others like Ortoni think that they’re completely separate sensations. I had a long argument, oh, probably 30 years ago with a Nobel laureate who insisted that hunger was an emotion. So what are you going to do? I mean, who’s going to be the arbiter of a disagreement like that? I mean, I was astounded.

I thought, my God, this guy’s got a Nobel Prize. And from my perspective, he didn’t know what he was talking about. And from his perspective, I didn’t know what I was talking about.

And I mean, I don’t have any more entitlement to say I’m right than he does to say that he’s right. So that’s just an example of what I mean when I say, you know, it’s a field that is characterized as much by sense of opinions than by actual facts. And even if Ortoni’s colleagues continue this battle over basic emotions, he says it doesn’t really matter because it won’t help us advance our understanding of emotions, what they do, how they help us, or why we even have them.

But with appraisal theory, Ortoni argues a potential answer to those questions. He believes our emotions are a direct and instant response to our perception of the world around us, rather than the reality. With that being said, can we change how our minds automatically respond? Ortoni doesn’t seem to think so.

He believes we’re all born with our own unique emotional baseline, just like how we all differ in height, our emotional capacity does too. Clearly, to some extent, one can learn just by using tricks like, you know, count to 10 before you react. But they’re tricks and those are tricks to overcome a natural response.

I mean, you’ve probably encountered people that we call sort of flat affect people, people where they never seem to react to anything, either positively or negatively. Okay, then there are other people that the slightest little thing sets them off. I mean, walking cases of extreme emotional people, doesn’t matter whether it’s positive or negative, their reactions always seem to be excessive and intense.

I think these are just individual differences. There probably is just something one can do to some degree, but still you’re trying to overcome these natural innate personality characteristics. Again, this is opinion, not fact.

An opinion that Nadine Leavitt challenges. She’s the author of children’s books and social emotional learning curriculums called My Mama Says Inside Me Lives a Village. Her program teaches kids how to understand and regulate their emotions in order to foster their emotional intelligence.

Emotional intelligence, I think, comes in three levels. The first level is, can you identify emotions in yourself and other people? And that’s sort of the basics. The second level is, can you separate out your emotional responses from your thought patterns and behavior? So I don’t think you can control your emotional responses.

So you’re going to feel angry or happy or any of those kinds of emotions. But you can control the way you think about them and the way you behave. For example, Leavitt says it’s okay to feel angry, but it’s not okay to punch someone as a response.

She believes the third level of emotional intelligence is being able to recognize all of your feelings at any given time and then understand what they’re trying to tell you. Ortoni says this final skill will allow you to respond more rationally in daily situations. And though Ortoni thinks a person’s natural emotional intelligence cannot drastically change, Leavitt believes it’s something that not only can be taught, but becomes more natural over time.

The more that you practice it, it’s just a habit. It’s just a skill like anything else that you learn. There’s a literacy piece to it, obviously being able to understand how emotions feel, understand how emotions look in ourselves and other people.

And that’s just an awareness, right? The more we can start to point that out, the better the habits become. Leavitt says the feeling of different emotions can change depending on our situation. Feeling happy when you’re about to ride a roller coaster is usually coupled with nervousness and excitement.

However, that happiness looks different when you’re on the couch with a bowl of popcorn watching your favorite movie. As Leavitt researched these variations, she realized emotional intelligence was more important than she thought. I realized that emotional processing is such a huge foundational skill for success in anything from academic achievement, professional achievement, to relationship building, to responsible decision making, self-awareness, social awareness, all of it.

But what happens when you don’t process your emotions? Many of us know the feeling of ignoring certain sensations in the hopes that they’ll magically disappear. Unfortunately, Leavitt has firsthand experience of why that doesn’t work. She was in law school about to take her bar exam when a family crisis hit.

My mom was super sick and sort of in and out of hospital for a good part of a year. And at one point, it looked like, you know, it was going to go south and that she was going to probably not make it. And at the time, I was sort of not going to process those emotions.

I kept thinking to myself, I have to soldier on, have to be strong. I’m not going to cry. And the reason for that was just I was scared that I would break down and not be able to do any of my bar exam.

I wouldn’t be able to focus on things. And so I just sort of ignored it and repressed it and then ended up with 17 stomach ulcers. Leavitt says she’s the poster child of what can happen when you refuse to process your emotions.

Her curriculum teaches kids to think of their feelings like messengers. These messengers take their job seriously. So if they can’t get your attention the usual way, they’ll adjust their delivering strategy.

So you’re going to start saying things like, maybe I’ll get louder or bigger somehow or make bigger movements if they’ll notice me. Or maybe I’m going to call a few more of my friends to get their attention. And maybe I’ll just go really quiet and sneak up on them and suddenly explode in their face and then they have to pay attention.

All in the name of getting our attention. Leavitt says that we need to take time to process each emotion without distraction, even if it’s just for a minute. Science has proven that even with billions of neurons, we can’t multitask.

So thinking that we can handle multiple emotions at once can lead to many more problems. The concept that emotions can hijack us is exactly that, that these big, big emotions that come into the hippocampus of our brain and they’re trying to be processed. And they literally, that’s when overwhelm and things like that, they shut out all ability for anyone to be able to come out of the waiting room and into the hippocampus.

And so I don’t know if anyone’s ever, you know, if you’ve ever felt grief or overwhelm and things like that, but you can read the same sentence 30 times and nothing will come in. Which is why Leavitt says emotional awareness is critical for developing high emotional intelligence. She admits that she can get drawn into checking things off a list and going through the motions of life, but says the problem with living that way is that it doesn’t allow us to truly be aware of our senses.

While there’s still conflicting research surrounding emotions, that doesn’t mean that humans are powerless. You can still learn how to regulate your emotions and better control how you respond to any given situation. To help in this journey, Leavitt offers a free quiz for you to check in with your own feelings on her website, emotionwonderland.com. And for more information about Ortoni’s research, the second edition of his book, The Cognitive Structure of Emotions, is available now.

It’s co-authored by Gerald Klor and Alan Collins. You can find more information about Nadine Leavitt, Andrew Ortoni, and all of our guests on our website, radiohealthjournal.org. This segment originally aired in September 2022. Our writer-producer is Kristen Farrah.

Our executive producer is Amira Zaveri. I’m Elizabeth Westfield. Coming up, why being skinny without muscle may be just as harmful to your health as being overweight.

When a Radio Health Journal returns. That smells good, Ma. What you making? Just a little something.

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Even those who report they understand the basics of nutrition struggle with foundational aspects of diet, like understanding labels and tracking nutrients such as carbs and fiber. Hunter Stoller says he never considered what was healthy growing up. His diet was simply whatever was available.

And I would have cereal at two in the morning because I just wouldn’t sleep. And it would be three servings of these sugary cereals that are bombs of sugar. And I wouldn’t even think anything of it.

And I didn’t know anything about labels. I didn’t know what ingredients I should be looking for and avoiding. And I was 50 pounds overweight until my sophomore year of college, which was five or six years ago.

And that’s when I really had my turning point and my completely 180 relationship with food. I went from not caring about food, always feeling sluggish, thinking that my acne was just, you know, a result of me living and not that anything I was doing was a consequence of it. Many people first think of how weight gain will affect their aesthetics.

But as Stoller mentioned, how you look isn’t anywhere near the biggest worry when putting on weight. Dr. Christopher Good is a spine surgeon and CEO of the Virginia Spine Institute. He says that extra fat, specifically around the midsection of the body, increases the stress on your spine, bones and joints, while also pulling your body’s center of gravity forward.

As we lean forward with the extra weight, that does a number of particularly bad things. Your muscles function best when you’re aligned properly, meaning when you sit or stand, your ears should be right above your ankles. And when you have extra gravity pulling the weight forward, that puts more stress on the muscles in your back.

They’re essentially working overtime to hold you upright. And those muscles, they fatigue. They have a lot of trouble.

The discs are the cushions in your spine. And when you carry extra weight around, it compresses those discs in the joints of your spine, which not only can increase pain from the pressure, but the more we carry around over time, the faster those things may wear out. And so, you know, a small difference over a long period of time can have a huge impact.

This compression also impacts other joints like our hips and knees, which can cause major disabilities. And though many people may think this effect mainly happens with major changes in weight, Good says that even a small amount of weight gain can increase the stress on the body. There’s kind of this rule of general rule of thumb out there that they say one pound of body weight is like four pounds of stress on your spine.

Some people say five. I think I like that. Is it kind of a general rule of thumb? The point is it’s not a one to one relationship.

And why that’s important is even a relatively small weight gain or loss can make a pretty big difference for you. And that’s nice because it can be a little daunting to think, well, I need to lose 50 pounds. That’s scary.

But if you think, well, losing 10 pounds will take 40 pounds of pressure off my back, I can make a difference with a relatively achievable goal. So while the bad news is that a few extra pounds can have a detrimental effect on our body, losing that same small amount of weight can put us right back on the healthy track. Still, it can be hard to notice an extra five pounds, especially around the holidays.

And it’s not that a few pounds will ruin your health, but Good says it’s the compounding effects of continually gaining a few extra pounds every year that will ultimately cause problems. Ten pounds of weight is not necessarily a horrible problem for someone, but I tend to tell especially a lot of men I see, you know, guys tend to gain 10 pounds every 10 years, right? Like so somebody who is ultra fit in their 20s, if you think about that, could be extremely disabled in their 60s and 70s. And we have to work harder and harder with each passing decade to try and counteract that if we specifically want to feel good as we age, which we all do want that.

But it’s a lot of hard work. Certain factors like muscle loss, hormonal changes and a slowing metabolism all make weight loss harder as we age, which is why Stoller is thankful he got his health on track during college. After trying and failing to lose weight by following all of the fad diets, Stoller says Weight Watchers, a weight management program, helped him create lasting change.

The program taught him the foundational parts of a healthy diet he’d been missing. And that taught me how to build a balanced plate. And it really motivated me because it taught me that food is fuel and you don’t need to restrict any food.

You just need to be aware of how much you’re having of certain foods. And it fully changed my relationship with alcohol, the gym. I used to hate going to the gym.

And now here I am. I’m working out pretty much every day and people tell me it’s too much. But it’s what I feel the best doing.

And it really is a complete 180 in my entire life. Stoller began growing an online following in college and in his senior year, he decided to become a certified health coach so that he could provide accurate information to his followers. After now helping hundreds of people with their health journeys, Stoller says one of the main mistakes people make is diving straight into the deep end.

People skip the basics. They love majoring in the minors. And what I will say is there’s a few foundational steps and a framework when you want to get healthy, whether you’re starting from step zero or step 50.

And those are prioritize your sleep. I wear an Oura rink and I love it. I try to get at least seven hours of sleep a night.

It’s so important for your body to recover. As well as focusing on a high quality diet made up of protein and fiber. But both Stoller and Good mention that losing weight isn’t the only goal.

Building muscle is an important part of this equation so that we’re not becoming frail as we age. Muscles support our body. Muscles burn more calories than fat.

And so losing weight and going after cardio for that purpose is great. But we have to have some muscle building exercises in there so that we don’t get weak and frail. If you’re super duper thin with no muscle mass and you get weak bones and weak muscles, that might have as much downside for some people as actually being really overweight and getting all the joint problems that comes from that.

Lifting weights is often touted as the best way to build muscle and increase strength. And while that’s true, it’s not the only option. If that sounds intimidating or boring, there are so many other options that can help get you back on a healthy path.

You want to find the workouts that work best for you. And I used to be someone who only goes to the gym and strength trains. And now I’ve fallen in love with these high intensity boot camp classes.

And we’ll see how long that lasts. And then who knows what the next wave will be. No matter what you choose, Good says it’s important that the exercises are building up the muscles that protect our spine, which includes the glutes and core.

And I’m not talking about having a six pack. I’m talking about the deeper muscles. But doing exercises like planks, Pilates, things that strengthen our midsection go a long way to supporting our whole body, but also to slowing down kind of the rate of degeneration.

Because if the muscles are strong as you use your body, it transmits less bad force into the bones and joints of the spine and the discs and things. So exercise, along with a nutritious diet and plenty of sleep, is the recipe that will keep you feeling young as you age. Stoller says it can be really helpful to find inspiration and motivation through other people on similar journeys, but stresses that no two people will have the same trajectory.

There’s no one size fits all when it comes to nutrition and health as a whole. Different workouts will work for different people. Different types of diets will work for different people.

Some people thrive off of vegan diets. Some people thrive off of mostly meat diets. And it’s all about finding what works best for you and not just seeing what someone’s doing online, seeing the way that they’re eating.

You like the way that they look or how they say they feel. And you think you have to duplicate exactly what they’re doing. And by individuality, the idea that everyone’s preferences and everyone’s needs are different is really important.

And when I work with clients, I’ve helped over 300 men and women lose weight, feel healthier or just develop a healthier relationship with food. I’ve taught many different ways of eating because there is no one size fits all. You can find more information about Dr. Christopher Good, Hunter Stoller and all of our guests on our website, RadioHealthJournal.org. Our writer-producer is Kristen Farah.

Our production manager is Jason Dickey. I’m Greg Johnson. Radio Health Journal returns in just a moment.

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You have a bigger brain than your ancestors, and that’s good news. A study published in JAMA Neurology shows that human brain size has been steadily increasing in people born after 1930. The average volume is more than 6% greater, and the brain surface area has increased by nearly 15%.

The researchers think that these larger brains may reduce the cases of age-related brain conditions like dementia, since it has more capacity to adapt to any changes. Why are kids so worried? Since the pandemic, cases of anxiety have been on the rise in young people. So how can parents help ease their children’s anxious feelings? Alyssa Farley, a professor of psychology at Boston University, says the answer may seem counterintuitive.

Instead of letting your child avoid distressing situations, Farley advises parents to encourage their child to gradually face their fears. And finally, how to spend your money for maximum happiness. Loneliness has been a growing epidemic in America.

Thankfully, research points to one strategy that can help. Spending money on experiences rather than material items. This method helps build and foster a social connection that could lead to more happiness overall.

The work is published in the journal Behavioral Decision Making. And that’s Medical Notes this week. I’m Mayan Vastabetancourt.

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Thank you for joining us this week and every week as we break down the science stories you need to know. You can find all of our past segments and guests on our website, radiohealthjournal.org, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and X for daily content, and tune in next week for another edition of Radio Health Journal.

Shocking Truths About Body Donation and Ukraine Doctors Using Medical Apps

Urban City Podcast Group — Sat, 27 Dec 2025 19:15:03 +0000

Urban City Podcast Group

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Major Takeaways

America’s body donation industry operates with shockingly little regulation leaving families and donors vulnerable to exploitation
Ukrainian doctors are using medical apps and peer to peer support from global physicians to save lives during wartime
Technology is filling deadly healthcare gaps where governments and systems have failed

Body Donation and Ukraine Doctors Using Medical Apps

You’re listening to Radio Health Journal, the trusted news source for medicine, science and technology. I’m Elizabeth Westfield. I’m Mayan Vasta Betancourt.

And I’m Greg Johnson. This week, doctors helping doctors in war-torn Ukraine via a medical app that offers clinical support during a crisis. 5,000 physicians in Ukraine that are using the app.

We also have specialists from all over the world who are giving peer-to-peer review. But first, who’s making sure our loved ones’ remains are safe? The donor having the autonomy, even if they’re not there anymore, they don’t oppose the fact that they’re being donated is really important. All that and more this week on Radio Health Journal.

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This magical place, as some people might call it, is where the Capital One bank guy says, what’s in your wallet? That’s a lovely tale. Terms apply. See CapitalOne.com slash bank for details.

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Enjoy the go with Charmin. Organ donation is a highly regulated system to protect both the donors and recipients. Federal and state laws protect against exploitation and trafficking while ensuring a fair and ethical process.

But what’s surprising is that this strict oversight doesn’t really apply to the rest of the body. Each year, thousands of people donate their bodies to science to be used for medical education or research purposes. But aside from a 1968 law, the human body donation market is essentially the Wild West of science.

Joy Balta says this lack of oversight and regulation has led to a dangerous absence of accountability for this industry. We know nothing actually about what happens. So some of the research that I’ve done and my PhD students have looked into was asking body donation programs about kind of what they do, their operations.

We’ve had donation programs that have refused to be part of the survey. Some of them said that their even administration advised them not to participate because that would maybe put them at higher risk and being exposed to kind of what’s happening, what they’re doing. Balta is a professor of anatomy and founding director of the Anatomy Learning Institute at Point Loma Nazarene University.

He says that we shouldn’t assume all donation centers are operating illegally or unethically. But there’s a lot of fear of what could be happening due to this lack of oversight, as well as past cases. Over the years, various companies in this industry have been exposed for using bodies without consent, illegally selling body parts and desecrating the remains.

Some notable cases have involved the bodies of loved ones being sold to the Department of Defense and used without consent in explosion and vehicle crash testing. There should be some law to ensure that illegal activities are not happening and stuff happens all the time. There’s been, I’m not going to necessarily name kind of cases, but there’s multiple cases that are from last year and the year before and the year before that.

So we’re not living in history. This is still happening today and it’s going to continue to happen until we do regulate the space. There’s always going to be some bad actors that are going to abuse the fact that there is no oversight for their best interest.

In an effort to establish some sort of guidelines, the American Association for Anatomy created a task force to come up with the best practices and recommended standards. It was published in 2024, but Balta, who is a contributor on the project, says the finished product was years in the making. It took years to be able to establish a committee and then it took years to build those best practices.

It wasn’t a short process. There were multiple people involved in that document. Each of us came from different backgrounds.

Some of us are faculty teaching anatomy. Some of us are administrators of body donation programs. I was the director of the body donation program and encyclical services at Ohio State University at the time.

With so many different perspectives, Balta says it took a while to create a document that everyone agreed represented a fair and ethical perspective on human body donation. The long process also may have stemmed from the fact that there had never been anything like this published before, meaning that an entire industry profiting off the sale of human remains has been operating without official guidelines and continues to function without any meaningful oversight. That was the first comprehensive best practices document.

Unfortunately, there aren’t even laws around some of those areas. So we are asking people to be ethical and follow best practices, even though there isn’t a regulatory body that oversees this and ensures that it’s being mandated. We’re just hoping that people and their leadership would kind of push to use those best practices to ensure that we’re advocating for those donors and we’re treating them in the most ethical way after they’ve given their bodies to us, after they’ve passed.

Balta hopes this document informs future legislation, but that dream may be far from coming true. The Uniform Anatomical Gift Act, passed in 1968, is the most universal law we have for donations. It mainly dictates who can authorize an anatomical donation and gives guidance on that process.

However, it doesn’t really touch on what the expectations are after a body is donated. There’s kind of some oversight in some states. So, for example, there’s like a board, an anatomical gift board in Florida, that in theory there should be overseeing, but they don’t have any legal authority to implement anything.

So like if they want to inspect something, they don’t have the authority to demand that. They don’t have the authority to enforce something. So there’s no legal power behind their work.

But yeah, different states do have different applications of it and it varies per state, but does not go into the post-donation part when we are working with the donor, when the donor is in the facility. So you have a chain of custody. The donor leaves the mortuary, comes to the facility, and that’s it when it comes to kind of paperwork until it leaves the facility.

There’s essentially no governing body doing checks on these facilities to make sure that these companies are running their operations safely and ethically. Balta says that most of the cases of illegal activity we know about are because of insider whistleblowers or family members of a donated body. That only shows you that there could be more happening.

We’re just waiting for things to kind of come out for us to know about it. But while this has been the standard of practice in America for decades, Balta says it’s much different in other countries. So I trained and taught in Europe.

So I studied in Scotland and I taught there and in Ireland. And they have inspectors. There’s an inspector of anatomy.

Somebody who comes and inspects the facilities, inspects the documentation, has the authority to shut down a body donation program. In the UK, there is the King’s inspector at the moment of anatomy, and that’s their job. There’s the Human Tissue Act that governs the space.

And it’s well managed. You don’t hear about there aren’t stories that come out like that over there because there’s more oversight, because there are people working to ensure that that doesn’t happen. Balta says a main hurdle to having those same standards in America is having to get all the states on the same page.

I’m not saying that that’s a reason not to. What I’m saying, it just makes it a little bit harder. But also politics is politics.

There needs to be a good reason for something to be pushed through the agenda. If it’s not loud enough, then politicians, I’m not sure that it’s going to be going on their agenda, on the priority list of their agenda. And we’re not even close.

We’re not even kind of having the conversations that hopefully one day we will. We’re not. We’re not having that conversation.

I think hopefully we’re able to start that conversation soon. There are a few points Balta thinks need to be at the top of these discussions, one being how we treat unclaimed bodies. Earlier this year, Radio Health Journal released a segment revealing the thousands of bodies in America that go unclaimed each year.

Instead, they’re left to the state and usually cremated. However, most counties are allowed to donate these remains to science without consent from the deceased or their family. A 2023 paper published in JAMA looking at Texas medical schools found that their use of unclaimed bodies jumped from 64 bodies in 2017 to 446 in 2021.

But is that unethical? Since it falls into a gray area for many people, it’s a topic Balta believes needs more attention and guidance. This body is contributing towards science and benefiting science and advancing medicine. But that’s not a good enough reason to kind of donate the body or give it away.

It’s not even donated, it’s being given without knowing that this could be somebody who had religious beliefs that could go against that. And that’s not OK. We shouldn’t be making those decisions for financial reasons, the ethical reasons and considerations of that human body should come first.

We can’t just assume that they’re OK with it or that because they were unclaimed were able to benefit from their donation. Another priority for Balta is making sure donation programs all have a transparent and standard structure for applications. Consent forms can vary drastically from one institution to the next.

Balta says that some completely refuse to disclose how they’ll use the body once it’s donated. Many forms list what types of research could be done to the body, but some don’t even give an option to opt out of anything the donor or loved one is uncomfortable with. Yes, it’s good to know that these are the ways I’m going to be donating my body to.

But can I say I don’t want to? And I think we might have like a place where they can write comments, but we don’t give like a checkmark like yes for this, no for that, yes for that. And there are multiple reasons for that. But yeah, I think that would be really helpful that people are aware.

And in some places, the consent form says it’s just one sentence. I am donating my body to this donation program. That’s it doesn’t go through their rights, doesn’t go through what’s going to happen after disposition of the human remains.

Usually forms are multiple pages, but you could have a form that is one sentence. Balta has published research looking through consent forms across the U.S. and notes how drastically these applications can vary. But if we zoom out and look at the industry as a whole, a larger issue may be the fact that parts of the human body donation industry are for profit.

Balta and the rest of the task force argue in their paper that the most ethical way to be conducting business in this field is to operate under revenue neutrality. While most university programs are nonprofit, there are other companies actively profiting off the sale of human remains. There are the body donation programs that are staff of a university.

There are faculty members, but they don’t like they’re not working for themselves. They’re not trying to make money that they’re going to benefit from. And hopefully they’re working towards the revenue neutrality.

But that’s what we’re trying to push for. The for profit companies don’t have to think about that. They don’t have to.

And some of them are. I don’t want to kind of lump everybody. Some of them are better than others.

Can we say like, oh, we don’t need those for profit companies. We should just rely on body donation programs and like get rid of those. I don’t know if I could say that, unfortunately.

The main hurdle being that universities sometimes need to use these companies to source bodies. Balta says there’s simply not enough body donation programs at universities to fill the need. If we had enough body donation programs, we wouldn’t need to rely on for profit companies.

And I’ll give you an example of that. This fall, fall 2025, I was not able to request donors from my local donation programs. And that was two weeks before the start of the semester.

And I was stuck thinking, what am I going to do? I’ve written best practices and I don’t want to go to I don’t want to kind of go towards for profit companies. And again, some of them are better than others. So there’s also wisdom in who we work with.

But for my own kind of best practice, I would prefer to work with the body donation program. I communicated with donation programs across the country and I was willing to have donors come from states that are very far away because I would rather work with donation programs. But we don’t have enough donations happening in donation programs.

Balta says people may choose to donate their body to a company because they cover more costs or are simply the only option someone is aware of. So while Balta’s ideal world would be that there are no for profit companies in this space, that’s not realistic right now. You can find more information about Joy Balta and all of our guests on our website, RadioHealthJournal.org. Our writer producer is Kristen Farah.

Our executive producer is Amira Zaferi. I’m Elizabeth Westfield. Coming up, the technology that’s helping trained doctors during war when RadioHealthJournal returns.

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Call 1-800-526-7736 or visit trmfya.com. It’s been three years since Russian forces mounted a full scale invasion of Ukraine. Today, the fighting there is still in full force. Many citizens have fled the eastern part of the country where the war rages on or have fled the country altogether.

This includes many doctors, which has created a medical crisis for the relatively few doctors that remain. There just aren’t enough medical specialists left in Ukraine to serve the remaining population. Because of staffing shortages in hospitals and medical centers, patients needing specialized care often end up seeing the local pediatrician or a first-year resident who may not know how to address their issues, like a recent heart attack or even an abscessed tooth.

We’re seeing physicians being overwhelmed. A lot of physicians have moved from rural areas of Ukraine, so there’s definitely a shortage of specialists. And for example, where now we’re seeing a family physician who has to help deliver babies in the basement without any electricity because their town is surrounded by Russian forces.

So it’s definitely became very challenging and the resources are scarce because the country is at war. That’s Dr. Olga Myhudiak, chief operating officer of Global Medical Knowledge Alliance, also known as GMKA. It’s a nonprofit organization that provides medical training and educational webinars for Ukrainian doctors.

MKA was co-founded in 2017 before the war started by Dr. Nelia Melnichek, an associate surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and assistant professor of surgery at Harvard Medical School. Seeing what was happening in her beloved country from afar, Melnichek knew she had to do something to help her fellow countrymen. That’s when she heard a story that gave her an idea for a medical app that would assist doctors in Ukraine from anywhere in the world.

One of our resident physician was in practicing in a small town and he had a case with a patient with a tooth abscess and he didn’t know how to pretty much deal with it. So he called his colleague at a bigger hospital in Kiev who guided him through the entire procedure via a video call. And therefore this resident was or junior physician was able to help this patient.

And that is how the idea for HealUA app, which provides peer-to-peer reviews, was created. With the help of GMKA and a technology company in Ukraine called Impact, Melnichek created a mobile app called HealUA that provides peer-to-peer support to medical professionals in Ukraine with other medical professionals in the U.S. and around the world. She knew the tool needed to be a mobile app rather than a computer program so that it could be accessed anywhere with a smartphone.

Doctors can take a photo of the patient’s injury or clinical presentation and submit a case on the spot. The HealUA app, which can be downloaded for free, was up and running three months after the war started. With this app, isolated Ukrainian physicians can submit a case and get a second opinion, usually within 24 to 48 hours.

It’s very hard conditions now in hospitals to work. So it’s very important when we have someone that could give us any advices and we really appreciate that we can get this advice very quickly by using HealUA. Because when we download our cases, we can receive answers very quickly and from doctors from Ukraine, but also what is very important for us, we have advices from doctors from USA and it really helps when, you know, you have doubts what to do and especially in a low setting conditions that sometimes we need to work through.

So it’s a wonderful to have opportunity to have a feedback from other doctors. That’s Dr. Olya Kostynchak, an oncology hematologist working in Western Ukraine. She was assigned an unconscious lymphoma patient and didn’t have the necessary experience to provide proper treatment.

Luckily, a specialist in Boston was able to provide her with a diagnosis and treatment protocol through the HealUA app. He gave the advice with diagnosis steps and what we can do in our setting and also how can we manage this patient. And by the way, not only this, but we leave coments about how is this patient going on now.

So it’s not just for the beginning, but through the whole course of treatment, this patient. And for me, it’s just wonderful. A team at GMKA monitors all submissions to make sure they’re from verified physicians on both ends.

They also monitor comments to make sure they’re medically appropriate. The founders of GMKA hope to see the app used around the world wherever physician and specialist shortages exist, such as in rural India and Africa. Dr. Daria Kizheb is a Ukrainian physician practicing at a major cancer center in the United States and offers peer-to-peer review through the app.

She says that while posted cases are complex and that this ability to get a second opinion from doctors in the U.S. is invaluable, she cautions against overstating the role of international expertise. I would like to not overstate the role of international physicians and expertise in this, because I think, you know, in Ukraine, there’s also a good amount of expertise where we were not available. Of course, it’s very helpful, but I don’t know that necessarily the patient would die in most cases if this was not available.

However, she does think the app helps to expedite Ukrainian patients’ treatments. One case I can think of is a patient with an advanced form of breast cancer that is very aggressive, called triple negative breast cancer. And the question was, do we need to do advanced diagnostics for this patient or can we just treat them with a targeted drug? Because the advanced diagnostics, the kind of lumbar puncture and kind of waiting for the result would have delayed treatment.

So I said, you know, in my practice or in our practice, you can just treat with this targeted drug. So the patient was able to get treatment faster. And this is for a condition where, you know, it can progress very quickly and patients can die generally within an average of about three months.

So I think it was useful, my advice for the patient to get treatment sooner. Majodiak says the greatest challenge in creating the app was translating from Ukrainian to English and vice versa. But she says that AI technology provided a quick solve to that problem.

You can learn more about the Heal UA app and all of our guests by visiting our website at RadioHealthJournal.org. Our Raider producer this week is Polly Hanson. Our lead producer is Kristen Farrah. Our production manager is Jason Dickey.

I’m Greg Johnson. Radio Health Journal returns in just a moment. Protect your home and auto by bundling them with Progressive and you’ll have a little less to worry about.

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See, because you’re always on that phone. I’m serious. I read that three out of four adults in the United States have a high risk factor for severe COVID-19 and black folks like us with certain conditions like diabetes, heart disease, mental health conditions or being 50 and older, like you, are at high risk.

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Me, too. Now get out of my kitchen. Visit wetalkwerise.com to learn more.

Brought to you by Pfizer. Medical Notes this week. We can diagnose food allergies earlier than ever before.

Since blood tests have high rates of false positives, the current standard for diagnosing a food allergy is consuming the product in front of a physician. However, a study in the Journal of Clinical Investigation could change this process altogether. Researchers found that measuring water loss from the skin can predict a severe reaction to food quicker and more quickly.

This means that food can be consumed earlier and easier than current testing methods. Yet another reason to eat more produce. Fruits and vegetables contain compounds called flavonoids, which have anti-cancer, antioxidant, and anti-inflammatory properties.

Research published in the journal Endocrinology shows how flavonoids may reduce the risk and severity of endometriosis. Researchers hope this connection will help drug development for the painful condition. And finally, should grade school classrooms be more active? Literacy skills are usually taught to young kids while seated at a desk, but this may be hindering their ability to absorb the information.

Research in the journal Educational Psychology Review studied 57 first-graders in Denmark. One group of students learned how to sound out letters at a desk, while the other group used their body to act out the shape of the letter. The kids whose learning involved movement doubled their test scores in spelling and letter recognition after just four weeks.

And that’s Medical Notes this week. I’m Mayan Vastabetancourt. A KFC tale in the pursuit of flavor.

The holidays were tricky for the colonel. He loved people, but he also loved peace and quiet. So he cooked up KFC’s $4.99 chicken pot pie, warm, flaky, with savory sauce and vegetables.

It’s a tender, chicken-filled excuse to get some time to yourself and step away from decking the halls. Whatever that means. The colonel lived so we could chicken.

KFC’s chicken pot pie. The best $4.99 you’ll spend this season. Prices and participation may vary while supplies last.

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Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates. Thank you for joining us this week and every week as we break down the science stories you need to know. You can find all of our past segments and guests on our website, RadioHealthJournal.org or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Follow us on Instagram, Facebook and X for daily content and tune in next week for another edition of Radio Health Journal.

Compounding Pharmacies The Unsung Heroes Of Healthcare

Urban City Podcast Group — Thu, 20 Nov 2025 17:27:53 +0000

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Major Takeaways

GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic may reduce alcohol intake by altering both peripheral and central mechanisms related to reward and intoxication.
These medications slow gastric emptying, delaying the rise of blood alcohol concentration and reducing early feelings of intoxication.
Early research suggests GLP-1s could become a new treatment option for alcohol use disorder, but more studies are needed to confirm long-term effects.

Compounding Pharmacies The Unsung Heroes Of Healthcare

You’re listening to Radio Health Journal, the trusted news source for medicine, science and technology. I’m Elizabeth Westfield. I’m Mayan Vasta Betancourt.

And I’m Greg Johnson. This week, are weight loss drugs the answer to alcohol addiction? If the GLP-1 drugs are kind of able to engage both, both the periphery and the central mechanisms, that might be an effective way to reduce drinking. But first, the health care resource you may have used without ever knowing about it.

An incredible number of patients really benefit from having medications compounded for them. This is a necessary industry. It’s not going anywhere, nor should it go anywhere.

All that and more this week on Radio Health Journal. Mmm, that smells good, Ma. What you making? Just a little something.

Collard greens, cornbread, fried chicken and peach cobbler. Some leftovers. Some leftovers? Listen, I’ve been meaning to talk to you about some new COVID information I saw online.

See, because you’re always on that phone. I’m serious. I read that three out of four adults in the United States have a high risk factor for severe COVID-19.

And Black folks like us, with certain conditions like diabetes, heart disease, mental health conditions or being 50 and older, like you, are at high risk. Boy, you sound like a commercial. I’m just saying.

I know you love your ginger teas and essential oils, but remember there are treatment options for COVID-19 if you ever get it again. Uh-huh. I promise if I get sick again, I’ll call my doctor to ask about my options.

I love you. I love you too. I’m glad we had this talk.

Me too. Now get out of my kitchen. Visit wetalkwerise.com to learn more.

Brought to you by Pfizer. With a majority of Americans taking at least one medication every day, we’re no strangers to prescriptions. But what happens when the medication you need isn’t offered in the right dosage? Or you’re allergic to a binding ingredient in the FDA-approved drug? That’s when you call a compounding pharmacist.

While FDA-approved products are always the first choice of treatment, these specialists are able to create a new version of the drug that fits a patient’s specific needs. An instance in which they might not be appropriate is, say, if a patient has a child and can’t swallow a tablet. The only approved medication is available in a tablet, so the pharmacist can custom-formulate it into a liquid version for the child to take.

Another instance might be if a patient needs a different dosage form than what’s commercially available, or a different route of administration, or they’re allergic to an excipient, and a lot of animal drugs are compounded. There’s not that many FDA-approved drugs for animals that can treat the range of animal sizes that exist, so from tiny kittens to giant elephants, compounding pharmacists are able to formulate medications to treat all of those different species. That’s Tenille Davis, chief advocacy officer for the Alliance for Pharmacy Compounding.

As a compounding pharmacist herself for 16 years, Davis says it’s the avenue for patients when there are no options left. That could be due to an allergy, like she mentioned, but compounding pharmacists also come into play when the FDA-approved drugs simply aren’t available. When a drug goes on the FDA’s drug shortage list, a compounding pharmacist can come in and essentially create what’s called essentially a copy of that formulation to treat a patient.

We’ve seen that a lot in the last couple of years when really popular GLP-1 drugs were on shortage. A lot of compounding pharmacies were able to fill in that gap for patients. Compounding pharmacists are nothing new.

In fact, before there were mass-produced pharmaceuticals, your local pharmacist would be the go-to for any treatment needed. A town doctor would say, oh, this patient needs tincture of whatever. And the pharmacist would say, OK, I have these bulk ingredients, let me mix up tincture of whatever for this patient.

And that’s essentially compounding at its root. And then kind of as processes became standardized through industrialization and, you know, there’s an explosion of different medications available, the medications begin to be produced in mass. And so pharmacists were no longer having to do compounding all the time.

They were having to dispense previously manufactured pharmaceuticals. That’s Dr. James Watson, an emergency physician and medical toxologist at Maine Medical Center. He says that this shift in the pharmacist’s role was amplified even more in the 1930s.

A product called Elixir sulfanilamide was made as an antibiotic. And since it was for kids, it had a raspberry flavoring added to it. It turns out when you take the raspberry flavoring and you take the sulfanilamide and you put them together, they don’t dissolve into a liquid.

And so you need a diluent, something that you can mix those two things in so that it’ll dissolve. And so they chose this thing called DEG, which turns out is incredibly toxic. People like maybe had the beginning of an understanding that it was toxic at that time.

But my understanding of the narrative is that it was a genuine mistake and not, you know, just not understanding this is a toxic thing to be mixing the medication in. But at that time, there’s no kind of FDA oversight of pharmaceuticals. And so they didn’t have to do any testing, safety testing, animal models, anything like that.

They just kind of mix this batch up and then they distributed it nationally. Just over 100 patients died. It was one of the most impactful mass poisonings of the 20th century, because one year later, Congress passed the 1938 Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act.

At its core, this law requires proof of a drug’s safety before being released to the public. However, while this gave the FDA oversight of pharmaceutical companies, it didn’t include small compounding pharmacies. That was like a very different type of practice than bulk manufacturing pharmaceuticals.

And so there was no kind of realization or insight at that time that the FDA would also need to oversee these people who are doing kind of bespoke one-off compounding. But then as we move through like the middle into the second half of the 20th century, there are a variety of different kind of advancements in medical practice that led to the need to compound more frequently and in larger quantities. Cardiac surgery is one example of this.

New medicines were needed to temporarily stop a patient’s heart during surgery, but those weren’t yet being manufactured on a large scale. And so they would look to compounding to put together these specific formularies or TPN, total parenteral nutrition, you know, for people who can’t take food by mouth and need to get food injected into a vein. So that started to have to be compounded.

The idea of people going on long term IV antibiotics, chemotherapeutics, things like that through the 50s, 60s and 70s. And so all of a sudden, there are more and more people who needed these kind of custom made or slightly alternative formulations of medications. And so pharmacies started to make things in bulk, right, in batch.

But these larger operations soon caught the attention of the FDA. In the 1990s, in 1997, there is the FDA, M.A. or Food Drug Administration Modernization Act, and that essentially said that the FDA was going to have expanded regulatory role over compounding pharmacies. And they were going to take compounding pharmacies that, you know, kind of adhered to certain criteria that just stick to doing bespoke stuff or promise they’re not going to try to market like a wonder drug to the nation without, you know, any regulatory oversight processes.

As long as pharmacies promise that they weren’t going to do that, then they could adhere to lower standards. Watson says these expectations created a gray area that ultimately set the stage for a pivotal moment in 2012. At the time, the New England Compounding Center was registered to make patient specific prescriptions, but in reality had been shipping drugs in bulk across the nation for more than a decade without any FDA oversight.

One of these products was a steroid designed to be injected into the spine to treat pain and inflammation. And it turned out that methylprednisolone was contaminated with fungus and it led to an outbreak nationally of fungal meningitis. The United States Attorney’s Office reports that around 800 people were affected and more than 100 patients died as a result.

Because of this mercury regulatory space that everyone was operating in, the FDA was able to do walkthroughs, but they had no real enforcement power, which was handled more by the state boards of pharmacy. And so in the trials that came after of New England Compounding Center, it came out that the FDA had actually investigated this facility three times and identified issues with their sterility, but they weren’t able to enforce anything or issue any penalties because there was like this contest over their jurisdiction. The public outcry in the wake of this disaster led to the Compounding Quality Act in 2013.

It basically split compounding pharmacies into the two groups we have today. The small, bespoke pharmacies are regulated under Section 503A of the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act, while the larger, bulk manufacturing facilities operate under Section 503B. Essentially, the smaller 503A are state licensed pharmacies.

They’re primarily regulated by state boards of pharmacy. There are FDA rules they follow, but their primary regulators are state boards, where 503B outsourcing facilities are primarily regulated by the FDA. The 503B outsourcing facilities make larger batches, typically of drugs and shortage, that are sent to like hospitals and clinics rather than treating one patient here and there, which is what 503A pharmacies.

The difference in oversight mainly stems from expectations that 503A pharmacies are only creating a medication when a prescription comes in for a specific patient. And so they would take that prescription and say, OK, I’m going to mix this up for this patient once I receive the prescription. They’re not allowed to anticipate that the prescription is going to come for that patient and make it in advance.

They can’t anticipate that they’re going to get a variety of these prescriptions for different patients and make them kind of in bulk. They have to do it kind of one for one. Davis says that the FDA still has a little oversight on the smaller operations.

For example, though compounded drugs are not FDA approved, the drug powders used to mix compounded medications have to come from FDA registered facilities. They have to come with a valid certificate of analysis. And most state boards of pharmacy have adopted what’s called the USP or United States Pharmacopeia chapters on compounding, which is a standard that’s set by USP about what goes into compounded medications.

So that legal requirement is set by state boards of pharmacy, not by the FDA to follow those USP standards, which cover everything from training to cleaning to monitoring to testing, like all of the things that go into creating medication. On the other hand, 503B pharmacies have to adhere to current good manufacturing practices and are inspected by the FDA. Despite this update in regulatory oversight, Watson says it’s still somewhat of a patchwork system where things can fall through the cracks.

People make mistakes, you know, and if you’re not going to be upheld to the same regulatory expectations, you know that you’re not going to get the same level of oversight. Things, standards can slip. I’m not saying that they do necessarily, but mistakes can happen, you know, and it can be something as simple as, you know, there’s a case where somebody was getting acid blocking medicine compounded for them and it had to be mixed with something called bicarbonate.

And it turns out that bicarbonate and baclofen, which is a heavy sedative, sit next to each other on the shelf. A simple error of grabbing baclofen instead of bicarbonate led to that patient receiving baclofen, which led to hospitalization and bad clinical outcome. So, you know, that’s a human error, right? Humans are expected to make errors and there need to be systems developed to accommodate that and account for the inevitability of human error.

Watson compares this expectation to how we view doctors. It’s understood that physicians may make a medical error. So there are systems and safety standards in place to protect patients.

In an ideal world, there would be, you know, there would be equivalent regulatory oversight from the FDA applied to outsourcing facilities and bulk compounders as is applied to, you know, any of the big brand name pharmaceutical companies who are making pills or IV solutions en masse. I think that’s kind of the gold standard and we should strive towards that. But that’s a difficult task, especially when the FDA’s resources are already being spread thin.

Still, that doesn’t mean we won’t get there one day. Pharmaceutical compounding is a crucial part of health care, and making small improvements over time will eventually build a system that has the most protection for consumers. I think that compounding is necessary.

It’s absolutely necessary. And an incredible number of patients really benefit from having medications compounded for them. This is a necessary industry.

It’s not going anywhere, nor should it go anywhere. You can find more information about Tennille Davis, Dr. James Watson and all of our guests on our website, RadioHealthJournal.org. Our writer producer is Kristen Farrah. Our executive producer is Amir Zaveri.

I’m Elizabeth Westfield. Coming up, how Ozempic could help your dry January goals when Radio Health Journal returns. A KFC tale in the pursuit of flavor, the holidays were tricky for the colonel.

He loved people, but he also loved peace and quiet. So he cooked up KFC’s 4.99 chicken pot pie, warm, flaky with savory sauce and vegetables. It’s a tender chicken filled excuse to get some time to yourself and step away from decking the halls, whatever that means.

The colonel lived so we could chicken. KFC’s chicken pot pie, the best 4.99 you’ll spend this season. Prices and participation may vary while supplies last, taxes, tips and fees extra.

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Enjoy the go with Charmin. With more than half of Americans reporting that they consume alcohol, drinking is a big part of American culture. Happy hours dominate corporate get-togethers and sporting events rake in millions of dollars from beer sales.

Even light drinkers may still enjoy a glass of wine with dinner. But with such popularity comes a greater risk for misuse. The 2024 National Survey on Drug Use and Health reports that nearly 28 million people ages 12 and older had alcohol use disorder in the past year.

That’s one in every 10 people. And yet barely any of them receive treatment, despite the fact that there are multiple FDA approved medications to reduce alcohol intake. So one of them kind of stops the breakdown of one of those byproducts that makes you feel ill when you drink alcohol.

So that byproduct accumulates and then you drink and you feel bad, right? Other ones act in the brain, really more on the reward system, trying to reduce the effects of alcohol. That’s Alex DeFelice-Antonio, an appetitive neuroscientist and associate professor at the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute at Virginia Tech University. It’s estimated that only 2 percent of people with alcohol use disorder use these medications.

Experts say that part of the problem is stigma, while the other factor is simply a lack of knowledge about these options. However, a potential new treatment could change all of this. GLP-1 receptor agonists like Ozempic have never been more popular with people across the board, from celebrities to your next door neighbor.

And though these products are known for their weight loss effects, DeFelice-Antonio says researchers have noticed a side effect of these medications that could make it a new option for alcohol addiction. Preclinical literature, the rodent literature, has actually been around for a long time. So people were examining Exendin-4, which is similar to Exenatide, one of the very early GLP-1 medications, and giving that to rodents and noticing that they were drinking less.

And unlike the current medications used to reduce alcohol intake that only act on one system, GLP-1s are showing early signs of working both in the brain and other parts of the body. We know, or at least in our study, we’re observing some of these peripheral effects. We have evidence from other RCTs that there might be central effects in the brain.

And so it’s possible, you know, we don’t have enough data to conclude this, but if the GLP-1 drugs are kind of able to engage both, both the periphery and the central mechanisms, that might be an effective way to reduce drinking. Again, this is early research, so there’s still more studies that need to be done. In fact, DeFelice-Antonio says there’s still some debate within the neuroscience field about how much a GLP-1 drug can get into the brain.

They definitely have effects in the brain. Some of their effects of nausea are in the area of postrema. There’s other effects of not, for it’s kind of feeling of fullness.

Also in the brainstem. But there’s a little more argument as to how these drugs are having their central effects. We know that there are GLP-1 receptors expressed throughout the brain, but how much of the drug is really getting into the brain is something that there’s kind of less really good evidence on.

However, she says recent research shows that semiglutides change the level of activity in reward-related areas of the brain in response to alcohol cues. And so even though we might not be able to really definitively point to and say, okay, like it’s the action of, you know, the drug is definitely getting to this part of the brain and it’s acting on this receptor, what’s happening, the downstream effects, whether those are coming from the periphery or from the brain, are impacting the reward system. Meaning that it’s changing how alcohol makes someone feel.

DeFelice-Antonio recently published her own study in Scientific Reports on the effects GLP-1 medications have during alcohol consumption. Her team specifically studied the pharmacokinetics, which refers to four core processes, absorption, distribution, metabolism, and excretion of substances. So the reason we’re talking about pharmacokinetics there is that for potentially addictive drugs, every potentially addictive substance, part of its abuse liability is how fast it gets to the brain.

And so a really good illustration of this is nicotine. Because nicotine in a cigarette, we know is an addictive substance. That same amount of nicotine in a transdermal patch is a smoking cessation aid, right? And so the drug is the same, but the route of administration is changing how fast it gets into your body and therefore how fast it gets into your brain.

And so when we’re thinking about a drug’s abuse liability, we do have to think about route of administration. And then if we’re thinking about things that can alter, even if we’re in the same route of administration, thinking about things that can alter the rewarding effects of a drug, slowing down how fast it gets to the brain is a way that should be able to do that. 20% of the alcohol you drink is absorbed into the bloodstream through the stomach lining.

Then the rest is absorbed after it leaves the stomach and moves into the small intestine. Once in the bloodstream, it gets to the brain within minutes. But we can slow down how fast alcohol gets to the blood by spending more time in the stomach, right? Because in the stomach, it’s not going to be absorbed as well.

You need to empty from the stomach to the upper intestine to really get that excellent absorption into the blood. And so if we change that, we can change potentially the rewarding effects of the drug based on this idea of the faster it getting to the brain, the kind of more rewarding it is, the higher the abuse liability. Which is where GLP-1s are coming into play.

The hormone regulates blood sugar levels and appetite partially by slowing down gastric emptying, which is the process that transfers food in the stomach into the small intestine. For DeFelice Antonio’s study, participants were split in two groups. One where everyone was on a maintenance dose of a GLP-1 and the other group served as a control.

Both were given a standard serving of alcohol to see how fast their breath alcohol concentration would get to 0.08%. We saw a slower rise in the breath alcohol and people taking GLP-1 medications compared to weight match controls for not taking those medications. The big difference is in that first 20 to 30 minutes. And that’s that first 20 to 30 minutes, both in our measurements of blood alcohol and in our subjective effects.

And so it’s not that, oh, people are getting less alcohol in their blood and they’re saying, oh, I feel just as intoxicated. They also feel less intoxicated. So that kind of is lining up nicely as far as their subjective effects, how they are experiencing the drug matches up with their blood alcohol.

But it’s delayed. And it’s that really first 20 to 30 minutes that’s really different. And then the lines start to come together.

The team believes this gap is due to the alcohol spending more time in the stomach and not being able to be absorbed into the bloodstream as fast as usual. But there’s also an idea that increased nausea could play a part since that’s a main side effect of many of these GLP-1s. However, DeFelice Antonio says they didn’t find any differences in nausea between the two groups.

Still, she says it could just be the nature of who was participating. We were recruiting people who had been on GLP-1 medications and had been on their maintenance dose, right? And people who feel a lot of nausea from the GLP-1 medications, they don’t make it to the maintenance dose, right? They often stop taking the drug. And so it could be really different, right? If we captured some of those people who are maybe kind of stepping up to their maintenance dose.

The effects that we saw in our particular, this study in person, we also had people rate the kind of aversive effects of alcohol, like, are you feeling bad from the alcohol? And we didn’t see any differences. We mainly saw differences in the subjective experience of being drunk. Though this research is still in the early stages, it’s an exciting avenue for addiction medicine.

You can find more information about Alex DeFelice Antonio and all of our guests on our website, RadioHealthJournal.org. Our writer-producer is Kristen Farah. Our production manager is Jason Dickey. I’m Greg Johnson.

RadioHealth Journal returns in just a moment. If you’ve been diagnosed with moderate to severe plaque psoriasis, this is what it sounds like to be a million miles away. Imagine being a million miles away.

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When impossible odors get stuck in. Medical Notes this week. Will we ever truly get rid of forever chemicals? They’re hard to remove and destroy once they’re in the environment and our current removal technology is slow and inefficient.

Thankfully, a new innovation published in Advanced Materials removes large amounts of forever chemicals from water within minutes, about 100 times faster than commercial filters. Your smartwatch is good for more than just counting steps. A new study published in Plus One examined how effective this technology is at alerting medical professionals to veterans experiencing PTSD.

Though this was only a preliminary study, researchers are happy with the veterans’ willingness to participate and believe it could be a major step towards bettering their mental health. And finally, the truth on how to get better sleep. The CDC reports that one in three adults don’t get the recommended amount of sleep, which can lead to worse physical, mental, and mood outcomes.

Experts say it’s important to leave all your screens out of the bedroom and ditch alcohol or caffeine. And that’s Medical Notes this week. I’m Mayan Vos, Tibetan Court.

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You can find all of our past segments and guests on our website, RadioHealthJournal.org or wherever you listen to podcasts. Follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and X for daily content and tune in next week for another edition of Radio Health Journal.

Private Equity’s Grip on Health Care and the Push for Mental Health Literacy

Urban City Podcast Group — Sat, 01 Nov 2025 20:10:24 +0000

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Major Takeaways:

Private equity’s growing control in health care often leads to cost-cutting, layoffs, and declining patient outcomes as firms prioritize short-term profit over long-term care.
Some states are moving toward regulating ownership transparency and curbing risky financial practices that jeopardize hospitals and nursing homes.
Advocates like Annie Sleese push for mental health literacy in schools to help families and educators identify early signs of mental illness and reduce stigma.

Profit Over Patients: Are Private Equity Firms Ruining Healthcare?

You’re listening to Radio Health Journal, the trusted news source for medicine, science and technology. I’m Elizabeth Westfield. I’m Mayan Vasta Betancourt.

And I’m Greg Johnson. This week, why everyone needs a baseline understanding of mental health. I didn’t know that I could be the expert of my child.

I thought, they’re the expert, they have the MD degree, I should just sit down and be quiet. But first, should we be worried about private equity’s growing investment in health care? Cutting costs, trying to drive profit, in addition, high amounts of debt. So a lot of times, this just spells financial disaster for the health care company, hospital entity that a private equity firm owns.

All that and more this week on Radio Health Journal. At Charmin, we heard you shouldn’t talk about going to the bathroom in public, so we decided to sing about it. Charmin UltraStrong, you can use less, better than the rest.

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Progressive Casualty Insurance Company affiliates and other insurers not available in all states. For many of us, the healthcare system is a tangled mess of complex phrases that try to explain the expensive bills we get in the mail. And with the chaos of life, it’s easy to quickly pay it without ever truly looking at the breakdown of cost.

Unfortunately, the industry knows this and can take advantage of it. Lynn Unruh, Professor Emerita at the University of Central Florida, experienced this firsthand after seeking help for her spinal issues. My visit was all of five minutes or less.

He misdiagnosed me, but did thankfully send me to a physical therapist, and the physical therapist did a good half-hour assessment and diagnosed me properly. And I wasn’t happy with this guy, so I asked for, you know, you have to contact the office and ask them for the record of your visit. And they are, by law, I believe, you’re entitled to get this record.

In a surprise twist, Unruh’s record detailed a much different visit than the one she had experienced. He said I had a half an hour visit and that he did a systematic neurological examination on me, which he did not do. He basically looked at the way I walked in and said, oh, you’ve got sacroiliitis and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And he did my knee reflexes, and that was about it, versus what the physical therapist did, that there’s all this whole big, long thing. So anyway, he lied, and he charged Medicare for a 30-minute visit when he saw me for less than five minutes. Unruh was a victim of upcoding, a type of medical billing fraud when providers intentionally submit wrong billing codes to increase their revenue.

It’s quite common and has a costly effect. In fact, a 2024 paper estimates that the practice of upcoding was associated with more than $14 billion in hospital payments in 2019. Unfortunately, it’s only become more pronounced in recent years, a rise that may be attributed to the uptick in investments from private equity firms in the health care space.

Why? Because it’s a simple way to increase revenue that often goes unnoticed. And as we’ve seen from private equities involvement in this industry, the main focus is making a quick profit. Private equity is investing everywhere in health care.

It started in some of the urgent care center areas in hospitals and nursing homes, but it’s also gone into doctor’s offices, which are all of the specialties. There’s pretty much not a physician specialty that you can name that it isn’t invested in. Investments in health care are usually seen as a positive.

So why is there a negative connotation around private equity involvement? Well, because most reports, like Unruh’s 2025 review published in the journal Health Policy, aren’t finding many good outcomes in the wake of a private equity takeover. Out of 21 studies that we found on health care quality and patient outcomes, only one nursing home study and one hospital study found that they were better. The outcomes were better in private equity facilities.

One hospital study and a couple other studies found no difference in system outcomes. And some found mixed results. But like we say, most of the mixed results studies were mostly negative.

So when you look at out of 21, really only six were not bad. It’s not a lot. The global investment firm KKR and Company has one of the few good examples.

Their acquisition of HCA Healthcare in 2006 showed a significant reduction in patient mortality. However, they declined our interview request for this segment. The Private Equity Stakeholder Project is a watchdog organization that specializes in researching the effects that the industry has on people and the planet.

It covers a range of factors. And one specific topic is health care. Michael Fenney, a senior policy coordinator at the organization, says that they’re also not seeing many positive outcomes of private equity investments in health care.

They may be out there, but what we’ve observed is that the incentives that private equity firms operate under don’t align with long-term care. Instead of working towards a long-term vision, Matthew Parr, the communications director for the Private Equity Stakeholder Project, says that private equity firms tend to buy and sell their investments in an average of five to seven years. These private equity firms have a set revenue goal that they’re trying to get out of a company, and they’re trying to do it very quickly.

And because they sell off these companies after about five to seven years or transfer them to another private equity firm, sometimes they take them public or these companies go bankrupt, what have you, after that short period of time, they don’t really have a stake in that company anymore. And so if the firm has gotten its profit, they can sell that company off. And they didn’t really have to invest in a lot of long-term strategies for the long-term benefit of the company.

That becomes a problem a lot of times with health care, because health care is inherently a long-term industry and health is a long-term aspect. So it’s not necessarily the investment that’s a problem, but the strategies they use to make the most profit in a short amount of time. And because of how these firms buy in, they get full operating control, despite in most cases not having any significant knowledge of health care.

So private equity firms typically do full control buyouts of companies or assets or things like that. So it’s a little different than venture capital or other types of investing. While they may buy a few shares or they may just own a part of a company, private equity tends to get a controlling equity interest in the company.

So they have operational control and they’re able to enforce decisions at the places that they purchase. They’re not people who have any health care background. So, for example, Blackstone, which invests in real estate, is a big investor in health equity and health care.

They don’t know anything about running a health care institution, but that’s who’s investing in it. Research shows that the typical game plan private equity firms use once they’ve acquired an institution usually starts with cutting staff. They also typically focus on the more profitable services, often driving up the prices on those while completely cutting the ones that don’t make as much money.

So we see a lot of private equity investment in dentistry, for instance, because a lot of times there is dental insurance, but there’s a lot of cash flow, people paying cash for procedures. And so that’s easy profit for a private equity firm. And so you couple cutting costs with trying to eke out profit and not a lot of kind of future thinking investment.

In addition, private equity firms do this tactic called the leverage buyout. And what that means is that they actually don’t put a lot of money into the companies that they purchase. They use a lot of debt.

Which means that the firm use very little of its own money in these purchases. Another bonus to this tactic is that the debt gets placed on the company they buy, not the firm itself. A very popular case right now is Walgreens.

Walgreens just got bought out by a private equity firm, Sycamore Partners. Just over 70 percent of that Walgreens acquisition was actually financed by debt and not from money from Sycamore Partners. But Walgreens is now going to be on the hook for paying that debt, not the private equity firm that owns Walgreens.

So in the case of hospitals or nursing homes or in Walgreens case, you now have cutting costs trying to drive profit. In addition, high amounts of debt. This strategy has been the cause of the financial ruin of many health care institutions owned by private equity firms.

In fact, the Private Equity Stakeholder Project reports that seven of the eight largest health care bankruptcies in 2024 were backed by these firms. They also resulted in more than 65,000 layoffs across America. So if these practices are leading to worse patient care, bankruptcies and closures, are we on a fast track to a destabilized health care system with even less patient access than we have today? Parr says it’s a fear that’s only grown with the recent Walgreens acquisition.

Patients have such direct access to Walgreens. It’s in nearly every community. Many rural communities only have a Walgreens for pharmacy access.

And so if you take what we’ve seen traditionally and historically with these firms and extrapolate it to Walgreens, which is in almost every community. And if Walgreens does fail, because like we’ve seen other health care companies fail, you have direct lifelines in communities all over the country that will lose access to health care. Thankfully, Fenney says some states have started to move towards increasing ownership transparency and pre-transaction review for the private market.

So if a private equity firm proposes a deal in which it acquires a health care provider, it would have to receive review and approval from the appropriate state entity. We’ve also seen states are starting to consider limits on certain practices by private equity firms, including limits on sale-leaseback transactions and dividend recapitalizations. And then states have also started to consider reinvigorating longstanding corporate practice of medicine laws, which keep clinical decisions with medical professionals instead of the corporations that own them.

You can find more information about Matthew Parr, Michael Fenney, Lynn Unruh, and all of our guests on our website, RadioHealthJournal.org. Our writer-producer is Kristen Farrah. Our executive producer is Amir Ozaveri. I’m Elizabeth Westfield.

Coming up, should mental health literacy be taught in school? When Radio Health Journal returns.

Some mental health conditions have become cultural buzzwords like anxiety and depression, while others have set the stage for blockbuster movies like the 2016 film Split. And though public awareness of mental illness has increased, can the same be said for public understanding? Annie Sleese is the co-founder and CEO of the Mental Health Literacy Collaborative, a national nonprofit organization. She believes education needs to be a foundational component of any mental health initiative, especially in schools.

Though she’s now a leader in this movement, there was a time when Sleese was a parent, unaware of how much she needed this knowledge in her own life. I was teaching 90 students a year and directing two musicals a year every year and continued to do that while my child’s condition deteriorated. And within a couple of years, I was navigating the prison system as a direct result of my child’s unmet mental health needs turning into substance misuse and being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

In 2010, Sleese was navigating how to be a teacher and primary caregiver to her two children, while dealing with what she thought was the typical teenage rough patch with her oldest, who’d just graduated high school. Looking back now, there are so many signs Sleese can see clear as day, but before she had any real understanding of mental illness, she dismissed even the stranger ones as personality quirks they’d grow out of. What I think I should have recognized, and had I had training, I would have known, was my child was fearful.

I found butter knives in the couch. And I would ask, you know, what happened here? Was someone buttering a bagel in the living room? You know, right? And that wasn’t it. It was, oh no, that’s mine, mom.

It’s for me to feel safer. And I thought, what do you mean safer? We have a house. We’re locking the doors.

We have security. What’s going on? And what I didn’t realize was my child was feeling paranoia. My child was feeling signs of unsettled, being able to discern reality from things that weren’t real.

So that fear manifested itself in bringing a butter knife around. By the time Sleese realized that her child was experiencing a mental illness, they were 18 and able to fight against the inpatient program she requested. Instead, they compromised on an outpatient treatment.

I was like, wait, I’m the mom. And they were like, yeah, but your child’s 18. So your child decided that that’s not going to work, so this is what we’re going to do.

When we did that, it was in that facility as an outpatient that my child accessed a firearm, got it from another person receiving care during a parking lot smoke break, just going outside, getting fresh air, and buying a firearm out of the trunk of someone’s car. My child brought it home, and then my 13-year-old found it. So I was trying to manage this distress internally, quietly, and obviously deeply stigmatized.

So two years go by, and the thing that made me actually do something was the tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary. When that happened, my eyes were just opened, and I was like, oh, my gosh, there is so much parallel between what happened and what was going on in my house. Now, there are great differences, too.

The perpetrator in that incident had a very different sort of set of circumstances, but the mother I definitely connected and could relate to. The mother was said to have been fearful, and I was fearful at that point. She started building a community through a blog, and though it was making an impact, Sleese realized the hypocrisy of her fight to normalize mental health issues while hiding from her own story.

It was anonymous. I was talking all about the stigma of mental health, yet not willing to tell anybody my name or what I did or where I live because deeply stigmatized I was. But over time, I got a lot of people reaching out from all over the world saying, this sounds a whole lot like someone I know, or this sounds like my story, or my family went through something like this.

And as that happened, it just built and built and built, and I realized that there was work to be done, and maybe I could help do it. She started by helping Sandy Hook Promise roll out their Know the Signs school programs in 2016. Soon after, Sleese decided to go all in.

She quit her job teaching and became the Director of Advocacy and Education at the National Alliance on Mental Illness in Delaware. My role at NAMI allowed me to, first of all, learn all the facts I didn’t know, and share them with parents like me, with individuals like my child, with community leaders, and then to advocate for policies that would make lives better. And when I did that, that’s really what brought me to what I’m doing now, because doing that policy piece allowed me to recognize the influence that policy can have, the positive work that can be done, but also the gaps.

And what my work does now is address one of those gaps. Which is mental health literacy. Understanding what mental illness is and being able to recognize the signs in yourself and others.

More than 30 states have some sort of mental health education policy in place, but Sleese says there’s no universal framework for what should be taught. On top of that, it’s hard for teachers to follow a policy and explain something that they themselves don’t truly understand. Just like me, having been a teacher my whole career and not being able to help my own child, most educators don’t get this information, most educators aren’t trained in this.

So whether or not you have a policy in place that requires something, or you just have people who want to do it, you still need to have the background, the foundation, the confidence around this topic that’s needed to provide the information thoughtfully. The gap between policy and action is what the Mental Health Literacy Collaborative is helping to close. We’re trying to elevate this framework that has been in existence for decades, but we’re trying to elevate it as a potential roadmap for school education systems to implement mental health education universally.

And doing that with that framework allows people to understand kind of four big ideas and to make those ideas suitable for the audience. It’s understanding how to foster and maintain positive mental health, understanding common disorders and their treatments, understanding how to seek help effectively, and understanding stigma and how to reduce it. Sleese believes that just simply being aware of a few statistics can make a huge difference.

In fact, she thinks that if she knew nearly half of all lifetime mental disorders begin by the age of 14, she would have reacted much differently to her child’s odd behaviors early on. That fact alone, I think, would have changed the trajectory of my child’s life if I had known that raising my child. Because I think I would have recognized far sooner.

Because looking back, there were signs way earlier than age of 18. But I would have also pushed back on discussions with physicians when I was asked, or with therapists, because there was therapy on and off throughout my child’s growing up. But every time I would say, I think it’s more than this.

I think this is going on. I would be told, we’re in the normal range. This is all fine.

Mom, this is fine. Everything’s fine, Mom. I would be called Mom, which was very annoying to me.

But also, I was sort of put in my place, and I didn’t know that I could be the expert of my child. I thought, they’re the expert. They have the MD degree.

I should just sit down and be quiet. And so one of my biggest lessons, I think, is to remind people that you’re the expert of your child. You know.

And if you don’t feel like this particular diagnosis or this particular treatment plan or this particular situation is right, speak up. And if they’re not listening, speak to somebody else. Sleese says mental health literacy isn’t just for parents and teachers to notice and understand.

She believes it can and should be taught to kids of all ages. The messaging may change when talking to a third grader versus a high schooler, but the outcome is the same. Understanding the brain, emotions, and overall health.

Let’s hope that by the age of, I don’t know, 9 and 10, we have young people who understand that health conditions happen in all parts of our body. Sometimes we get sick, and it’s our heart that’s sick. Sometimes we get sick, it’s our stomach that’s sick.

Sometimes we get sick, it’s our brain that’s sick. That’s the idea of mental health literacy, is it’s just a piece of health literacy. Something that young people and people of all ages have been building.

We understand really common things, like no one shies away from a broken bone. If you have a broken arm, people don’t go, oh no, I can’t talk about that, don’t tell me about that broken bone. We have a general idea of what happens with a broken bone.

We also understand, because we understand the treatment, we understand that after you wear that cast for a little while, that cast is going to come off, and your arm’s going to look kind of like it did before, and it’s going to be okay. That’s our health literacy in action. What we’re trying to do is add the piece of health literacy that’s been missing, mental health literacy, and young people can learn it.

One argument that pushes back against including mental health literacy in school is the idea that teachers aren’t qualified to be speaking about the brain. And though it’s true they’re usually not neurologists, Sleese says that with the right tools and resources, they can confidently and accurately teach a foundational understanding of mental health that can be extremely impactful. You can find more information about the Mental Health Literacy Collaborative, Annie Sleese, and all of our guests on our website, RadioHealthJournal.org. Our writer-producer is Kristen Farrah.

Our production manager is Jason Dickey. I’m Greg Johnson. RadioHealth Journal returns in just a moment.

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Why does asthma differ between genders? Research shows that the condition starts at different times, presents with different symptoms, and responds differently to treatment between men and women. A new study examined this divergence at a genetic level and identified 61 genes that have significantly different expressions related to asthma. Surprisingly, this research also revealed that the condition changes depending on age and tissue type, too.

The research is published in the American Journal of Respiratory Cell and Molecular Biology. Does a doctor need to be present on every flight? New research in JAMA Network Open analyzed how frequent medical emergencies are in the air. Between 2022 and 2023, they reviewed medical calls from 84 airlines that flew more than 3 billion passengers.

It turns out that one in every 212 flights have a medical emergency. However, most are minor, and only about 8% were taken to the hospital after landing. And finally, daydreaming may be the key to getting a promotion.

A new study in the Journal of Management argues that letting the mind wander increases the chance of epiphanies. These aha moments shape how people navigate their careers. Creating more epiphanies could heighten a person’s sense of purpose and drive within their career.

And that’s Medical Notes this week. I’m Mayan Vastabetancourt. Whatever your vision for holiday decorating, the Home Depot has what you need to bring it to life.

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Thank you for joining us this week, and every week, as we break down the science stories you need to know. You can find all of our past segments and guests on our website, RadioHealthJournal.org, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and X for daily content, and tune in next week for another edition of RadioHealth Journal.

Immersive Healing and Cancer Research: How Virtual Reality and Glucose Discoveries Are Transforming Patient Care

Urban City Podcast Group — Sun, 28 Sep 2025 14:00:19 +0000

Urban City Podcast Group

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Major Takeaways:

Immersive reality programs are being used to provide spiritual and emotional healing for cancer patients, complementing medical treatment.
Researchers discovered glioblastoma tumors use glucose to create serine, fueling rapid cancer growth.
Blocking or restricting serine may be a potential strategy to slow tumor progression and extend patient survival.

Immersive Healing and Cancer Research: How Virtual Reality and Glucose Discoveries Are Transforming Patient Care

You’re listening to Radio Health Journal, the trusted news source for medicine, science and technology. I’m Elizabeth Westfield. I’m Mayan Vastabetancourt.

And I’m Greg Johnson. This week, a new discovery that could increase life expectancy for cancer patients. So your brain may use glucose to make neurotransmitters, but we don’t know what the cancer cell is using it for.

So if we know what that cancer cell is using that glucose for, then we can attack that pathway. We can block that pathway. But first, how immersive reality is providing cancer patients more than just physical healing? There’s a quote that we kind of like to incorporate into our ethos that there’s no profit in healing the body if in the process you destroy the soul.

All that and more this week on Radio Health Journal. Do Crohn’s disease or ulcerative colitis symptoms keep coming back? Tremphaya gazelkomab may help, with rapid remission achieved at 12 weeks and lasting clinical remission at one year. Some even saw visible improvement of their intestinal lining at 12 weeks and one year.

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Tell your doctor if you have an infection, flu-like symptoms, or if you need a vaccine. Healing is possible with Tremphaya. Approximately 3 out of 10 patients were in endoscopic remission at one year, based on areas visualized on colonoscopy, which may not represent the deeper bowel layer or entire GI tract.

Individual results may vary. Ask your doctor about Tremphaya today. Call 1-800-526-7736 to learn more or visit Tremphayaradio.com. Cancer entered Roger Holzberg’s vocabulary at a young age.

His cousin grew up just down the street, and the two were inseparable, until an aggressive form of pediatric kidney cancer stopped the duo in their tracks. At age 14, Holzberg watched his best friend fight for eight months until he had nothing left to give. About a decade after that, my parents were divorced, my mom was terminal with breast cancer, and as the oldest kid, I had to make her end-of-life decisions at a time when no one should have to make those decisions.

My dad, who was a physician at that point, said, so now you’re going to go into med school and help fix this cancer problem, right? To which I said, I’m going to be as far away from med school as I possibly can be. I’m going to art school. Holzberg dove headfirst into his passion, and landed with a position as a creative director and vice president at Walt Disney Imagineering.

Just when he thought he had the rest of his life figured out, the enemy Holzberg had worked so hard to distance himself from barged right back into his life. Despite his strict diet and exercise regimen, Holzberg had begun gaining weight and feeling more lethargic. I called my physician the next day.

On the eve of my 50th birthday, I heard those three words that one in two American men and one in three American women hear in their lifetime. You have cancer. The good news is it was an early diagnosis, stage one, completely still encapsulated.

And I knew very little about health care at that point. My dad came back into my life and said, so your prognosis looks really good. You ought to do some volunteering.

Holzberg pulled together a group of his Imagineer co-workers, and as he successfully fought his own thyroid cancer, the team adapted some favorite Disney attractions for Children’s Hospital of Orange County. Which included adapting one of our attractions called Turtle Talk with Crush to Children’s Hospital of Orange County. And suddenly I met child life specialists and I saw immersive distraction therapy work and I got to help Crush the Turtle be more than just a goofball surfer dude, to be a comfort friend.

I’d say that was the first time the light bulb went off, which was realized in the project we’d just opened, where I went, why didn’t I have stuff like this when I was in adult treatment? Holzberg had spent his time in treatment either staring at a blank wall or watching the news from a TV in the corner of the room. I remember sitting in a chair in a hospital going, my healing place is the ocean. If I could be in Malibu, if I could be out the water and there was a dolphin near me, I’m an ocean swimmer, right? That would be my healing place.

And I went, wait a second, you work for Walt Disney Imagineering. Your job is putting people in virtual places. You could have been there in every way, but physically, what would that have meant? These realizations led Holzberg to finally jump into the healthcare space.

He co-founded Reimagine Well, a company that uses technology to create immersive healing programs. Just around the corner at City of Hope Orange County, Annette Walker was having the same thoughts. Known in the healthcare industry as a visionary and innovator, Walker had begun to set her sights on the part of care that’s often overlooked.

The patient experience. There’s a quote that we kind of like to incorporate into our ethos that there’s no profit in healing the body if in the process you destroy the soul. Walker is the president of City of Hope Orange County, a comprehensive cancer center.

Though the organization isn’t faith-based, they’ve realized that their patients are made up of mind, body, and spirit, which means to have the highest potential for healing, Walker believes they need to address all three factors. So when it came time to design the program’s spiritual care center, a vague non-denominational room wasn’t going to cut it. Either they are so generic, they’re not sacred enough or personal enough to the person who needs them, or they really are dedicated to one denomination, one faith tradition, and the others are excluded.

So I think that our attempts to meet the needs of every patient, I mean, we would do the same thing in other aspects of their care. This is one aspect of your care. So for instance, if you had cancer, you might need nutritional counseling, or you might need acupuncture, or you might need something else.

And in all cases, that care is personalized to you. This is no different. This is our ability to personalize a spiritual care to the individual’s needs.

However, the Orange County community has five primary religions, as well as groups that believe more in spirituality than one specific faith. As you can imagine, Walker didn’t have the space for seven separate rooms. So our dilemma was, wow, we have five primary religions in Orange County, as well as people who are not religious, but are spiritual and have other needs.

How do we address all these populations? And the idea was presented by our chief operating officer, hey, why don’t we try immersive reality? And it was like, oh, my God, could we, we’re so good technically, could we use technology on the softest part of our services? And that’s when they brought in Holzberg. He had already been using immersive technology at the Children’s Hospital after an oncologist had challenged him to find a way of helping the kids who had just been diagnosed with cancer. And he said, you know, my pediatric patients, they get diagnosed with cancer.

They immediately feel isolated, depressed, withdrawn. And those three things in concert with chemotherapy is just not good. So how do we change the chemotherapy experience? And I said, can I go out with a survey of your patients? And he said, well, you’re not a doctor.

What kind of survey do you want to send to my patients? I said, basically, one question, if you could get your treatment anywhere in the universe and there were no rules, what special place would help heal you? In the 15 years we’ve been asking kids and adolescent young adult cancer patients, what special place would help heal them? Never once has one of them come back and said that would be a hospital. So in the same way that he surveyed pediatric patients, Holzberg’s first step for City of Hope’s new spiritual center was to survey the people in Orange County. My job is never to tell a patient or clinician what is right and healing for their population.

It’s to ask them what is healing for their population and then get that for them. We went out to patients and families and we went out to faith leaders with a very similar question to what we asked our pediatric patients. But it wasn’t about your healing place.

It was about your family coming together in a sacred healing place. And so that’s what gave us the answers for the five faith themes and the two nature themes. The team settled on creating scenes depicting a chapel, mandir, mosque, synagogue, temple, an alpine forest, and the beach.

Holzberg’s team had gone back and forth on how immersive they wanted the experience to be. We concepted a number of different approaches. One of them was very immersive, meaning the people in the room were surrounded by imagery.

Another one is what we wound up with, which is a very large screen with what then we call alcoves, all of which contain different media in different forms. The decision ultimately came down to one factor that the theme park industry refers to as the barf quotient. I’ve been a part of tuning the profiles of some extreme rides before, and when people get nauseous is a thing that you’ve got to really dial down because in the ride theme park world, you don’t want to be washing out ride vehicles every four minutes.

But also in the hospital world, you’ve got different sets of challenges. You’ve got patients who might have some loss of equilibrium, might have some nausea from medication. And we wanted to make sure we didn’t overwhelm them.

On top of that, the team needed to make sure that the experience wasn’t just cool, but felt sacred. Roger will tell you that we’re pretty nitpicky about that’s not quite right. We have to adjust it.

So we’re kind of fanatically possessed with making it as real and as awesome as we could. Now, there’s no doubt that right now, using immersive reality in this situation, people just the fact that we used it will think it’s cool, but it wasn’t meant to be cool. It was meant to be sacred.

They had community leaders advising on all of the details and even went as far as to create their own stained glass when they couldn’t find any that perfectly fit the comforting environment they were aiming for. It looks like it could be made into original stained glass window. It’s a beautiful piece of art.

But when you go in the room, it does look like we picked a stained glass from somewhere and put it there. But that was some of the nuances of the perfection that we were going for that, you know, there’s a lot of images of Christ that could be distressing during this time. We wanted the comforting images of Christ.

City of Hope recently unveiled this space after two years of development, and patients will be able to fully utilize the center in December. The room will be open 24-7 and on the outside of the room, it’ll show you the scene that is currently on. But as soon as you walk in, if there’s no one else in the room, you just go push a button and you pick the one you want and it’ll stay on for 15 minutes.

The other thing that’s very cool is if you were a patient and say we were having a service in there, if you’re a patient and you’re confined to your bed, you can turn it on from your room and watch it. Now that Walker and Holzberg have reimagined how spiritual centers can look, they hope more programs will adopt this immersive experience to enhance their patients’ quality of care. Someone asked me that, do you think this will change the industry? And I think it will.

I do. I think people will say, wow, we just didn’t think of doing it. It wasn’t that they were trying to be thoughtless or exclusionary, I just didn’t think they thought of it.

And also, you know, the technology is relatively new. You know, it’s immersive reality has been used in other cases, like Roger has used it in children’s hospitals for immersive experiences for kids. I went to the Sphere this weekend and saw a concert.

It’s unbelievable. And so what you’re seeing is technology is helping health care in a different way. This won’t be the only way it does, but I do believe it’s the first time it’s been used in this particular circumstances in health care.

You can find more information about Annette Walker, Roger Holzberg, and all of our guests on our website, RadioHealthJournal.org. Our writer-producer is Kristen Farah. Our executive producer is Amira Zaveri. I’m Elizabeth Westfield.

Coming up, the engineered diet that could defeat brain tumors, when Radio Health Journal returns. Behold, the Colonel’s giant KFC chicken sandwich, a towering extra crispy monument to flavor. Such a huge amount of juicy, hand-breaded KFC chicken at a pretty tiny $3.99 price for the Colonel’s KFC chicken sandwich.

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Though neurons are the cell you probably think of first when talking about the brain, did you know they have a host of bodyguards keeping them safe? Glia are cells that provide support and protection for neurons and are a vital part of keeping your body functioning properly. As you can imagine, cells with such a big responsibility can be destructive if they become mutated. For example, glioblastoma, the most common type of brain cancer, is super aggressive.

Many patients are given a life expectancy of one or two years after diagnosis, and that’s with the help of treatment. In many cases, we recommend either surgery to take out tumor as much of it as possible or a biopsy to establish a diagnosis. After surgery, patients will typically undergo standard therapies, that is a combination of chemotherapy, a drug called temozolomide, and radiation, and that’s been our standard treatment for almost 20 years now.

And despite these treatments being around for so long, we have not really identified better treatments for these tumors. That’s Dr. Wajid Al-Hallou, a neurosurgeon and assistant professor in the Department of Neurosurgery at the University of Michigan. Despite being able to remove much of the tumor in some cases, Al-Hallou says it’s never enough to outrun the cancer’s rapid growth.

Sometimes we can achieve something called a gross total resection, meaning we have removed everything that is visible on the MRI. But the reality is, even if we achieve this extensive resection, the tumor is actually beyond that. It has traveled centimeters into the brain, and so even though surgery has shown to help improve prognosis, survival, and quality of life, etc., it does not cure the tumors.

Glioblastomas are so hard to treat partly because no two tumors are the same. There are significant genetic differences, which makes it tough to develop a drug that would be effective for multiple patients. However, the one factor that these tumors have in common is that they all need to consume energy in order to survive and spread.

And though there’s been a lot of research around cancer, Al-Hallou says the one area that’s been overlooked is what these cancerous cells use and how they metabolize energy. Al-Hallou and a team of researchers sought out to uncover these mysteries with their new paper published in the journal Nature. They had guessed that glucose was a good place to start their search since all living cells use it.

It’s a common source of carbon, it’s how our cells run most of their metabolic processes. But the reality is, one cell in the body may use glucose to do one thing, so your brain may use glucose to make neurotransmitters, your liver may make enzymes. But we don’t know what the cancer cell is using it for.

So if we know what that cancer cell is using that glucose for, then we can attack that pathway. We can block that pathway. This research project is unique in two ways.

The first is that it’s a deep dive into the metabolic processes of tumors. And second is that it brought together various teams of researchers to contribute their expertise. Glioma metabolism has been studied in the past, but not in the way that we have done it as a group.

I think what we’ve realized in the brain tumor world is that the old-fashioned model of one scientist discovering things on their own just doesn’t really work. You need people who have significant knowledge and expertise in every specialty to make things work. So you need metabolomics experts, you need bioinformatics and engineering experts, you need neurosurgeons, you need radiation oncologists.

Without that, you’ll never really get to the real truth about these tumors. And importantly, you won’t be able to impact patients’ lives. The group used two methods in their study.

They started with isotope tracing, which is a way to follow a certain nutrient, in this case glucose, through parts of the body. Al-Hallouz says that while this is a common technique, it hasn’t been widely utilized in glioblastoma research. The second advancement the team was able to utilize was seeing how the tumors acted in human patients.

And most of the time when people study glioma, we’re often studying it in a cell line in a dish or in a mouse model. And these are important ways for us to study disease, especially brain tumors. But to really know the truth about how a brain tumor behaves in a patient, in a human being, we need to study it in patients.

And that’s really the major leap that we made, is that we were able to study in patients and we’re able to compare the tumor to the brain of that patient. So that’s what was really unique. And that gave us the opportunity to make these amazing observations and discoveries that I’d never seen before.

All of their experiments were first done in mouse models, then they were able to give human patients glucose during resection surgeries and send a sample of the removed tumor to their lab for inspection. Their research revealed an exciting finding of how the cancer cells are obtaining and using glucose. The cancer cell’s priority is to grow really fast, divide, and invade into the brain.

So it has to do a lot with very limited resources. So it shuttles a lot of its glucose to making these purines and pyrimidines to help the tumors grow. They also need other things to maintain their cellular processes and to survive.

And so they end up, instead of making them, they end up essentially like stealing them from the environment. So it ends up using less energy. You don’t have to make it from scratch.

You essentially borrow it from somebody else. Meaning that the cancer cells are stealing the glucose from the other healthy cells in the brain that need it to carry out their functions. Al-Hallou and the team found that the tumor uses the sugar to create an amino acid called serine, which fuels its rapid growth.

That was an important discovery in our patient tumor samples. And then the follow-up question was, now that we’ve discovered that these tumors require specific amino acids but don’t make it, can we starve them? Can we starve these tumors of this essential nutrient? The second part of that question is, even if you are able to starve the cancer, will it matter? Will it impact the tumor’s function? And the answer was yes. At least in our animal models, the answer is, if you starve these mouse models of serine specifically, the tumors don’t grow as fast.

So how do we restrict serine? That’s a difficult question. It’s not something that you can easily go to the grocery store and not buy the product that has serine. Serine unfortunately is in lots of things.

So it’s not easy to do that on your own. The group is now collaborating with a company that’s manufacturing specific dietary products that don’t have any serine in them. Another option the team is looking at is developing a drug that can block the serine from ever getting to the cancer cell.

Restricting diet in patients is challenging because you’re talking about a patient who has a very bad tumor. You’re asking them to completely change their lifestyle and their diet to help prevent the tumor from growing. And I’m sure a lot of patients want to do it, but it’s not easy to do.

It’s something that we worry may be hard to adhere to in every patient. But if we can find better ways to block the use of serine in the cells or the transport of serine to the cells, it may actually be more effective. Which gives the team a lot more work to do moving forward.

Even though this is a huge, huge accomplishment to find how these brain tumors consume energy, what they use glucose for, that serine is a potential vulnerable target. It’s not the end. The next step is the easy step.

Can we restrict serine and glycine? Can we block serine and glycine? Our work continues. We’re trying to find other amino acids, other nutrients that these tumors need. So these studies continue.

We’re trying to find the next thing. And the ultimate goal is we are not going to rest until we find something that is effective in these patients. You can find more information about Dr. Wajid Al-Hallou and all of our guests on our website, RadioHealthJournal.org. Our writer-producer is Kristen Farrah.

Our production manager is Jason Dickey. I’m Greg Johnson. RadioHealth Journal returns in just a moment.

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Presenting, again, Fling’s love story. Dear love of my life, we were on the 12B bus this morning when I caught a whiff, a scent so fresh, so life-changing, I had to find its source. Alas, I didn’t know if you were the woman in the pink freshly washed cardigan or the retired mailman next to me, but I knew one of you was my soulmate.

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Medical Notes this week. You may soon be able to detect skin cancer at home. The ExoPatch is a silicone product that uses microneedles to pick up DNA information from our cells.

It uses this data to detect cancerous fragments. When tested on mice, the ExoPatch was able to specifically locate the cancerous DNA. The scientists are now looking to do a pilot study in humans before moving into clinical trials.

The research is published in the journal Biosensors and Bioelectronics. A healthy childhood may be more important than you think. Research in the European Journal of Pediatrics reveals that your habits as a kid impact your physical health later in life.

Fitness habits are hard to break, so being unhealthy and inactive in early life is most likely how you’ll be as an adult. The researchers are also looking into how this impacts obesity and heart disease. We need better ALS detection.

The degenerative nervous system disease is estimated to affect 400,000 people across the globe by 2040. Sadly, there’s not currently a diagnostic test, but researchers have been working on identifying a marker that can catch ALS years before symptoms appear. The research, published in Nature Medicine, shows that specific proteins in blood can detect the disease with significant accuracy.

This would give researchers time to find effective treatments before ALS becomes debilitating. And finally, is binge-watching TV good for your mental recall? Binge-watching has become a popular way to consume your favorite show, and researchers say it may have some benefits. A new study in Acta Psychologica reveals that people who engage in marathon viewing are more likely to remember stories and engage with the content even after watching it through imagination.

And that’s Medical Notes this week. I’m Maayan Vastabetancourt. You hear that? That’s Mike sleeping soundly on a Sunday night.

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Really great sleep. Use as directed. Keep out of reach of children.

Oh, could this vintage store be any cuter? Right? And the best part? They accept Discover. Accept Discover? In a little place like this? I don’t think so, Jennifer. Oh, yeah, huh.

Discover’s accepted where I like to shop. Come on, baby, get with the times. Right.

So we shouldn’t get the parachute pants? These are making a comeback. I think. Discover is accepted at 99% of places that take credit cards nationwide.

Based on the February 2025 Nielsen Report. Thank you for joining us this week, and every week, as we break down the science stories you need to know. You can find all of our past segments and guests on our website, RadioHealthJournal.org, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and X for daily content, and tune in next week for another edition of Radio Health Journal.

Everyone Has A Status: The Fight To End HIV | Do Americans Have A Prejudice Against Immigrant Doctors?

Urban City Podcast Group — Fri, 19 Sep 2025 20:26:25 +0000

Urban City Podcast Group

00:00

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Major Takeaways

HIV survivors still face stigma despite medical progress, with stories like Keith Green’s highlighting resilience and ongoing challenges.
Immigrant doctors play a critical role in U.S. healthcare but struggle against racism, visa restrictions, and systemic bias.
The healthcare system remains deeply influenced by social inequities, showing that progress in medicine doesn’t always erase prejudice.

Everyone Has A Status: The Fight To End HIV | Do Americans Have A Prejudice Against Immigrant Doctors?

You’re listening to Radio Health Journal, the trusted news source for medicine, science and
technology. I’m Elizabeth Westfield. I’m Mayan Vasta Betancourt.
And I’m Greg Johnson. This week, immigrant doctors are crucial to U.S. health care, but they’re
frequently disrespected. If they were working with white patients, often the white patient would
not respect their authority and would ask them to go find the real doctor.
But first, if we have so many effective tools to fight HIV, why is it still an epidemic? And I just
remember taking that train ride all the way back home and feeling like my life was over. My
very young 17-year-old life was already coming to an end. All that and more this week on Radio
Health Journal.
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The best a man can get. Gillette Labs also available in heated. In 1994, Keith Green was in his
last year of high school, excited for whatever surprises the future had in store.
Maybe he’d go to college or move to a new city where he could make an impact. Green was
already an active member of his community and had been spending the last few months of his
high school career helping set up an annual blood drive. Initially wasn’t planning to donate
blood because I was a little scared of passing out.
Kind of a cool kid, I didn’t want people to see that, didn’t want to ruin my reputation. So I wasn’t
going to donate. However, my girlfriend at the time sort of convinced me that I had to.
You have to lead by example, that sort of thing. And so I did. A couple of weeks later, I got a
letter from LifeSource, who was the company who had done the blood drive for us, pretty much
suggesting that I don’t donate any more blood and that I make an appointment to come into
their offices.
It was a vague letter that left way too much room for Green’s imagination to run wild. He knew
sickle cell anemia runs in his family. Had they detected it in his blood? After they refused to give
Green any more information over the phone, he set up an appointment and hopped on the
train after school.
The woman sat me down and she basically just said, did you know that you were HIV positive?
And of course I didn’t know. I was in complete shock. I don’t remember a whole lot about the
rest of that interaction.
It was very like a blur, still a blur. I don’t remember a whole lot of it. But I do remember that she
gave me some information, some pamphlets, stuff like that to read and review.
And I just remember taking that train ride all the way back home and feeling like my life was
over. My very young 17-year-old life was already coming to an end. Human immunodeficiency
virus, or HIV, is an infection that weakens the immune system until patients are unable to fight
off any illness.
There’s no cure. And though we now have various treatments to help patients keep their
infection under control, that wasn’t the case in 1994. Average lifespan for people living with HIV
at that time was 8 to 10 years.
We didn’t have all of the medications that we have now. The Lazarus effect, if you will, wasn’t a
thing at that time. Protease inhibitors didn’t exist.
So I had no real reason to believe that I’d live longer than 8 to 10 years. Though there weren’t
many options, Green was able to go on three different drugs that he was prescribed to take a
couple times a day. And I remember that one of them was this sort of big, white, quarter-sized,
chalky pill that you had to take on an empty stomach.
And it tasted horrible. It was just absolutely disgusting. And I also remember just feeling
lethargic, nauseous, you know, not well.
And I started taking medications around the same time that I started my first semester of
college. I actually started at Columbia College. And it was just so dreadful that I just stopped.
It was a decision between Green’s mental health or his medication, a choice that stretched for
eight years before his doctor made sure Green knew it was becoming a choice between life and
death. When they drew my labs, I had a T-cell count of 30, and my viral load was well into the
hundreds of thousands. And so I was told at that time that, you know, if I didn’t get on
medications, it was likely I wouldn’t survive.
I had some friends who lived here and then moved to Charlotte, North Carolina. I moved to
Charlotte really because I didn’t want my family to witness what I was going through. I started
to lose a great deal of weight, was really sick for a period of time.
So I literally went there to die. Though he desperately needed medical care, Green says
accessing it was nearly impossible without insurance. To access the public health system there,
there was a phone number that you had to call between eight and nine in the morning.
That’s the only time you could call to get an appointment. And generally, those appointments
were, the available appointments for that day were gone before you got to nine o’clock. So I
had to go through several days of making an appointment.
And I remember when I finally was able to get an appointment, we were a couple of months
out. So it was just a nightmare trying to access health care in Charlotte, North Carolina.
Thankfully, a friend was able to help Green out, and he found a specialist who immediately put
Green back on a treatment plan.
But by this time, he had let the disease progress so far, there was still a chance he wouldn’t
make it. I was hospitalized for several weeks. You know, I’m 6’4″, average weight was at that
time about 190, 195 pounds.
I withered away to about 144 pounds and was literally at one point given six months to a year
to live. Against all odds, Green’s numbers began to turn around. Instead of a sure death
sentence, he once again began imagining a possible future.
The doctor handed him a copy of a magazine called Positively Aware’s 2002 HIV Drug Guide.
And Green began to map out his next steps. And I kind of made a pact with myself in that
moment that if I got back to Chicago, I would seek out this place because obviously there had
been all of these advances in medications that I didn’t know a whole lot about.
And people were living and I needed to, they had information that I needed to get. So I needed
to get there. Green did eventually end up back in Chicago and worked his way up the ranks at
the magazine, becoming an associate editor.
He went on to become a co-founder of the Chicago Black Gay Men’s Caucus, of which he is now
the executive director. The organization aims to end HIV by increasing health equity and
developing innovative programs. And though HIV.gov reports that cases dropped 12 percent
between 2018 and 2022, there’s still a lot of obstacles that prevention programs face.
Green says a main issue is stigma. It keeps people from ever having these important
conversations with their doctors. There’s still many medical professionals who don’t believe in
PrEP and stigmatize or shame folks for asking for it or using it.
I think that there’s a great deal of what we call slut shaming, where, you know, if folks are on
PrEP, they’re assumed to be promiscuous. And so then that also leads to the like, I’m not
promiscuous. I don’t need that.
Right. But any encounter could potentially put you at risk. And so it doesn’t matter whether
you’re promiscuous or not.
If you are sexually active, PrEP is something that is for you. One of the things we know is that
stigma is a big driver of why we haven’t gone to where we need to be. There’s a lot of stigma.
And until we end stigma, we can’t end HIV. That’s Dr. Toyin Nwafor, executive director of U.S.
HIV Medical Affairs at Gilead Sciences. She says that stigma can drastically reduce the number
of people getting tested and their willingness to continue care.
If they’re going into spaces where they don’t feel affirmed, they feel judged, they feel like
somebody sees me going to that clinic. Right. So then people stop taking their meds.
Stigma impacts somebody’s mental health and ability to stay on therapy. If you just keep
feeling like every time you take that pill, it reminds you of just how you felt the first time you
got that diagnosis. So stigma is such a big part.
So initiatives that normalize conversation, that normalize that we’re all HIV possible, that if
you’re sexually active, there are ways to prevent HIV, and that nobody cares about how you’re
having sex and who you’re having sex with. That’s your personal life and that’s your personal
choice. And that routinizing that conversation is what needs to happen.
If you’ve never gotten tested for HIV, you’re part of the majority in America. Despite the CDC
issuing guidelines in 2006 that everyone over age 13 should be tested at least once, only about
36 percent of adults have. Nwafor says part of the hesitancy has to do with how HIV testing
began.
Initially, right, with the first few cases of people living with HIV diagnosed, it was thought to be
only in certain risk groups, right, men who have sex with men or injection drug use. So some of
those initial tests and how health care providers thought was very located in certain
populations. That has changed clearly over the last three and a half decades.
But it’s taking people a long time to catch on, not just community, but also health care
providers. Nwafor says that the test has become more mainstream in certain cases. It’s become
a routine part of prenatal testing panels for pregnant women and for anyone wanting to take
HIV preventative medication.
But there’s still a big discrepancy between recommendations on what’s actually happening. And
there are many times when people who have been engaging in health care assume they’ve
actually had an HIV test. When they go in and say test me for everything, they assume that their
health care provider did it already.
So there’s still a lot of work to be done about why it’s not happening. And some of it has to do
with health care provider bias, comfort or discomfort in having the conversation where they’re
practicing. And that’s why the CDC took out risk based testing and just said if people are
sexually active, they should have an HIV test.
And that’s what’s going to happen. That’s the only way we’re going to kind of move forward
with getting it done. Which is why Nwafor believes that many of the HIV prevention initiatives
that focus on community outreach must also include the broader scope of health care
professionals.
For her and Green, the most effective message will educate the patients, doctors and
pharmaceutical companies. You have these innovative technologies that literally could prevent
someone from contracting HIV that just in 2025 still remain out of reach. With Gilead Sciences,
there’s been a commitment for, you know, 35 years now, right, to innovation in medication
discovery, right, not just in HIV, but also in viral hepatitis, right, a lot of curative therapy for
hepatitis, in oncology, right, in oncology, in liver disease.
But what’s clear is that medications and products don’t end epidemics. Programs do, right,
because a medicine is only as good as getting to the right person at the right time when they
need it, how they need to use it. Nwafor believes that public-private partnerships between HIV
advocacy groups and health care companies are the bridge between innovation and real life
impact.
The health care system and partnerships within the patient community and pharma and
academia and public health needs to come into play so that we can actually take interventions
and actually make them tangible and real for people who need them the most. You can find
more information about Dr. Toyin Nwafor, Keith Green and all of our guests on our website,
RadioHealthJournal.org. For more behind the scenes, follow Radio Health Journal on Facebook,
Instagram and Twitter at RadioHealthJournal. And I’m Kristin Ferra.
And I’m Elizabeth Westfield. And I’m Kristin Ferra. And I’m Elizabeth Westfield.
Coming up, how will current immigration policies impact America’s health care workforce?
When Radio Health Journal returns. I’m still going for it, even with higher stroke risk from atrial
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Immigrant doctors play a crucial role in the U.S. health care system, serving patients in parts of
the country where there’s a shortage of doctors. These highly qualified medical professionals
from Southeast Asia and elsewhere have the same amount of training as American doctors, if
not more. They take the same exams as U.S.-trained professionals in order to receive their
accreditation or licensing to practice in the U.S. And yet many still are victims of racism and
other prejudices from their patients who question their skill and expertise.
If they were working with white patients, often the white patient would not respect their
authority and would ask them to go find the real doctor. There was another example of a
physician who was working with black patients and the black patients were judging his level of
medical knowledge and saying, oh, you’re from this land of snake charmers. And do you
actually know what you’re doing? And so I think that these physicians often from all sides would
experience these questions around their competence and their ability to do the work, which is,
you know, competence is coded for it’s a very racist kind of idea here.
That’s Iram Alam, associate professor of history of science at Harvard University and author of
The Care of Foreigners, How Immigrant Physicians Changed U.S. Healthcare. The number of
immigrant doctors in the U.S. is one in four. However, the ratio can be much higher in areas of
the country where there are physician shortages.
In rural hospitals, for example, it’s possible for 100 percent of physicians to be immigrants. But
regardless of the biases they face, these professionals work around it to give their patients the
best care possible. Some of that meant just kind of absorbing it.
Other times it meant figuring out different strategies for how they would speak to people or
address the patients. And often what it meant was just that over time there was a recognition
that this was the only physician that was available to people. And so there was almost a what
are you going to do? It’s either this or nothing.
Although some patients may choose to do nothing, Alam says more often than not, most
choose to see the foreign specialist. It’s a really complicated dynamic, especially because having
an encounter with a physician is such an intimate encounter. It’s such a vulnerable kind of
encounter.
So in some ways, I think that that I’m not sure if it makes it worse or if it makes it less bad in
that way. Like you’re coming from a place of actually really requiring this care and being
vulnerable to it as well. So I think it takes time.
I think it’s taken persistence on the part of immigrant physicians and their presence and having
to prove themselves and having to prove their competence often. But, you know, on their part,
it feels like it’s a well, a the conditions of their legal entry in the United States and also, I think, a
commitment to the profession and a commitment to providing care. The U.S. government has a
long history of recruiting foreign doctors to staff what are called health professional shortage
areas or HPSAs.
The practice started at the end of World War II and has continued ever since. Health profession
shortage areas are these designations that the federal government makes where there are
fewer than one physician for 3,500 people who live in those areas. And these designations can
be all over.
So they can be in rural communities, they can be in urban centers. But it just means that there
is an inadequate number of physicians to the populations. So these often are areas that are
impoverished, under-resourced, and they’re not attractive places that U.S.-trained physicians
would like to go and work because the conditions are, they’re difficult to work in.
Immigrant doctors who are here on a J-1 visa have to return to their home country for at least
two years after completing their training. To bypass this requirement, they can choose to work
full-time in an HPSA, medically underserved area, or medically underserved population for at
least three years. However, Allam believes that this practice of recruiting foreign doctors is
simply putting a bandage on a bigger problem.
She believes medical students should be cultivated from rural or underserved areas in the
hopes that they’ll return to serve their home communities. Otherwise, there’s no incentive for
doctors to want to practice there. Allam says another factor in these shortage areas is the cost
of medical school.
One of the reasons why I chose not to go to medical school and to go to Ph.D. school was I
didn’t come from a wealthy family. And the idea of taking on that much debt was too
overwhelming. And so what happens then is you end up getting these shortages.
Also, it’s shortage of specialties. So things like internal medicine, family medicine, pediatrics,
the specialties that are not as lucrative are the ones that immigrant physicians are often trained
in or are sent to go and receive training. And because U.S.-trained physicians, they want to
work in specialties where they can get paid more so they can also pay off their debt faster and
not be in these excruciating kinds of cycles of educational debt.
Allam believes the health care systems in Canada and the United Kingdom provide a more
judicial model that tends to limit doctor shortages to some degree. Physicians are salaried
government employees, part of the national health care system. And so the ways that they are
asked to move and work and that work is organized, of course, they still have shortages and are
dealing with similar kinds of issues.
But the distribution of how people are organized is different than it is in the United States,
where it’s really based on a much more, I mean, it’s a free market logic. And the ways that
people are compensated is based on their geographic proximity to other practitioners. That’s
how insurance allocates reimbursements.
This is not going to incentivize people to go and work in rural areas or under-resourced
hospitals in urban areas at all. For U.S.-trained physicians, for immigrant physicians, that’s
what’s available to them. And so they end up going there.
And though these physicians are working where no one else is willing to, they still face blatant
prejudice. Thankfully, Allum says celebrity doctors such as Abraham Verghese have helped to
dispel some of the implicit biases some American patients have toward immigrant doctors.
However, it’s possible that these physicians won’t be able to continue this custom.
The current immigration policies have created pretty big obstacles for international medical
graduates. Visa delays could drastically impact America’s workforce and, in turn, worsen many
Americans’ access to health care. These physicians and immigrant nurses and other kinds of
care workers in long-term care facilities are so vitally important to the functioning of the U.S.
health care system.
And the kinds of erratic and xenophobic immigration policies that are being enacted right now
are going to have a very adverse effect on the health of the U.S. population. Allum’s book, The
Care of Foreigners, How Immigrant Physicians Changed U.S. Health Care, is available now for
preorder. You can find more information about Iram Allum and all of our guests on our
website, RadioHealthJournal.org. For more behind the scenes, follow Radio Health Journal on
Facebook, Instagram and X. Our writer producer this week is Polly Hanson.
Our lead producer is Kristen Farrah. Our production manager is Jason Dickey. I’m Greg Johnson.
Radio Health Journal returns in just a moment. Oh, could this vintage store be any cuter? Right.
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Use as directed. Keep out of reach of children. Medical Notes this week.
Are you taking too many medications? In a review of nearly 2,000 older adults, about one in
three took five or more prescription drugs. These people had worse balance, weaker grip
strength and walked slower than their peers. Researchers believe it’s not necessarily the type of
drugs that are contributing to this difference, but simply the sheer number of them.
The research, published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine, supports the need for
physicians to consider a patient’s functional health when prescribing. Your blood may soon
have tiny robots flowing through it. Drugs administered through IVs aren’t often as precise as
they need to be, so researchers have found a solution.
Robots. These micro-devices are injected and then moved to a specific target area using
magnets. The scientists hope this will help patients get the most out of their medications.
The study is published in the journal Science Advances. We can detect more cases of
Alzheimer’s disease, so why aren’t we? New research shows that a majority of older Americans
understand why early detection is important, but only one in five have had a recent cognitive
screening. The numbers are even lower for Hispanic and Asian Americans.
These early screenings are important to help slow the disease as early as possible. The research
is published in Alzheimer’s and Dementia, Diagnosis, Assessment and Disease Monitoring. And
finally, a new fix for carbon monoxide poisoning.
Just over 1,000 Americans die from CO poisoning each year. Thankfully, a new protein-based
therapy helps the body rapidly get rid of the carbon monoxide through urine. The research is
published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.
And that’s Medical Notes this week. I’m Maayan Vastabetancourt. Do Crohn’s disease or
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Call 1-800-526-7736 to learn more or visit Tremphayaradio.com. Thank you for joining us this
week and every week as we break down the science stories you need to know. You can find all
of our past segments and guests on our website, radiohealthjournal.org, or wherever you listen
to podcasts. Follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and X for daily content.
And tune in next week for another edition of Radio Health Journal.

Can Suicide Be Prevented? Stories From Survivors And Loved Ones

Urban City Podcast Group — Fri, 12 Sep 2025 20:26:48 +0000

Urban City Podcast Group

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Major Takeaways:

The notion that all suicides are preventable is a damaging myth that can increase guilt and shame for loss survivors, as some individuals do not show clear warning signs.
Suicide is often an impulsive act, and one of the most effective prevention strategies is creating time and space between a person in crisis and lethal means.
Listening without judgment is one of the most powerful tools for helping someone experiencing suicidal thoughts, as it provides connection and can de-escalate a crisis.

Are All Suicides Preventable? Debunking Myths and Understanding the Complex Reality

You’re listening to Radio Health Journal, the trusted news source for medicine, science and technology. I’m Elizabeth Westfield. I’m Mayan Vastabetancourt.

And I’m Greg Johnson. This week, why do older drugs have so many more quality issues? If you think of most industries, you would think companies would get better, you know, through the learning curve. They would get better and better at making the products that they’re making.

But in this industry, the older drugs are the drugs that have kind of run the race to the bottom. But first, are all suicides truly preventable? Not every person with thoughts of suicide shows us a sign. They might protect their loved ones and family from that.

They might be showing someone else a sign. And it’s quite possible there are no signs. All that and more this week on Radio Health Journal.

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It’s a time when most of us feel renewed and optimistic. But September is also National Suicide Prevention Month. Unfortunately, it’s a year-round issue.

During the month of April, more people take their own lives than any other time of year. The myth that suicide rates reach their peak during the holidays is just that, a myth. Here’s another one.

Every suicide death is preventable. In fact, no matter how well-intentioned, alert, and diligent people’s efforts may be, there’s no way of preventing all suicides from occurring, as stated by the Nevada Division of Public and Behavioral Health Office of Suicide Prevention. We strive for 100% suicide prevention, but people are complex, hence suicide prevention is equally complex.

We don’t know always those signs. We aren’t always aware of those signs, but also not every person with thoughts of suicide shows us a sign. They might protect their loved ones and family from that.

They might be showing someone else a sign, and it’s quite possible there are no signs. I do believe that is rare. Most people do show some indication that they’re struggling and having thoughts of suicide or struggling with other mental health concerns.

That’s Misty Vaughn-Allen, Suicide Prevention Coordinator with the state of Nevada in the Division of Public and Behavioral Health. She says the notion that all suicides can be prevented is hurtful and inaccurate. In 2022, the CDC recorded almost 50,000 deaths by suicide in the U.S., so it’s an important distinction to make, especially for suicide loss survivors.

Yes, suicide prevention is a great thing, and I’m glad to see the new hotline number and all of the good work that American Foundation for Suicide Prevention is doing. I would argue that not all suicides are preventable, and perhaps I say that because my daughter’s wasn’t and I wasn’t able to. So maybe I’m being defensive about it, but I’ve talked to many other parents who bristle at the idea.

That’s Eileen Vorbach-Collins, author of Love in the Archives, a patchwork of true stories about suicide loss. Her daughter, Lydia, took her own life 24 years ago. Lydia was 15 years old.

Certainly, my daughter had mental health issues and had her own clinical diagnoses and was hospitalized. And it wasn’t that I didn’t see what we like to call the signs. And that’s one of the issues I have with the whole idea of getting on the prevention bandwagon.

Certainly, we all want to see suicide prevention, and I’m certain that it does work to a degree. It’s when I hear that all suicides are preventable that it makes me bristle because they are not. You know, I worked in mental health.

I knew the signs. My daughter exhibited many of them, was hospitalized, had a therapist, was medicated for a while. But at some point, you cannot watch a child 24 hours a day.

As a parent, Collins suffered the common stigma of shame and guilt after Lydia’s death. Had she done enough to protect her daughter? Could she have prevented Lydia’s suicide? Collins sought help from other suicide loss survivors through various support groups. If it hadn’t been for some of these survivor groups, I don’t know how I would have managed.

I absolutely needed to find other people who had gone through this. I have so many people in my life because of these support groups who have felt the same and I’m able to look at them and say, no, this wasn’t your fault. You know, you did what you could do.

And then finally being able to tell myself that. In addition to the myth of prevention, Collins says another misleading idea is that suicide is always a selfish act. I never thought of it that way.

I thought of it as she tried so hard. And when I read her journals, when I read her journals, she fought it for a long time, as young as she was. And I hear this from many other parents.

It’s not like they did this to hurt us. They did it because they couldn’t take the pain anymore. Rick Strait is the Substance Use Division Director and Suicide Prevention Coordinator for the Community Counseling Center in Southeast Missouri.

He’s also a suicide attempt survivor. I struggled with depression my whole life. Growing up as a child, didn’t know it was depression at the time.

And then I lost my brother in a car accident. And that took that grief, that spiraled the depression to the point that I felt completely alone. In retrospect, I know I wasn’t alone.

I had parents that were also hurting, but I felt like I had to not let them know I was hurting. That way I could be supportive of them. I had a wife at the time and I had a newborn baby.

And I was in the military at the time. So I had a lot of friends that are my squadron that I, you know, so I knew like looking back, I had so many people in my corner, but I just felt like I wasn’t. I felt like it was just me.

Fortunately, Strait’s mom interrupted his attempt. Though he was initially angry, Strait quickly realized how grateful he was to be alive. Yes, I was glad.

But I still struggle with depression and suicidal thoughts for many, many more years. But after the attempt, though, I kind of made a promise myself that I wouldn’t attempt again because I realized how it was going to impact my wife at the time. And so I tried to make that promise myself that it would never happen again.

Strait says he eventually learned how to talk about his feelings, though it took a long time to be comfortable with. And when he met with other suicide attempt survivors, he realized that so many more people struggle with these thoughts than just him. Because that was one of the worst feelings about when I was having thoughts of suicide is I really thought that nobody else would ever understand that there’s nobody else has ever been through this.

And so as I learned over the years that there are so many people have been through this. So many people have lost people to suicide. So many people have made attempts and lived.

And then so many people are struggling with those thoughts and never act on them. And so even though I’m not glad that they struggled also, it was kind of a lightning effect for me when I realized, OK, I’m not alone. This isn’t some just messed up brick thing.

This is this happens. And, you know, the more I learn and how often it happens, it has helped me feel kind of normal. And then eventually I got some counseling and some help to get through the depression.

Today, Strait is doing well, but he still has bad days. The difference is that he talks about his feelings with his family and friends to let them know when he’s struggling. We don’t have to spend much time dwelling on it, but it keeps those thoughts from festering and becoming more intense.

Von Allen says many people live with ongoing thoughts of suicide on a daily basis. Thankfully, a lot of them have found successful coping strategies. There are many people with persistent thoughts of suicide, and they live and work with us and keep themselves safe.

When their thoughts start to escalate towards suicide, they have a safety plan that they need to work. And that could be reaching out to a hotline. It could be walking the dog.

It could be talking to your support system. Research shows that suicide attempts are often impulsive. A person might deliberate for five minutes or less after having suicidal thoughts before taking action.

It is one of the most preventable forms of death. It is. But again, we aren’t always given the gift of time and those signs within that time.

There are certain people who might have an event occur that activates thoughts of suicide and lethal means are readily accessible. One of the most proven prevention strategies we can implement is giving that person with thoughts of suicide space and time away from that lethal means, be it medication, be it a firearm. We give them space and time.

Often they can deescalate. They can reach out for help or someone can intervene. So that’s really a crucial element here.

But we don’t always get that opportunity. And as suicide rates continue to rise, Von Allen says that prevention is crucial. However, there’s always more to learn, especially from people like Strait.

Those who survive their own attempts of suicide teach us how to be better at the work we do with prevention. Under our best efforts and our most diligent work, we can still lose someone that we’re trying to help. But the better we get, the stronger our safety net will become.

If anyone listening to this program is feeling depressed or having suicidal thoughts, you can dial or text 988 from anywhere in the country. Sometimes just talking to somebody that you know that cares and can help listen. And sometimes it can be enough on its own and they get a trained person.

They can ask them some questions and just be there for a conversation. And then most states also have, you know, walk in mental health clinics as well. I know in Missouri, every county has a Department of Mental Health funded place where they people can walk in and they can talk to somebody every day, any day.

And if someone you know is depressed or has shared that they’ve been having suicidal thoughts, STRAIGHT says it’s important to be a listening ear for them. If we can have compassion and listening and ask them questions and then just be present, even if we know it’s a suicidal crisis or not. So let’s say there is a teenager that brings that to them.

Just being there and being in that moment and tell me what’s going on and then truly listening. And as a parent myself, it’s hard not to try to fix right away. We want to go into problem solving and tell all things are going right.

Just listen and kind of shut that parent mode off for a second and just, you know, the writing reflex and just listen. I think that’s one of the most powerful things we can do, whether it be any type of mental health thing, whether it be just a bad day and no suicidal crisis or somebody that’s having suicidal thoughts. If we can just take a few minutes and just truly listen to what they’re saying and not jump to conclusions.

Collins book Love in the Archives, a patchwork of true stories about suicide loss is available now online and wherever books are sold. You can learn more about suicide prevention and all of our guests on our website, RadioHealthJournal.org. For more behind the scenes, follow Radio Health Journal on Facebook, Instagram and X. The segment originally aired in April of 2024 and was written and produced by Polly Hanson. Our lead producer is Kristen Farah.

Our executive producer is Amir Zaveri. I’m Elizabeth Westfield. Coming up, are your prescription drugs safe? When Radio Health Journal returns.

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Apple AirTag sold separately. Whether you have a chronic condition or periodic headaches, the quality of pharmaceuticals affects every American. To ensure a stellar end product, every step of the process must be held to a high standard from ingredient sourcing to labeling.

These guidelines are called the Current Good Manufacturing Practice Regulations. The FDA uses them to guarantee accurate design, monitoring and control of manufacturing processes and facilities so that every product is safe and reliable. The good manufacturing practices, the GMPs, as the FDA calls them, were written explicitly to ensure consistently high quality drugs leaving facilities.

So the FDA chose to, a long time ago, to manage quality through the process versus the products. They don’t do a lot of product testing. Instead, they go and inspect the process both before they approve a facility to produce a drug and then ongoing, supposed to be about every two years.

That’s John Gray, a Dean’s Distinguished Professor of Operations and Business Analytics at The Ohio State University. Despite the FDA’s oversight, there’s been various reports of GMP violations at facilities in India. In fact, a 2019 book by Catherine Ebon exposed Indian generic drug companies for purposefully deceiving and defrauding customers with low quality products.

However, Gray says many of the violations aren’t officially recorded, partly because it’s extremely difficult to access the data. The pharmaceutical industry is notoriously private when it comes to where their drugs are produced, and they’re not required to disclose that information to consumers. I believe that it does serve some in the industry well to have a lack of transparency and to have all consumers and providers believe that there is absolutely no difference between all of the possible generic drugs they might take for a given condition.

There’s not supposed to be a difference, but just like with any other industry, things fall through the cracks. But when quality drops in this business, it can be life or death for consumers. Gray and his team stumbled across a goldmine of information that helped them piece together data that’s often kept hidden from researchers.

We were actually working on a grant with the FDA at that time and kind of got a hint that, hey, there’s a California law that requires drug companies to put the facility in their label. Go kind of look that way. And we found the law, but still that didn’t make it obvious as to how to go about to do this.

Thankfully, Gray’s PhD student was able to dig through a bunch of labels on DailyMed, the National Library of Medicine’s database of the most recent labeling. But unlike the nutrition information on the side of a cereal box, the labeling for prescription drugs are each 20, 30, even 40 pages long for one product. Gray says many of them identify their manufacturers through a Dunn’s number, which is a unique business tag created by the credit bureau Dunn and Bradstreet.

It’s a number that if you subscribe or your library subscribes to the database, you can type it in and then it will give you the facility information. And that was structured in a way that he was able to automatically extract more than half of the drugs. He was able to find where the production was located and then through a little more manual effort was able to get a higher percentage.

It wasn’t 100 percent, but this novel source of data gave them much more than other researchers have had access to. Gray and his team used this information to compare the number of serious adverse events caused by generic prescription drugs made in different locations. While various American facilities have had issues with GMP compliance, Gray’s analysis published in the journal Production and Operations Management reveals that the same drugs coming out of India seem to be much riskier for consumers.

The adverse events data is messy. And so we’re and then this is a model predicted number. But the number we quote in the paper is about a 50 percent higher incidence of adverse events than if it coming from the same drug from India, controlling for volume, most importantly, but also controlling for other facility and drug characteristics compared to, again, the exact same active ingredient dosage form and route of administration from a domestically produced drug.

So that’s kind of the kind of valid number, most carefully constructed numbers, about that 50 percent higher. We if you read the paper closely, we put a lot of cautions around that because, again, the adverse events database is messy. The FDA cautions against using its adverse events reporting system as a sole indicator of drug quality because the reports haven’t been medically verified.

However, the FDA does use this same database as a tool for postmarket surveillance to identify drug safety issues. Interestingly, this data was able to reveal an interesting pattern. Most of the serious adverse events could be linked back to older drugs.

If you look at the drugs, the newer generic drugs, there actually wasn’t a statistically significant difference, whereas for the drugs that were older than the median, which was about eight years, that was really where the result was coming from. And that’s kind of interesting, because if you think of most industries, you would think companies would get better through the learning curve. They would get better and better at making the products that they’re making.

But in this industry, the older drugs, the drugs that have kind of run the race to the bottom. With so much secrecy within the industry, Gray says the buyers purchasing decisions are limited mostly to which product is cheapest. And since all generic drug manufacturers are required to use the same active ingredients, dosage form and route of administration as the name brand, it seems like a win-win.

That is, until manufacturers stop adhering to the GMP regulations. Gray’s best guess as to why the pharmaceutical industry’s trends drastically differ from others is simple. Money.

It’s cheaper to not fully comply with GMPs, which means more competitive pricing and higher profit margins. The FDA does have inspections to make sure all facilities are up to code. But while domestic inspections are unannounced, they’ve historically given advance notice to foreign facilities.

That’s quite a different environment, right? If you’re going to get a few months notice that the FDA might be coming or is going to be coming, say, in three months from now, you have time to kind of clean things up a little bit. And if you know the exact date they’re coming, you have time to even have the right employees at the facility that will answer the questions well and the best trained employees and things like that. Because the FDA inspections are quite thorough.

I mean, the FDA comes in and talks to employees on the floor. They look at records, they get into the computer systems, but you have time to clean that up. Whereas if they just show up unannounced and then they have the right to enter the facility immediately, you’re just caught in your normal state.

And so these pre-announced inspections allow the normal state maybe to be a little less than ideal. And then when the inspector arrives for you to be a little above your normal state and maybe not be forced then to fix problems because maybe they’re not detected. Earlier this year, the FDA recently announced plans to expand its surprise inspections to foreign facilities that produce food, drugs and medical products for American consumers.

Additionally, investigators will no longer be able to accept travel accommodations from regulated industry members. While it’s unclear when this plan will go into effect, it’s a big step towards solving these drug quality issues. Gray says another important shift would be increasing the transparency so that buyers know where their products are being made.

We prefer location and quality transparency because we don’t want, if we just do location transparency, there would be a bias or tendency toward domestic manufacturing and maybe a bias against India and China specifically. But there are good manufacturers in India and China. And so if we do location and quality transparency, now a valid and reliable quality metric needs to be created.

The FDA probably has a reasonable one, but I don’t think they’re going to release it. And then a high quality Indian manufacturer could still compete and a low quality domestic manufacturer would be challenged. And so we could still have this global supply chain, which I think is necessary and appropriate, but we would not have this cost only buying practice and this race to the bottom being run.

However, Gray mentions that it’ll be hard to create true change without some reform on the buyer side. In pharmaceuticals, the buyers aren’t the consumers. They’re often pharmacy benefit managers or PBMs who are negotiating and purchasing on behalf of pharmacies and insurance companies.

The consumers or the doctors might notice where the drugs are located or that they’re a four star rated drug instead of a five star rated drug or something like that. But it’ll be difficult for them to do anything if their insurance company only covers these two NDCs for this treatment. And so a bigger thing is some and it’s a harder thing.

You know, transparency is relatively easy. It would be easy to write down the mandate for transparency. I’m not saying be easy to implement, but it’s easy to imagine.

Right. It’s easy to imagine doing on and out inspections. We’ve already done pilots.

We know how to do it. But fixing the middle of the pharmaceutical supply chain between the manufacturers and the consumers is pretty hard. There’s really powerful entities in the middle there.

He’s not saying it’s impossible, but it’ll require some elbow grease to get to the real change that’ll help American consumers. You can find more information about John Gray and all of our guests on our website, RadioHealthJournal.org. For more behind the scenes, follow Radio Health Journal on Facebook, Instagram and X. Our writer producer is Kristen Farrah. Our production manager is Jason Dickey.

I’m Greg Johnson. Radio Health Journal returns in just a moment. You know, that big bargain detergent jug is 80 percent water, right? It doesn’t clean as well.

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Individual results may vary. Ask your doctor about Tremphaya today. Call 1-800-526-7736 to learn more or visit TremphayaRadio.com. Medical Notes this week.

Why are weight loss drugs so difficult to take long term? GLP-1 medications help suppress a person’s appetite, but the various side effects like vomiting and nausea cause a majority of patients to stop using the drugs within a year. Now, a research team has found a new brain region to target that won’t cause these gastrointestinal symptoms. When tested in mice, the injection helped the animals lose weight without negative side effects.

The study is published in the journal Science Translational Medicine. Alcoholism doesn’t just affect one person. New research in the journal Aging and Disease shows that paternal drinking habits before conception can negatively affect fetal development.

It can also cause symptoms of early aging in kids, even when consuming the legal limit. And the effects continue to worsen if both parents drink. And finally, fix your bad knees without surgery.

Osteoarthritis is a leading cause of adult disability, and there’s no way to reverse the damage. However, scientists have found that making a small adjustment to how someone walks can cause the same amount of relief as medication. It also reduces cartilage damage in the knee.

The study is published in The Lancet Rheumatology. And that’s medical notes this week. I’m Maayan Vastabetancourt.

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Keep out of reach of children. Thank you for joining us this week and every week as we break down the science stories you need to know. You can find all of our past segments and guests on our website, RadioHealthJournal.org or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Follow us on Instagram, Facebook and X for daily content and tune in next week for another edition of Radio Health Journal.

Turning Trauma Into Strength: ADHD Treatment and the Power of Primal Wounds

Urban City Podcast Group — Sat, 06 Sep 2025 16:59:45 +0000

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Major Takeaways:

Accurate ADHD diagnosis requires collaboration between psychiatrists, teachers, and parents, as symptoms often mimic other conditions.
Medications remain the most effective ADHD treatment, but therapy and parent support can further help children navigate challenges.
Core childhood wounds, or “primal wounds,” can be reframed into strengths, helping individuals turn trauma into resilience and healthier communication.

Turning Trauma Into Strength: ADHD Treatment and the Power of Primal Wounds

You’re listening to Radio Health Journal, the trusted news source for medicine, science and technology. I’m Elizabeth Westfield. I’m Mayan Vasta Betancourt.

And I’m Greg Johnson. This week, how to turn your trauma into your biggest asset. Your past is not your problem.

It actually becomes your superpower. My framework actually flips the script entirely and says, there’s nothing wrong with you. Let’s embrace it and take it and do something with it.

But first, why ADHD treatment needs a team-based approach. Even if it’s the best medicine and it’s really helpful for this kid, if that medicine doesn’t get into that kid’s mouth and into the body, it’s not going to be helpful. All that and more this week on Radio Health Journal.

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Serious allergic reactions and increased risk of infections and liver problems may occur. Before treatment, your doctor should check you for infections and tuberculosis. Tell your doctor if you have an infection, flu-like symptoms, or if you need a vaccine.

Healing is possible with Tremphaya. Approximately 3 out of 10 patients were in endoscopic remission at one year, based on areas visualized on colonoscopy, which may not represent the deeper bowel layer or entire GI tract. Individual results may vary.

Ask your doctor about Tremphaya today. Call 1-800-526-7736 to learn more or visit Tremphayaradio.com. Though many of us are familiar with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, the journey through treatment isn’t as straightforward as you may assume. Dr. Bradley Peterson, a child and adolescent psychiatrist, says the very first obstacle families face is getting an accurate diagnosis.

He says that there are various other conditions that mimic similar symptoms, which can lead patients down a rabbit hole of misdiagnoses. Maybe the most common thing is kids who are very anxious. They can be quite fidgety because they’re anxious.

And when you’re anxious about things, like in a classroom, whether the kids are looking at you or thinking badly of you, or the teacher’s thinking badly about you, that can absorb your attention and distract you from paying attention to what you need to pay attention to in class, what the teacher’s saying. Most psychiatric and mental health and behavioral problems, in fact, have some impact on our ability to pay attention and stay focused. It’s a pretty nonspecific symptom, and so a lot of things can look like ADHD or be confused with it.

Peterson is chief of the Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and co-director of the Behavioral Health Institute at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles. There are three core symptoms of ADHD, hyperactivity, inattention, and impulsivity. When people think about ADHD, their first image is that really hyperactive type.

And it’s usually the stereotype of a little boy who’s sort of all over the place physically. What’s happened over the years is it’s gotten really convoluted. And when people have inattention and they’re more subtle, like we often see with women and girls who have ADHD, they tend to be under identified and less likely to be seen by others.

That’s Dr. Andrew Kahn, associate director of expertise and strategic design at Understood, a nonprofit for learning and thinking differences. Their new interactive tool called Through My Eyes offers users the ability to understand how neurodivergent kids think. And as you navigate through the simulation, what you commonly see is that kids who are going through their day-to-day lives are experiencing things that we don’t always see.

So as the simulation goes on, it is narrated by the kids themselves. We also see through Through My Eyes videos where we have nine different kids talking about their life experiences with learning and thinking differences and being neurodivergent. And I think that what you see in that situation is that the experiences as they’re narrated to you by the kids themselves gives you insight into things that you wouldn’t have seen otherwise.

Kahn says the program’s goal is to help neurotypical people truly understand the obstacles kids with ADHD face. Many of the tasks are ones that may seem easy to others, like brushing your teeth or tying your shoes. People get lost in the behavior that they see.

So if a child has, let’s say, ADHD as our example, and they’re feeling really challenged by an activity, what you’re likely to see is behavior. So people are going to say, oh, that child’s out of their seat, or they’re refusing to do a task. And in turn, people draw assumptions that that kid is lazy or defiant or unmotivated.

And what they can’t see is that that child is trying to filter out all of that stimulation, trying to focus their attention or navigate their energies. And those kind of misunderstandings can really lead to a lot of difficulty. Like being reprimanded or taken out of the classroom without having their struggles ever addressed.

However, the necessary support can only come after a kid has gotten an accurate diagnosis. The ideal medical professional for this is a child psychiatrist, but they can be hard to find and even harder to access. Thankfully, Peterson says teachers are a valuable resource in this journey.

Teachers can compare this child’s behavior and their ability to stay focused on a task with all the other kids in the class, all the other kids that they’ve experienced in their teaching careers. Teachers are very, very good sources of information. Once that diagnosis is made, the next hurdle is finding the right treatment.

Every case is different, but Peterson says there are generally two major categories of treatment, medication and therapy. And it can be hard to access either one or both of those. I would say that typically, in general, accessing really good psychotherapy and behavioral therapy is much harder, much harder.

And even when you can access it, it’s very difficult to gauge the skill set of the therapist and the care provider. Someone who calls themselves a therapist, not all of them are the same. Calling yourself a therapist doesn’t make you one and it doesn’t make you a good one.

So discerning who’s good and really qualified is really difficult and important. Which is where having a referral from a trusted medical professional can be extremely helpful. On the other hand, medications can be a bit easier to get right because Peterson says many pediatricians know how to prescribe the most common ones for ADHD.

That’s especially good news since his 2024 paper shows that drugs tend to be the best treatment for this condition. About 80% of kids will benefit from that first trial of medicine. And it helps not only with the core symptoms of ADHD, but with other problems as well.

So just global impressions of how the child’s doing clinically, it helps with that pretty dramatically. It also helps with other problems like disruptive behaviors. You know, some kids with ADHD, because they’re impulsive, they can be more aggressive than other kids.

They can have trouble following rules and those sorts of things. And medicines generally help with those problems as well. So they’re helpful not only for the core symptoms of ADHD, but the other kinds of problems that often come along with ADHD.

So the benefits are substantial and most kids will benefit pretty dramatically from medicine. Peterson’s systematic review, published in the journal Pediatrics, looked at how effective various interventions are on the symptoms of ADHD. And though drugs are at the top of that list, they do still have side effects that can deter some patients.

They can cause appetite suppression, sleep issues and irritability. But Peterson says it’s worth taking the time to find the one that works the best for each person. There are two major classes of drugs to choose from, stimulant and non-stimulant.

Peterson says stimulants are the most common and are widely helpful. But there are many reasons why parents choose to give their kids one type over the other. I would say some families and parents in particular have a conceptual, ethical, even moral bias against stimulant medications.

They’re afraid that they’re addictive, which when used appropriately and when prescribed by an experienced clinician, they are not addicting. But parents fear that they could be. They think that somehow those medicines will change brain structure and function when in fact, our studies suggest that they don’t.

And if they do, it actually improves brain structure and function. So there are a lot of biases, especially parents will come in with. Sometimes prescribers will.

I would say most commonly it might be some pediatricians are reluctant to prescribe stimulants based on misinformation and some of the same biases that misinformed parents can have. That’s not to say that every patient will respond better to stimulants. It’s truly a case by case basis.

There’s no right course of treatment, only that medication is an important part of that journey. Peterson’s paper also revealed that supporting the parents of kids with ADHD can be very helpful. There are various types of interventions his review looked at, and many of them turned out to be worthwhile.

The intervention that most clinicians in the field believe help kids with ADHD, especially kids with ADHD who also have disruptive behaviors, trouble following rules. Maybe they’re aggressive, so disruptive behaviors. Most people feel that something called parent management training.

That’s what I refer to it as. It has it goes by a number of other names, but what it involves descriptively is helping parents learn the principles of behavioral management for their child to help with consequences for behaviors that you want to reinforce, like following rules and doing homework and that sort of thing. And discouraging behaviors that you would prefer not to be there, like aggression, verbal or physical aggression and how to deal with that.

So you help the parents become really the best behavioral therapist for their kid that you can possibly find because no one knows their child better than a parent. Since no two studies involved exactly the same parent intervention, Peterson’s team lumped them into one category and ran a bunch of statistics to see if as a group, parent support was effective for helping ADHD symptoms in kids. And regardless of which intervention was used, they found that this support can be a major benefit.

What came as a big surprise for the research team was what they found when they paired multiple of these helpful interventions together. Most people, most clinicians and most parents believe instinctively that if medications help and psychotherapies or parent support helps, well, one plus one will equal two. And so if medications help some, but you need more help, well, let’s add parent support to it or psychotherapy for the child.

And a number of studies have tested this, whether combination treatment like that is better than a single intervention alone. And what is surprising is we didn’t find evidence of the case. So one plus one here doesn’t necessarily equal two.

That doesn’t mean that combining therapies will never be effective. It just means that on average, when looking at an overall group, there’s no evidence that it’s beneficial. Individual kids still may find a combination of therapies helpful.

And Peterson says that a good clinician will be able to see which are best for their specific patient. And possibly the most important part of this journey, regardless of which type of therapy is used, is that the choices are made in partnership with the medical professionals, parents and child. They have to buy in, know why this is helpful, and the parents need to buy in.

It all needs to be a team-based approach. Otherwise, it’s not going to work. Because even if it’s the best medicine and it’s really helpful for this kid, if that medicine doesn’t get into that kid’s mouth and into the body, it’s not going to be helpful.

You can find more information about Dr. Bradley Peterson, Dr. Andrew Kahn, and all of our guests on our website, RadioHealthJournal.org. Our writer-producer is Kristen Farah. Our executive producer is Amir Zaveri. I’m Elizabeth Westfield.

Coming up, rewiring your brain for healthier communication, when RadioHealth Journal returns. As we get older, we may feel strong and healthy, but no matter how healthy you feel, your immune system weakens with age. That’s where vaccines come in.

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Enjoy the go with Charmin. Have you ever wondered why you react more strongly to a situation than others around you? Maybe it’s a moment that makes you feel left out or not good enough, and you can’t seem to shake that cycle of frustration. Dr. Michaela Renee Johnson believes these patterns stem from our core beliefs she calls primal wounds that begin in childhood.

And it doesn’t necessarily mean that we had a bad childhood or some major traumatic event. It’s just simple, small, little things that can lead us to formulate these things. And there are seven of them.

And I’ll give you an example. So it might be I’m not good enough. Perhaps you’re just not doing well in school as a young person.

And so you start to tell yourself, I’m not good enough. As a teenager, it becomes I’m never going to be good enough. I’m never going to make the basketball team.

I’m never going to achieve what I want to achieve or get that job that I want. And then as an adult, you paradoxically pick out people and situations that affirm that belief. And the reason is because it’s actually comfortable.

It’s actually safer to choose someone that is going to invite that situation into your life than it is to do something different because we’ve dealt with it and lived it our whole lives. Johnson is a psychotherapist and author of Seven Primal Wounds. The seven wounds include feeling insignificant, inadequate, damaged, powerless, incapable, undeserving and like an outsider.

And though these seem to be negative emotions, Johnson says having these innate feelings is very normal. It’s essentially your mind’s version of touching a hot stove and then making sure that never happens again. So instead of trying to get rid of this protective mechanism, Johnson argues that we need to embrace it and learn how to make it our own personal superpower.

We inherently know when we’re walking into relationships, they could hurt us. And so we’re always looking for the potential threat. That’s not a bad thing.

That means we’re working very well. It means our brain is doing exactly what it is supposed to do. But just like the hot stove situation, it doesn’t mean we stop cooking.

Right. Like it doesn’t mean we can never use the stove because we’ve gotten burned once. So this is what the book’s about.

It’s really exciting. It’s actually teaching people that you’re not broken. You’re doing great, but you probably could benefit from learning about your activations and what’s causing them so that you can disempower it and have healthy relationships moving forward.

Johnson says each wound comes with its own unique triggers and characteristics. So, for example, if my friends don’t invite me to go out on Friday night because I don’t have the I am an outsider wound, I probably don’t care. I’m like, cool, I’m going to go do I’m going to go for a hike.

I’m going to go whatever. Like, it’s not going to bother me. But if I feel unchosen for something, then that might have a much deeper impact.

Which is why understanding which wound you have is crucial to controlling how you want to respond in certain situations. What’s interesting is that Johnson says in many cases, whatever your core belief is will be what drives you later in life. So the powerless wound is going to go out to do something that they might choose something where they’re very empowered, right, where they’re in a position of power or they’ve they might choose something because of their bleeding heart nature, where they’re, you know, working in a role that they’re helping others.

However, they might also pick a relationship with a very needy partner and that’s going to quickly build resentment and frustration. Like, why are they so needy? Why are they constantly needing me? Even though they actually sought that out because it’s their wound and what they know and what they want to attach to. And this does play a lot into attachment theory.

But in our work and in our decision making processes, sometimes we’ll say yes to things from the wounded lens that we should be saying no to. Johnson says if someone’s unaware of how their primal wound is causing them to react, it can draw them into a harmful cycle. However, her research has found that when used with intention, these core beliefs can still act as a protection without impeding on the rest of your life.

We can actually rewire our brain. There is tons of research that is coming out, including my own, that is showing you can actually rewire these primal pathways. You can choose different.

And this is the hot stove analogy. You can touch the hot stove, go, dang, that was hot and still cook on the stove because you can learn how to embrace it with a different mindset, embrace it with a different set of plans for how you’re going to navigate if it’s hot. Right.

And once you know that, you can actually use your best skill set ever as your superpower. Your past is not your problem. It actually becomes your superpower.

And so that’s the beautiful part of primal wounds. It’s not negative at all. It’s actually really positive focused.

It’s taking what is your human emotional survival that a lot of work has not been exposing and turning it into something that you can actually look at and call out and have a conversation with. These conversations will probably look different depending on which part of yourself becomes activated. Johnson says that the issue she sees most in couples she works with is that they’re constantly triggering each other without resolving any of the problems.

We can’t be constantly wounding one another without repairing it. Otherwise, we’re walking around with a shield. So that’s when people say we don’t talk anymore.

You know, we stonewall, we disengage, all that kind of stuff. So instead of automatically reacting like you normally would in a tense situation, Johnson says you should pause. Give yourself a breath to realize how you want to naturally respond and ask yourself if that reaction will be helpful to your end goal.

It’s very easy to become defensive in arguments and want to blame the other person. In fact, you can know all the mental health tools for positive communication, but without mindfulness and intention, those tools can easily become ammunition. A hammer is a weapon or it’s a tool, depending on how you’re using it.

So I really teach them like we need to think about tools a little differently because if you’re swinging a hammer when you’re ticked off, it’s probably not an effective tool. It’s a weapon. Right.

So that’s kind of the thing is really recognizing what’s going to work for your wound, how to disempower it by calling it out. And frankly, what I see more often than not is we really like to put expectations on our partner. And I heard a great phrase from somebody just yesterday.

They said expectations are premeditated resentments and the partner is never going to deliver on the repair because they don’t know how to do it. They’re not you. They’re not in your body.

And so the biggest fatal mistake I see is expecting our partner to do the next right thing. We have to do the next right thing to fix ourselves, to help ourselves, to improve and stop the pattern. There are a few ways that Johnson recommends getting familiar with your primal wound.

For some people, the scariest part of this work happens when they have to start putting each exercise into practice. The undeservers, right, they love to be yes people. They will say yes, even if they are completely expended and exhausted and don’t have a yes in them.

They will say yes, they will take it on. So the undeservers, what they might work on is, for example, saying, while I would love to pick up your kids from school for you, I actually can’t do that. Thank you for understanding.

So this is a rewire, right? What my undeservers love to do is they love to say either they’ll say, no, I’m so sorry. I can’t do that. I’m so sorry.

I would love to. But I just really I’m so sorry. Right.

And they’re just completely living in that. I am not deserving of having my own time or being able to say no. Right.

So for that example, what we might say is I appreciate that you’ve asked me and I can’t do that today. Thank you for understanding. No apologies, no undeserver narrative, just going to take time for myself because I deserve it.

I deserve to have this time. Each exercise is custom to every wound and how it manifests in each individual’s life. If you’re wondering where to start, Johnson offers a free quiz on our website, 7primalwounds.com. You can find more information about Dr. Michaela Johnson and all of our guests on our website, RadioHealthJournal.org. Our writer-producer is Kristen Farah.

Our production manager is Jason Dickey. I’m Greg Johnson. And I’m Kristen Farah.

Radio Health Journal returns in just a moment. Progressive’s teen driver discount could lower the cost of insurance for your teenager and save you some money. And then you can still spend money on them, because just when you think you have a grasp on spending new sneakers and then it’s money for a school field trip and, of course, spending money.

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I’m still going for it, even with higher stroke risk from atrial fibrillation and a regular heartbeat not caused by a heart valve problem. Over a three year study, Eliquis Apixipan tablets reduced stroke risk better than Warfarin, and over 97 percent of Eliquis patients did not experience a stroke. A first stroke occurred in 2.9 percent of Warfarin patients versus 2.3 percent of Eliquis patients.

Don’t stop prescription Eliquis without asking your doctor. Stroke risk may increase. Eliquis can cause serious and potentially fatal bleeding.

Don’t take if you have an artificial heart valve, abnormal bleeding or antiphospholipid syndrome. While taking, you may bruise more easily or bleed longer. A spinal injection increases blood clot risk, which may cause paralysis.

Get medical help right away for unexpected bleeding or bruising or back pain, tingling, numbness, muscle weakness or incontinence. Aspirin products, NSAIDs, SSRIs, SNRIs and blood thinners increase bleeding risk. Tell your doctor about planned medical or dental procedures.

Learn more at Eliquis.com or call 1-855-ELIQUIS. Medical Notes this week. Some diseases are tough to self-diagnose, but AI is here to help.

Research in the journal NPJ Parkinson’s Disease has revealed a screening test that uses artificial intelligence to help notice signs of Parkinson’s. The program gives users two short sentences to recite, which both use all 26 letters of the alphabet. The AI then analyzes the recordings for patterns linked to the neurological condition.

It has an 86 percent accuracy. Does bacteria get a bad rap? The tiny microbes may help lower your medical bills. A study published in the journal M-Bio shows how scientists can engineer bacteria to overproduce vitamins.

This route would reduce the need for lab space and other raw materials, making the end product not only cheaper but more sustainable. The researchers are currently working on using this method to produce vitamin K2. And finally, have you had enough water today? Probably not.

And that’s a big problem. New research is showing that just two hours of dehydration severely impacts your cognitive processing. Attention, coordination, and complex problem-solving are usually the most at risk to suffer.

A study published in the journal Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise argues that dehydration can raise the risk of accidents in hot workplace environments. And that’s Medical Notes this week. I’m Maayan Vasta-Bettencourt.

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Each week on the Viewpoints Radio Podcast, you’ll hear from our leading experts on an important topic within education, history, society, psychology, and more. For first-time homebuyers, it can be really disheartening to look at the mortgage market right now, to look at the home prices, and just imagine being able to purchase a home and seeing that slip out of reach. Viewpoints Radio Podcast is produced by our team of award-winning journalists.

Subscribe today by searching Viewpoints Radio wherever you listen to podcasts. Thank you for joining us this week and every week as we break down the science stories you need to know. You can find all of our past segments and guests on our website, radiohealthjournal.org, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and X for daily content. And tune in next week for another edition of Radio Health Journal.

Radio Health Journal 8/29/2025 Short Kids Are Being Given Growth Hormones – Is It Safe?

Urban City Podcast Group — Fri, 29 Aug 2025 19:59:27 +0000

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You’re listening to Radio Health Journal, the trusted news source for medicine, science and technology. I’m Elizabeth Westfield. I’m Mayan Vasta Betancourt.

And I’m Greg Johnson. This week, the history behind breast cancer awareness. We have to stop being polite.

We can’t be polite anymore. We need to shout and demand that our disease be looked at and funded as well. But first, should parents be able to give their kids growth hormones? You’re just not going to get your child to be 5 feet 10, 6 feet, if they were destined to be 5 feet 5 inches.

All that and more this week on Radio Health Journal. Do Crohn’s disease or ulcerative colitis symptoms keep coming back? Tremphaya, gaselkomab, may help, with rapid remission achieved at 12 weeks and lasting clinical remission at one year. Some even saw visible improvement of their intestinal lining at 12 weeks and one year.

Individual results may vary. Ask your doctor about Tremphaya today. Call 1-800-526-7736 to learn more or visit Tremphayaradio.com. Growing up, there’s always one kid who’s the shortest in their class.

In first grade, second grade, all the way through to junior high. It may well be that they’ll grow up to be normal height, or close to it, but parents often worry that they’ll never catch up. And with height being a commodity today, especially for boys, mom and dad are taking more kids to the doctor to do something about it.

I’d say there’s been a shift from seeing patients who aren’t growing well, of course we still see those, to children who are short or whose parents perceive them to be short. For whatever the reason, people have become much more concerned about their child’s height than there seems to have been in the past. So we see a lot of kids coming in now who really don’t carry the medical definition for being short, but are shorter or relatively shorter than other children their age.

That’s Dr. Lori Cohen, Chief of Pediatric Endocrinology and Diabetes and Professor of Pediatrics at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. She says even before doctors take a history and check for what might be making a kid short, parents and even kids have already set expectations for the visit. One of the things that I’ve noticed that has changed over the past even several years, I always ask children when they come in their office why they’re here.

And I’m surprised by the number of them who say, I’m here to see if I can have growth hormone. I think that they’re being exposed to children who are receiving growth hormone. And that was never the case.

If you’ve got a disease, growth hormone deficiency, and it’s relatively rare, when I was growing up, people didn’t know anybody who was receiving growth hormone. Now they go off to summer camp and their friends go off to the nurse’s office at night to get their growth hormone injections. However often, there’s nothing wrong with a child at all, and growth hormone will make little difference in how tall they end up.

The problem is that growth hormone is not a solution. The average gain of height in growth hormone is about a centimeter, that’s a third of an inch for every year of treatment. It’s not going to make somebody tall.

And while there is a spectrum between being shorter and being taller, studies that equate being taller to being more successful, you’re just not going to get your child to be 5 feet 10, 6 feet, if they were destined to be 5 feet 5 inches or similar. So I think that there’s this perception that we can give this expensive medication and add several inches of height, and that’s just not the case. And the response is quite variable, depending on the patient and presumably depending on why they’re short.

Why they’re short is often that the parents themselves are short, though doctors like Cohen take a look at everything. We look at the growth charts to assess the growth pattern. We need to take a good medical history, that’s going to include looking for medications that affect growth, birth size, poor diet, signs and symptoms of other illnesses or endocrine conditions.

Family history is really important, parents’ heights, but also siblings and grandparents. About 80% of the difference in height is heritable. We’re also going to take a family history of pubertal patterns, that’s heritable as well.

Both height and puberty are likely affected by hundreds of common gene variants that each have tiny effects. So just we need to look at the whole child. And then after that, we do a physical examination.

That’s going to include an accurate height and weight. I can tell you that I’ve had patients come in for falling off their growth charts and when we remeasured them, their height is fine. Children who lack growth hormone and who are very, very short certainly exist, but Cohen says they’re much rarer than people think, between 1 in 4,000 and 1 in 10,000 children.

Many of the rest are simply late bloomers who will end up more or less normal if given enough time. But sometimes parents don’t have the patience. The stereotypes that we, the beliefs and assumptions that we have about short stature are very powerful.

Even the doctors themselves, the general pediatrician or the pediatric endocrinologist who would prescribe growth hormone. Many of them believe without strong evidence or even weak evidence that to be substantially shorter than average is going to interfere with a person’s quality of life. That’s Dr. David Sandberg, pediatric psychologist and professor of pediatrics at the University of Michigan Medical School.

He spent nearly 20 years examining the psychosocial impact of short stature. I’m swimming against the current, so to speak, by pointing out that the research does not support many of the assumptions and beliefs we have about being taller than average or shorter than average. But are there scars along the way for the child who’s a lot shorter than their classmates? They’re an easy target for name-calling, but the research is mixed.

There are many studies of psychological well-being in short children. A lot of them were sponsored by drug companies. Many of them have biases.

And while some studies do indicate that childhood short stature affects psychological well-being, many others don’t. And also, if psychological problems are present, they’re usually not due to short stature. Studies that have looked at quality of life in short adults, it’s usually normal, and growth hormone therapy doesn’t predictably improve it.

Short children may feel conspicuously small, and their classmates’ taunts of being a squirt may make them feel disrespected. But Sandberg’s research, designed to look like a study on something else to get honest answers, show that big kids accept short kids as well as anyone. Regardless of your height, whether you were significantly above average, average height, or substantially shorter, including those at the first percentile for the general population, they had the same number of close friends.

Whether they were boys or girls and they were very short, they had the same number of close friends. Their friends were just as likely to be very tall as being very short. So there’s a stereotype that we have, you might expect, that somebody who’s very short would hang out with other people of a similar height.

That was not the case. As I said, they had the same number of friendships. They were considered as likable as anyone else, regardless of their height.

As far as reputation, Sandberg admits that classmates sometimes see shorter kids as younger than their chronological age. But they’re not seen as any less athletic than others, and are no more likely to be picked on. However, there’s one big caveat to that.

That’s the opinion of others. Short children may view themselves differently. Perceiving yourself as different from others, even if others do not recognize you as being different, but you yourself may feel different, that is not a good experience.

So in my line of work, one goal is to help the person to differentiate between what they might believe is a disadvantage versus challenges that they might experience people making comments. The approach towards addressing those are really quite different. Sandberg says that a lack of stature may seem so defining to a child that whenever they get teased or picked on, that must be the reason.

So where does all this leave a parent’s pleas for growth hormone for their child? The FDA says synthetic growth hormone, available since 1985, can be prescribed for idiopathic short stature, meaning cause not known. But Cohen says it’s not meant for kids on the fringe of normal. Only the smallest 1 or 2 percent should even be considered.

So as is often the case, the biggest problem for short children isn’t what’s wrong with them, it’s our societal norms. What’s wrong with the rest of us? Short stature is not a disease. It can indicate a medical condition for which evaluation is indicated, and I do urge people who have children who are short or shorter than expected for family or certainly children who aren’t growing well to have an evaluation.

But whether to treat or not treat a short child with growth hormone is a complicated decision. Not all short children should receive growth hormone. It doesn’t mean that all children with idiopathic short stature won’t benefit from growth hormone, but really risk-benefit ratio needs to be taken into consideration.

And really, children who are of normal height, who are expected to be within normal population range, even if that’s going to be on the shorter side for society, really shouldn’t be receiving growth hormone. They’re healthy, and giving them a diagnosis telling them that they’re not going to function well, that’s not a good thing. You can find more about all of our guests on our website, RadioHealthJournal.org. For more behind-the-scenes, follow Radio Health Journal on Facebook, Instagram, and X. This segment originally aired in June 2021 and was written and produced by Reed Pence.

Our lead producer is Kristen Farrah. Our executive producer is Amir Zaveri. I’m Elizabeth Westfield.

Coming up, how Shirley Temple led the charge for breast cancer awareness when Radio Health Journal returns. Ah, that’s the sound of someone who’s misplaced… My debit card. …their debit card.

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Enjoy the go with Charmin. 2011 was a big year. Looking at a global scale, NASA ended its space shuttle program just a few months after the world tuned in to the royal wedding between Prince William and Kate Middleton.

For Judy Pearson, 2011’s the year she was a newlywed and about to watch her oldest son deploy to Afghanistan. But these events were quickly overshadowed that April, when Pearson was diagnosed with breast cancer. It was triple negative breast cancer, which is a highly aggressive and, for lucky me, rare kind of cancer.

But I went through 18 rounds of chemotherapy after a mastectomy, 18 rounds of pretty gnarly chemotherapy. It was kind of cool because my son and I exchanged a lot of emails, which I saved, talking about fighting our respective enemies. The diagnosis was a shock, especially since Pearson had recently had her routine mammogram come up completely clean.

It was pure chance that she happened to feel a lump and was brave enough to double check the mammogram’s results. I was living my happy life and literally scratched my chest and found this lump almost in my cleavage. When they took off the breast, not only was that lump there, but there were other tumors within my breast so deeply buried I couldn’t feel them.

But by the time my next mammogram would have happened, my cancer would have spread. No question about it. Even by the time I might have felt something, it would have spread.

So I just figured, okay, I was spared for a reason. What is that? It’s a question that took Pearson down a rabbit hole of research, which led to her new book Radical Sisters, Shirley Temple Black, Rose Kushner, Evelyn Lauder, and the Dawn of the Breast Cancer Movement. It highlights the stories of these three activists and how they pushed for women’s health to be taken seriously.

So when I discovered in researching each woman’s younger life that all three of them almost died and weren’t spared randomly, and what a different world it would have been for all of us truly if they hadn’t been spared from what almost happened to them. I think it’s really important. There’s a quote that I use in the book, but I had used that quote so many times in public speaking and magazine articles about, it was said to a survivor of the sinking of the Lusitania, if you survived, it’s because there’s something else in the world for you to do.

For Shirley Temple, her first near-death experience came at age 11. She was performing live on stage when a woman in the audience stood up and pointed a handgun directly at her. Years later, the actress would fall under another attack, this time from inside her body.

In the 1970s, when Temple was diagnosed with breast cancer, it was common for women to go into surgery for a biopsy and then wake up with both breasts amputated without ever giving their consent. It was called the one-step procedure. A woman was anesthetized, taken into the operating room.

Her lump was removed and analyzed in the lab while she’s still unconscious, and then they would come back and amputate her breast. Or better still, the doctor, almost always a man, would go out to the husband or the father in the waiting room and say, yeah, it’s cancer. What do you think? Should we take her breast? Okay, fine, we’ll do that.

I interviewed an oncologist for a previous book about the cancer survivorship movement, and he said it was ridiculous to force women to go through that kind of a trauma where you are told by your doctor almost routinely, it’s fine, I’m sure it’s going to be fine. And then they would wake up pawing at their chest to see if they still had breasts. And he said it’s barbaric.

After learning about these horror stories, Temple made sure her surgeon knew that she would be making all the decisions about her own body. She cemented this radical request by saying the doctor can make the incision, but I’ll make the decision. The biopsy showed that there was a cancerous part of the tumor and her breast would need to be removed.

Luckily, her doctor was positive it hadn’t yet spread and she didn’t have to undergo a radical mastectomy. It was the standard procedure at that time where doctors would surgically remove a woman’s breasts, pectoral muscles, and underarm lymph nodes. You couldn’t work out.

You couldn’t raise your arm if you didn’t have pectoral muscles. And then some doctors up until the late 80s were still taking some rib cage that was not cancerous or some clavicle. These women were completely debilitated for life.

It was Rose Kushner’s work that helped guide medicine in a different direction. Without Rose, the one-step procedure was still approved by the National Institutes of Health, as was the radical mastectomy, even though there were ways to tell that the cancer hadn’t spread. Those were still best practices at the National Institutes of Health up until 1980.

It was because of a meeting at NIH that Rose went to that she had the opportunity to persuade doctors who’d already decided at that meeting, okay, we’re not doing the radical anymore. She had the opportunity to say, there are many reasons why women need a minute to figure out what their next steps are. Kushner, a journalist, was one of America’s most vocal breast cancer activists.

She openly criticized the medical community in newspapers and on TV. She advocated for women to be an active participant in their medical care. And to understand that the one-step radical mastectomy their doctors may try to push on them was an outdated procedure that had been rejected by physicians outside of America.

During the 1979 NIH Conference on Breast Cancer Treatment, she convinced the panel of physicians to stop the one-step procedure and separate biopsy from operation. Soon after, President Carter appointed her to the National Cancer Advisory Board. And then with regard to Evelyn, the Breast Center at Memorial Sloan Kettering that bears her name is terrific.

Breast Cancer Research Foundation is terrific because they were one of the first organizations to be willing to fund really out-of-the-box ideas in battling breast cancer. The Evelyn H. Lauder Breast Center is continually promoting new prevention and diagnostic technologies, less invasive surgery, and more targeted treatments. Despite the center’s contributions to breast cancer research, Pearson believes Lauder’s greatest contribution to this community is how she was able to raise awareness.

And we toss that word around a lot these days. But in 1993, there wasn’t a lot of awareness of breast cancer. Women were still afraid if they felt a lump, they were afraid to go see what it was because it might be bad.

And so therefore, you know, by the time they did get to the doctor, it was too far down the road. And so early detection, getting mammograms, those kinds of things, educating yourself, those kinds of things are really important. Cancer in general was something no one wanted to talk about, and many still falsely believed that it was contagious.

In fact, Pearson says many people would go as far as to hide their diagnosis because they didn’t want to be ostracized from their community. You could be fired. If you had health insurance, you could lose it.

You couldn’t join the military. You couldn’t adopt children. Childhood survivors couldn’t get roommates at college.

And if you were invited to someone’s house for a cocktail party, you might be served on paper plates with plastic silverware so that it could be disposed of. Because even through a washing cycle, your cancer germs could be passed on to people in that household. I mean, it was it sounds really ridiculous now.

But when you think about it, all those things went well into the 80s. Then specifically with breast cancer, Pearson says there was a lot of shame around losing your breasts and fear that their husbands would leave them. This absence of conversation played a part in the lack of funding and research for breast cancer.

But when the AIDS movement shot to the top of public interest, Pearson says it began to raise questions as to why the same attention wasn’t given to breast cancer. Congress was appropriating millions and millions of dollars to research, all of it very important and very good. But if you were trying to survive breast cancer at the time and you looked at that and you saw that the number of diagnoses between the two diseases were, you know, breast cancer was 100 fold more often diagnosed.

And yet the money dedicated to research was almost 100 fold in the opposite direction. And so these women, Evelyn and other women who were at the ground floor of the breast cancer movement, looked at the AIDS movement and said, we have to stop being polite. We can’t be polite anymore.

We need to shout and demand that our disease be looked at and funded as well. And so using some of the same grassroots activism techniques as the AIDS movement, the National Breast Cancer Coalition and other groups successfully pushed for an increase in federal funding. They were also instrumental in getting legislation passed for health coverage of mammograms.

Pearson chose to focus on these three women to highlight how just a few motivated people can create impactful and lasting change. Her book, Radical Women, is now available for presale. You can find more information about Judy Pearson and all of our guests on our website, RadioHealthJournal.org. For more behind the scenes, follow Radio Health Journal on Facebook, Instagram and X. Our writer-producer is Kristen Farrah.

Our production manager is Jason Dickey. I’m Greg Johnson. Radio Health Journal returns in just a moment.

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Progressive Casualty Insurance Company affiliates and other insurers not available in all states and situations. Summer’s here, get ready for backyard barbecues, trips to the pool and COVID-19? That’s right, COVID isn’t taken this summer off and can actually spread year round. I am Dr. Simone Wiles and as an infectious disease expert, I know this fact surprises a lot of my patients.

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Medical Notes this week. Toothpaste may be the cause of your child’s allergies. An antimicrobial chemical called triclosan has been a staple ingredient in everyday products like mouthwash and clothing for decades.

While its purpose is to reduce bacterial growth, research suggests it may make matters worse. In fact, a study in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives reveals that kids with more exposure to this chemical are more likely to develop eczema and other allergies. A new player in the fight against forever chemicals.

New research in the journal Toxicology and Applied Pharmacology reveals that these substances may be able to be flushed from our system. Scientists believe taking a fiber supplement with meals can reduce your levels of forever chemicals. The supplement acts as a magnet and draws the chemicals out with it as it exits your body.

And finally, an apple a day may help you sleep better. Sleep deprivation can be detrimental to your health. Thankfully, eating more fruits and veggies during the day may be the easiest way to make sure you get your beauty rest.

Just five cups a day has been linked to a 16 percent improvement. The research is published in Sleep Health, the journal of the National Sleep Foundation. And that’s Medical Notes this week.

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Semaglutide injections 0.5, 1, and 2 milligrams. Thank you for joining us this week, and every week, as we break down the science stories you need to know. You can find all of our past segments and guests on our website, radiohealthjournal.org, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and X for daily content. And tune in next week for another edition of Radio Health Journal.

Radio Health Journal: Segment 1: Facing Dementia: Early Detection And Advancements In Treatment

Urban City Podcast Group — Fri, 22 Aug 2025 16:00:25 +0000

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You’re listening to Radio Health Journal, the trusted news source for medicine, science and
technology. I’m Elizabeth Westfield. I’m Mayan Vastabetancourt.

And I’m Greg Johnson. This week, how can we reduce severe injury in young athletes? Kiddos
are seeing injuries because of more repetitive actions and higher risk motions that they’re just
doing again and again and again, as opposed to having the opportunity to diversify. But first,
everything you need to know about dementia.
There are many, many studies that show correlations between more exercise, less dementia. I
would say doing crossword puzzles in Sudoku, probably not. All that and more this week on
Radio Health Journal.
Summer’s here. Get ready for backyard barbecues, trips to the pool and COVID-19? That’s right.
COVID isn’t taken this summer off and can actually spread year round.
I’m Dr. Simone Wiles, and as an infectious disease expert, I know my patients are often
surprised by this fact. They don’t expect COVID to strike in the summer and derail their plans,
but guess what? It can. COVID can be unpredictable and quickly turn serious, especially for
those who are 50 plus or have certain underlying medical conditions.
The good news is, is that if you start feeling sick or test positive, you don’t need to wait it out.
Prescription medications exist to treat COVID for certain people. If you catch COVID this
summer, don’t delay.
Ask your doctor if prescription medication is right for you. Learn more at PfizerForAll.com slash
COVID-19. This message is sponsored by Pfizer.
When we’re young, the idea of monsters under our beds is the biggest fear we can imagine.
But as many of us age, that fear begins to take a different shape. One that we can’t fight with
our fists.
One that’s wrapped up in deceptively calm words delivered by a white coat in a sterile room.
Dementia. It’s this fear that drives many people to keep their heads in the sand, pushing
forward with life as normal and ignoring their diagnosis.
Dr. Peter Rabins, Professor Emeritus in the Departments of Psychiatry and Medicine at the
Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, says since so many different diseases can cause dementia,
it’s important to parse out which one is the culprit to get the best treatment. Because there is
treatment. Somewhere around one or two percent of people who have dementia have a totally
treatable disease.
For example, low thyroid, very low vitamin B12. There are a number of medical treatable
diseases that have dementia as one of their symptoms, particularly if they go on long enough.
So having a thorough evaluation is important.
Rabins is the author of Is It Alzheimer’s? 101 Answers to Your Most Pressing Questions About
Memory Loss and Dementia, Second Edition. His mission is to inform and empower both
patients and caregivers to optimize their quality of life, no matter which state of the disease
progression they’re dealing with. Which is why Rabins believes it’s so important for patients to
fully understand their condition, even if they’re not part of the small percentage with a curable
condition.
When we get a more specific diagnosis, that tells us something about the here and now, what
are the problems the person’s having, but also what’s likely to happen in the future. And also
about what might help the person function better and have a better quality of life. I mean, I will
say that many of, if you put aside the biological treatments, many of the principles of care are
the same, whether it’s Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s dementia or Lewy body dementia.
But having a specific diagnosis can help. While each disease provides its own challenges, Rabins
says the goal is always to maximize the person’s quality of life. This looks different as the
condition progresses, but big impacts can be made even when someone’s in the more
advanced stages.
Pain, for example, is hard to notice in dementia patients, so being aware of the signs can make
a world of difference for these people. Many people lose the ability to speak or to use language,
so they can’t say, I’m in pain. Now, they may be crying or when you touch them, they may
cringe.
So there are markers that somebody is in pain, but you have to be looking for it. And someone
who can’t tell you it hurts. And of course, if you have a memory problem, even if you can speak,
you may not remember that a half an hour ago you were in a lot of pain and for some reason
things are better now.
So that’s a big one. It does appear that treating depression when people are severely ill, that
can help some people. Keeping people maximally functional from a physical therapy point of
view seems to be associated with a better quality of life, even an advanced disease.
Learning what triggers someone to be upset can help avoid these unpleasant situations
altogether. And once you get to know somebody, even at the late stage of the disease, you
learn what triggers them, or you see that they’re starting to get upset, stop doing it, even if it’s
quote, to help them. So there are lots of care things like that, that you can do that also improve
quality of life, even at the end of the disease.
And we treat sick people somewhat differently than we do, whether it’s cancer or heart disease
or dementia. But understanding that the person has a disease that affects their thinking, I think
is important Because then you start using common sense and trial and error. So if there are
problems, how do you solve those? And when you do that, you make life better for everybody.
And though a majority of cases are not curable, Rabin says there are some exciting
advancements that have come out in the last few years. The first are blood tests that physicians
will be able to use to diagnose patients in addition to the brain scans that are currently used.
That’s a huge advance, partly because when doctors could only diagnose by symptoms, we
were wrong from 10 to 30 percent of the time.
And whether it was Alzheimer’s disease or some other cause of dementia. Though they are
currently made for people with Alzheimer’s disease, Rabin’s believes that the same strategies
will soon be able to diagnose other conditions as well. Along with the blood tests, there have
been two medications approved to treat the disease, but they aren’t yet able to make a
dramatic difference.
Currently, patients taking these drugs see about a 7 percent improvement. And though it’s a
modest change, Rabin says for these people and their families, it’s a noticeable difference. It’s
as if we’re at the dawn of a treatment era.
I like to think of it compared to cancer treatment. This is like 1960 when we were just starting to
have medicines that help people live a little bit longer. So we need to have lots of progress and
not better medicines, but probably different kinds of medicine.
In other words, medicines that work differently. And you know, it took a long time to figure out
in cancer. For many cancers, you need three or four medicines.
And somehow that combination is much better than any one alone. So it may be a combination
of these medicines and other new ones that target different aspects of the disease. So it’s a
start.
While we wait for these breakthroughs in drug development, there are other ways for people to
increase their quality of life when living with dementia. The first is getting an early diagnosis.
You may be wondering how to tell the difference between dementia and age-related memory
issues, but Rabin says it’s a much more clear drop-off than most assume.
For example, when given a list of words, a healthy young person can remember about one
extra word than a healthy 70-year-old. Not a huge difference, right? If you were to give that list
to somebody with mild Alzheimer’s disease, maybe they’d get three. So it’s a big difference.
And sort of related to that, let’s say there’s somebody who’s getting married this coming
weekend and I forget about it and I’m reminded, a normal aging person is most likely to
remember that. A person with Alzheimer’s disease is most likely not to remember it because it’s
learning new information that gets impaired first. So do you have a doctor’s appointment? Are
you going out to dinner tonight with somebody? Those are the kinds of things in people with
Alzheimer’s disease that become impaired.
And so it is pretty noticeable. When looking for the signs of dementia, either in yourself or a
loved one, it’s important to have a full picture of the risk factors. Unfortunately, the biggest one
is something none of us can outrun, age.
Still, that doesn’t mean that everyone will develop dementia as they get older. Let’s say at age
80, somewhere around 20% of people have dementia. 20, maybe 30.
Some people say 30. So that still means that at age 80, 70 or 80% of people are normal in their
thinking. So I think it’s important to keep that in mind, that it doesn’t appear to be inevitable
that you’ll develop it.
The second biggest risk factor is high blood pressure. And what’s really important is high blood
pressure in midlife. So people who are listening and who are 40, 50, maybe 60 and have high
blood pressure, it’s really important that you get that treated as well as you can.
Rabin says the connection between high blood pressure and dementia later in life isn’t well
understood. But the leading theory is that it damages blood vessels in the brain and increases
the risk of stroke. There are a number of other risk factors that aren’t anywhere near as
powerful, but it clear that there’s a good correlation between exercising more and being
socially more active and having a lower risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease.
It’s really hard to prove cause and effect. You’d have to tell a group of people, don’t exercise for
the next 20 years. And another group of people, you have to exercise.
Forget it. We’re never going to do that. But there are many, many studies that show
correlations between more exercise, less dementia, more social activity, less dementia.
I would say doing crossword puzzles in Sudoku, probably not. If that statement was a shock,
you’re not alone. Society has long held puzzle games as the gold standard for staying mentally
sharp.
And while Rabin’s agrees that these challenges can be helpful, there’s no magic injected into
these specific games. In fact, he says the best activity you can do for your brain is simply one
that you enjoy doing. It’s much better to find something else mentally stimulating that you
enjoy.
Reading or being in a discussion group or arguing with people or playing sports or, you know,
thinking about what’s new in football and different plays and all that. I think it’s finding
something that people find mentally engaging, whatever that is. And to think that, well, if I just
do crossword puzzles or just do Sudoku, that’s going to be it.
Again, you’re probably not going to continue because you have to do this for years if it’s going
to have a prevention. And as Rabin’s mentioned earlier, consistent physical activity like walking
has been shown to be protective against dementia. I think there’s strong agreement that more
exercise in general is protective.
And then there’s some other things just for prevention. I think we should say that there’s at
least a suggestion that if you have hearing impairment, getting that treated might help,
especially if you have other risk factors like heart disease might help prevent dementia. There’s
something about physical, about exercising that affects the brain.
Well, in a sense, hearing and comprehending what you’re hearing, that’s exercising that part of
the brain. Same thing with vision. So it’s a two-way street between the inside the body affecting
what’s outside and outside inside.
While many discussions around Alzheimer’s and dementia center around the patient, Rabin’s
book dedicates the last two chapters to caregivers. In fact, he argues that every chapter was
written with caregivers in mind. We wrote the first edition of the book in 1981.
So that was a time when most people had never heard of Alzheimer’s disease, and I include
doctors and nurses in that most people. But more importantly then was that even though we
don’t have biological treatments, there are lots of things that we can do to make life better,
both for the person and whoever is caring for them. And throughout the disease, most people
live at home with another person.
So we wanted to target caregivers and caregiving because we really believe that if people were
informed about what to do and how to do it, they had a better chance of helping the ill person.
This conversation has touched on the importance of increasing the patient’s quality of life,
however possible. And Rabin says the same is true for caregivers.
They often are giving so much of themselves that their own needs are neglected. It’s
distressing for most people to be a caregiver, not everybody, but for most people. And that
means don’t shut yourself off from your friends and family and other loved ones.
You need to keep active and busy and stimulated, even if you feel like you’re the best caregiver
for your loved one. And often that’s the truth. And don’t neglect your health.
Make sure that you keep up your medical appointments and whatever you need to do to keep
your own health up. I think it’s easy for that to get lost when you’re spending a lot of time
caring for somebody else. These are some of the things that people can do.
Rabin goes into even more detail in his book, Is It Alzheimer’s?, which is available now wherever
books are sold. You can find more information about Dr. Peter Rabin and all of our guests on
our website, RadioHealthJournal.org. For more behind the scenes, follow RadioHealth Journal
on Facebook, Instagram, and X. Our writer producer is Kristin Ferra. Our executive producer is
Amira Zaveri.
I’m Elizabeth Westfield. Coming up, have sports become too specialized? When RadioHealth
Journal returns. It’s a classic odor tale.
You fried fish for dinner, cleaned up, but the smell is still in the house. And the neighbors are
coming over for game night. They’re on their way.
And then you spray Febreze Air Mist. Febreze Air starts working instantly to fight even your
toughest odors. So you go from fish to fresh like that.
Now all you have to worry about is Pam cheating at charades. How many sports did you play
growing up? For many kids, it’s common to try as many as possible to figure out which ones
they like best. Often this looks like swimming in the summer, soccer in the fall, basketball in
winter, and track and field in the spring.
This type of varied routine exposes kids to many different activities, exercise and team
dynamics. However, as athletics have evolved into a lucrative opportunity for the top players,
more and more kids are choosing to put all their focus on one sport. And so I think definitely
over the last 10 or 15 years, as we’ve seen the growth of these mega clubs that are able to play
11 months out of the year and travel the country and compete and play against each other, that
it’s definitely grown.
And even some of the other institutions that allow kids to come and train for an extended
period of time. And so I would say definitely over the last 15 years, we’ve seen exponential
growth in that situation. That’s Nathan Fitton, a team physician for Michigan State University
Athletics and associate professor at Michigan State University College of Osteopathic Medicine.
He and a team of researchers recently released a paper in the Clinical Journal of Sport Medicine.
Their investigation tracked how this shift into hyper specialization has impacted the health of
athletes. As someone who’s in his 40s growing up, you didn’t have the opportunity to play one
sport year round.
It just wasn’t there. And so by default, we ended up playing, you know, three seasons, three
sports. But as we’ve seen the evolution of club sports and year round sports, I would say from
an injury perspective, we’re seeing kind of what’s consistent with this study in the sense that
kiddos are seeing injuries because of more repetitive actions and higher risk motions that
they’re just doing again and again and again, as opposed to having the opportunity to diversify.
The research team surveyed more than 200 student athletes playing at the collegiate level. We
looked at division one, division two and division three athletes, and we asked them three simple
questions. Did they focus on one sport in high school? Did they quit other sports to do it? And
did they train in that sport greater than eight months out of the year? And based on their
answers, we grouped them into low, moderate and high specialization.
The more yes answers, the more specialized they were. And so what we found for the kiddos
that answered yes to all three of those is that there was a clear pattern between these highly
specialized athletes and increased injury risk that was not due to chance or other external
elements. We found that kiddos that were highly specialized were five times more likely to have
sustained an injury than the low specialization, and they had tripled the risk of needing surgery
to correct that injury.
Then when they looked at overall recovery times, the team found that the athletes who were
highly specialized reported needing 30 more days of recovery than the other groups. Despite
the longer downtime, these athletes were also at a higher risk of re-injury when they were
finally able to return to their sport. By analyzing the recovery time, the research team was able
to capture how the rate of serious injuries fluctuated between the three groups.
And so for the low and moderate specialization, the average recovery days was just over two
months. In the highly specialized, it was approaching almost four months. And so that would
tell you that the injuries that were brought up or that they were reported were more significant
and severe injuries.
So maybe they were, you know, a significant joint sprain or a significant muscle sprain or tear
or something that needed surgery. Each athlete’s recovery times were reported based on how
long it took before they were able to return to their sport. That may mean being a practice-only
player or being able to fully compete in matches.
But if focusing all your efforts on one sport dramatically increases your chances of serious
injury, why aren’t we seeing the same trends when we move the scope from high school to the
professional level? I can’t speak for certainty, but I definitely know that in that professional
level, they’re getting a variety of exposed experiences to help with this, right? And so it’s the
awareness that they need to diversify. But at the same time, they’re not growing anymore. And
so there’s that factor that comes into all of this as well, is that as in our adolescence, we’re still
growing.
There’s still, you know, bones are not as strong as muscles. So there’s that type of injury pattern
versus as we age and our growth is over with. So it’s a little bit of a different injury pattern and
injury risk we would potentially see.
Athletes going through puberty are more likely to develop growth-related overuse injuries. In
kids, bones grow faster than muscle, which makes them more vulnerable to muscle and tendon
damage. And sadly for some athletes, one injury may be the first of many.
A 2020 study published in the journal Sports Health assessed the risk of re-injury for athletes
under 20 years old. It found that of those returning to sport after ACL reconstruction, one in
five would suffer another tear in either knee. Fitton hopes that since these findings are out
there, athletes will be more intentional about diversifying their activities.
What we’re trying to get out there is that just one season off dramatically reduces injury risk
and surgical risk for those particular injuries. So our goal with this is just to bring forth that
highly specialization is dangerous to student athletes, but it is not far off or difficult to lower
your risk through a shift of just about three months. If you can get that three months to do
something different, to enhance other skills, to take a break, to take just a mental break, to
allow yourself to explore other things and then come back to your sport, you’re going to
dramatically reduce the risk of injury and potential need for surgery.
In fact, the group of athletes that had low specialization and were part of multiple activities
throughout the year showed such low rates of injury that a majority of the respondents had
never had an injury. Whereas in the highly specialized, over 75% of those kiddos had a
substantial injury. And so you can see how it escalates as you would imagine, but these are still
all college athletes, right? So what we’re trying to get away from is, well, they’re low specialized,
so they can’t work as hard.
They must not be as talented. No, we don’t see that. We don’t see hours spent in per week
training when they’re in season different from side to side, from high to low.
Rather, they all commit when they’re in that sport. It’s just the low specialization goes on to
different sports and does different things. And so I would say that the one sentence takeaway
from this is find a sport you’re passionate about.
That’s fine, but try to take one season off to see a significant reduction in your risk of injury and
potential need for surgery to correct that injury. High school and youth sports programs can
also use this information to inform their training protocols. You can find more information
about Nathan Fitton and all of our guests on our website, RadioHealthJournal.org. For more
behind the scenes, follow Radio Health Journal on Facebook, Instagram, and X. Our writer
producer is Kristen Farrah.
Our production manager is Jason Dickey. I’m Greg Johnson. Radio Health Journal returns in just
a moment.
Hey, Ma, I’ve been meaning to talk to you about some new COVID information I saw online. I
read that Black folks like us with certain conditions like diabetes, heart disease, mental health
conditions, or being 50 and older, like you, are at high risk. Boy, you sound like a commercial.
I’m just saying. I know you love your ginger teas and essential oils, but remember, there are
treatment options for COVID-19. I promise if I get sick again, I’ll call my doctor to ask about my
options.
Visit wetalkwerise.com to learn more. Brought to you by Pfizer. Oh, no.
Ah, that’s the sound of someone who’s misplaced… My debit card. …their debit card. Where did
I leave that thing? Not at the gas pump, or the checkout counter, or the roof of your car.
Now, if he has the Chase mobile app, he can use Card Lock. Wait, I could just lock my card. Yep,
just a few tippy taps on his phone and… That sound? That’s peace of mind from Chase.
Chase mobile app is available for select mobile devices. Message and data rates may apply.
JPMorgan Chase Bank, N.A., member FDIC.
Here’s comedian Howie Mandel for hands-free Cozy Fit Sketchers slip-ins. Hey, everybody. I’m
holding a new Cozy Fit Sketchers slip-in sneaker.
And first of all, I barely know I’m holding it. It’s that light. You see, Cozy Fit is a cool new sneaker
where the upper is made of a soft quilted material.
It’s kind of like a little puffer jacket for your feet, except it looks like a super stylish sneaker.
Introducing new Cozy Fit Sketchers slip-ins. The latest comfort creation from Sketchers.
Featuring Sketchers’ new Contour Foam, a soft, cushy footbed that shapes your foot when you
walk, softening every step. Best of all, they have slip-in technology so I can just step in and go
with no bending down and no touching my shoes. Once I start walking, you know, this is like
Contour Foam is hugging my foot.
And normally, I don’t like hugs. But when it’s my Cozy Fit’s doing it, I’m all in. Hug away, shoes.
Hug away. You can find Cozy Fit Sketchers slip-ins at a Sketchers store, Sketchers.com, or
wherever stylish footwear happens to be sold. Nice spot, Howie.
Give me a hug. Give me a hug, baby. Oh, I’m being hugged.
Medical Notes This Week Not all generic drugs are created equal. You may want to start paying
attention to where your medications are manufactured, according to new research. A study
published in the journal Production and Operations Management has found that drugs coming
out of India have 54% more adverse event reports.
These products have the exact same pharmaceutical makeup as ones made in America,
suggesting that the fault lies in lax regulation policies. How much of a benefit do you get from
learning a second language? For kids with autism, the outcomes are significant. In general,
bilingual children have stronger executive functioning skills that help them control impulses.
When applied to kids with autism, researchers noticed an improvement in their symptoms. This
is a significant step in helping kids on the spectrum thrive in school and workplace
environments. The research is published in the journal Autism Research.
There’s a new product to help stop the spread of malaria. In areas with high transmission rates,
mosquitoes are becoming resistant to insecticides. Thankfully, a new tool called Mosquito
Shield has proven to be a valuable added protection.
It’s a spatial repellent that, when used alongside nets, cuts malaria infections by one-third. The
research is published in the journal The Lancet. And finally, your next hospital visit may look a
bit…greener. The design of a medical room directly impacts patient outcomes.
New research out of Texas A&M University reveals that adding plants to these spaces can make
a big difference in patient recovery. This effect occurs even in virtual reality settings. Indoor
plants promote relaxation and mental clarity.
And that’s Medical Notes this week. I’m Mayan Vos, Tibetan Court. Mmm, that smells good, Ma.
What you making? Just a little something. Collard greens, cornbread, fried chicken, and peach
cobbler. Some leftovers.
Some leftovers? Listen, I’ve been meaning to talk to you about some new COVID information I
saw online. See, because you’re always on that phone. I’m serious.
I read that three out of four adults in the United States have a high risk factor for severe COVID
19. And Black folks like us with certain conditions like diabetes, heart disease, mental health
conditions, or being 50 and older, like you, are at high risk. Boy, you sound like a commercial.
I’m just saying. I know you love your ginger teas and essential oils. But remember, there are
treatment options for COVID-19 if you ever get it again.
Uh-huh. I promise if I get sick again, I’ll call my doctor to ask about my options. I love you.
I love you too. I’m glad we had this talk. Me too.
Now get out of my kitchen. Visit wetalkwerise.com to learn more. Brought to you by Pfizer.
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You’re listening to Radio Health Journal, the trusted news source for medicine, science and technology. I’m Elizabeth Westfield. I’m Mayan Vasta Betancourt.

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You’re listening to Radio Health Journal, the trusted news source for medicine, science andtechnology. I’m Elizabeth Westfield. I’m Mayan Vastabetancourt.

You’re listening to Radio Health Journal, the trusted news source for medicine, science and
technology. I’m Elizabeth Westfield. I’m Mayan Vastabetancourt.