Book Club

Host: John Russell, MD

Guest: Aaron Carroll, MD

Over the years, the world of food has taken drastic swings, such as the demonization of butter in the '70s and today’s obsession with gluten-free foods to cut out carbs. Dr. Aaron Carroll, author of The Bad Food Bible: How and Why to Eat Sinfully, dives into the myths surrounding nutrition and why common sense might just be the answer to eating healthy.

Host: Maurice Pickard, MD

Guest: Allison Pataki

Five months pregnant, on a flight headed for Hawaii, Allison Pataki's life took a sudden turn when she witnessed her husband, Dave Levy, lose consciousness. After an emergency landing and evaluation, Levy was found to have had suffered a rare stroke.

When he woke the next day, he had amnesia, leaving the young couple holding onto hope for recovery. True to form, Pataki began to write letters to her husband—letters that became the foundation for Beauty in the Broken Places: A Memoir of Love, Faith, and Resilience.

Host: Maurice Pickard, MD

Guest: Beth Macy

Beth Macy’s Dopesick is a heartbreaking trajectory that illustrates how America’s twenty-plus year struggle with opioid addiction has persisted for this long and has become so firmly entrenched in practically every corner of our country—from desolate cities to once idyllic farm towns.

Tune in as Beth Macy joins Dr. Maurice Pickard to illuminate the persistent and often conflicting gaps in the treatment and criminal-justice landscapes while shining a hopeful light on the heroes battling the worst drug epidemic in American history.

To explore the origin of our country’s opioid epidemic, Mark Masselli and Margaret Flinter speak with Pulitzer Prize-winning Barry Meier, author of Pain Killer: An Empire of Deceit and the Origin of America's Opioid Epidemic which dives into the pivotal role Purdue Pharma, makers of the narcotic OxyContin, played in the greatest public health crisis of the 21st century.

Host: Jennifer Caudle, DO

Career burnout is unfortunately all too common in the healthcare industry, with over half of physicians suffering from at least one symptom of burnout. Not only that, but the rates of depression and suicide in this industry are significantly higher than others.

To discuss this very real threat to health care providers, Dr. Jennifer Caudle is joined by Dr. Shawn Jones, ENT physician and author of Finding Heart in the Art: A Surgeon's Renaissance Approach to Healing Modern Medical Burnout, who recants his own personal journey in overcoming career burnout.

Host: Maurice Pickard, MD

Guest: Bob Mitchell

Quite suddenly, Bob Mitchell became very sick. He would endure three near-fatal episodes of ventricular tachycardia due to a heart muscle comprised of 54% scar tissue, as well as heart surgeries, two harrowing months of waiting on the transplant list for a new heart on life-supporting IV drips (during which time a malignant tumor was detected in his kidney), partial nephrectomy surgery to remove the cancer, another month of waiting, a 12-hour heart and kidney transplant surgery, and 100 days on life support in four different hospitals.

Host Dr. Maurice Pickard talks with novelist Bob Mitchell, author of Time for a Heart-to-Heart: Reflections on Life in the Face of Death about his inspiring story of the triumph of hope in the face of the direst of circumstances.

Host: Maurice Pickard, MD

Guest: Carl Hart, MD

Carl Hart, who grew up in one of Miami’s toughest neighborhoods, escaped a life of crime and drugs and avoided becoming one of the crack addicts he now helps treat as the Chair of the Department of Psychology at Columbia University. His landmark, controversial research is redefining our understanding of addiction and demonstrates how personal experience and scientific study can inform and validate each other for a deeper understanding of human behavior and addiction.

Host Dr. Maurice Pickard talks with Dr. Hart, author of the book High Price, about the relationship between drugs and pleasure, choice, and motivation, both in the brain and in society. They explore how his research sheds new light on common ideas about race, poverty, and drugs, and explain why current policies are failing.

Host: John Russell, MD

As a young critical care physician, Dr. Rana Awdish was transfigured from a doctor into a critically ill patient in an instant. This transposition, coincidentally timed at the end of her medical training, instantly laid bare the vast chasm between the conventional practice of medicine and the stark reality of the prostrate patient.

Host Dr. John Russell chats with Dr. Rana Awdish about this transformation and how she came to understand the fatal flaws in her profession, from her own past actions as a physician to the perils of navigating her own illness. She presents a new paradigm and rationale for embracing the emotional bond between doctor and patient and outlines the redemptive possibilities of dismantling the barriers to connection in all relationships.

Dr. Awdish is the author of In Shock: My Journey from Death to Recovery and the Redemptive Power of Hope and Director of the Pulmonary Hypertension Program at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit.

Host: John Russell, MD

Guest: Meredith Wadman, BM, BCh, M.S.

Until the late 1960s, tens of thousands of American children suffered crippling birth defects if their mothers had been exposed to rubella, popularly known as German measles, while pregnant; there was no vaccine and little understanding of how the disease devastated fetuses.

In June 1962, a young biologist in Philadelphia, using human tissue samples sent from Sweden, produced a line of cells that allowed the creation of vaccines against rubella and other common childhood diseases. Two years later, in the midst of a massive German measles epidemic, the vaccine that would one day wipe out homegrown rubella was introduced. This vaccine has since protected more than 150 million people in the United States, and its development method has also led to other vaccines that have protected billions of people around the world from polio, rabies, chicken pox, measles, hepatitis A, shingles, and adenovirus.

Host Dr. John Russell chats with Meredith Wadman, author of The Vaccine Race: Science, Politics, and the Human Costs of Defeating Disease, about the story of both the science of this urgent race and the political and ethical controversies that nearly ended it prematurely.

Host: John Russell, MD

Revolutionary advances in medical knowledge have caused doctors to become so focused on their narrow fields of expertise that they often overlook the simplest fact of all: their patients are suffering.

Dr. John Russell welcomes Dr. Thomas Lee, Chief Medical Officer at Press Ganey and author of An Epidemic of Empathy in Healthcare: How to Deliver Compassionate, Connected Patient Care That Creates a Competitive Advantage. Their discussion focuses on the growing divide between world-class medical treatment and compassionate care, and why the two are not mutually exclusive.