One of health secretary Robert F. Kennedy’s refrains has focused on medical education: Doctors don’t know enough about nutrition and preventive medicine, he likes to say. He has encouraged medical schools to beef up (tallow up?) their education on healthy eating and its connection to chronic disease.

What do medical students think of this?

On this week’s episode of the “First Opinion Podcast,” host Torie Bosch spoke with Tiffany Onyejiaka, a fourth-year medical student, and Lauren Rice, who is poised to start her residency in internal medicine this summer. Both have written First Opinion essays on Kennedy’s claims. In November, Tiffany argued that it would be more productive to support the work of registered dietitians and encourage them to collaborate with doctors. More recently, Lauren wrote that she agreed that medical school needs more of a preventive health mindset.

I brought them together to discuss each other’s arguments and compare their experiences in medical school.

“Our country's health is going down a very poor trajectory and something needs to change,” Lauren said on the podcast. “I don't have the answer to what that needs to be. I don't think Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has the answer. I don't think anyone has the answers. But the conversation needs to start and it needs to a conversation with a lot people at the table.”

Have you ever wondered how many drugs are behind the counter at your local pharmacy?

According to Thomas Goetz — a journalist, entrepreneur, and host of the new podcast “Drug Story” —  “there are over 3,000 drugs behind a typical pharmacist counter.” And behind each drug is a story.

On “Drug Story,” which debuted in January, Goetz picks one drug and examines its history, the disease it treats, and how it intersects with society and public health. “In every drug, every medication, there is a much larger story to tell about health and medicine and society and business and economics,” he told me on this episode of the “First Opinion Podcast.”

We talked about Ambien, Ozempic, and how drugs attempt to treat the ways modern life is incompatible with the human body; how his thinking about weight loss drugs has changed over the years; and much more — including my ill-fated attempts to feed a baby salmon puree to stave off fish allergies.

The deep distrust between public health and the Make America Healthy Again movement may seem impossible to heal. But the podcast “Why Should I Trust You?” is trying to do just that by facilitating conversation between people who often view each others as enemies.

Brinda Adhikari and Tom W. Johnson launched “Why Should I Trust You?” in 2025. Since then, they’ve hosted big names from MAHA, the Trump administration, the anti-vaccine movement, and traditional health. They also bring on everyday Americans trying to keep their families healthy while navigating a confusing information ecosystem. “Everyone, when they come on the show, no matter what their quote unquote, expertise, they're all equals. Everyone gets time to speak,” Adhikari said.

On this episode of the “First Opinion Podcast,” host Torie Bosch speaks with Adhikari and Johnson about their show’s goals and the criticism they’ve received from public health and MAHA alike.

Ahead of Monday’s NCAA men’s basketball final, much of the news coverage focused on two overlapping dynamics: 1) what bets to make and 2) how the rise of sports betting is causing damage.

According to Isaac Rose-Berman, a fellow at the American Institute for Boys and Men, the skyrocketing popularity of sports betting is a burgeoning public health crisis, especially for young men.

While men and women are roughly equally represented at the casino, with “sports betting you’re talking, you know, 85-90% of the users” are men, according to Isaac.

That results in two problems from a public health perspective: the financial cost, which can lead to depression, anxiety, and even suicide, and the compulsive behavior that pulls people out of their normal lives.

Religion and science can often seem in opposition, at least culturally. But they don’t have to be, say Marc Siegel and Francis Collins.

Siegel, who is a physician and a senior medical analyst at Fox News, has recently published a new book, “The Miracles Among Us: How God's Grace Plays a Role in Healing,” in which he tells stories of unexpected — miraculous, he says —recoveries.

On this episode of the “First Opinion Podcast,” host Torie Bosch speaks with Siegel and Francis Collins — former director of the National Institutes of Health and the author of “The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief.” They discuss the intersection of faith and science, particularly the ways that some Christian communities have increasingly become skeptical of medicine like vaccines.

When Jason Karlawish started working with dementia patients in the late ’90s, there often wasn’t much he could offer them. “I gave them a diagnosis,” he told me on this week’s episode of the “First Opinion Podcast,” but had limited medications to prescribe. Now Karlawish — who is STAT’s Neurotransmissions columnist; a professor of medicine, medical ethics, health policy, and neurology at the University of Pennsylvania; co-director of the Penn Memory Center; and executive producer of the “Age of Aging” podcast — says a revolution is taking place in dementia care, thanks to diagnostics that are removing uncertainty and treatments that actually have some effect.

Celena Lozano's son Benny, who turned 5 in November, loves trains, trucks — anything that goes. He also has a rare disease, PURA syndrome.

Earlier this year, when headlines announced that a child with a different rare disease, known as Baby KJ, had been treated using CRISPR in a major breakthrough, Celena, a neuroscience Ph.D. candidate, found that many in the PURA community had major questions, with comments like “This happened in just six months. When will this be available for our PURA kids?” appearing on Facebook groups.

Celena and STAT reporter Jason Mast joined the podcast to discuss why CRISPR for PURA syndrome is particularly difficult, what it’s like to be both a rare disease parent and a scientist, and how crucial parents are to research.

As science journalist Melanie D.G. Kaplan describes in her new book, “Lab Dog,” tens of thousands of beagles are used in the U.S. for medical research, testing chemical safety, and more.

In “Lab Dog,” Melanie goes on a journey with her beloved adopted beagles, Hammy, a retired research dog, to find out where he came from. Along the way, she explores the ways that dogs contribute to medical research, the potential and limitations of substitutes for animals in the lab.

In this episode, we discuss the ethics of animal research, Hammy’s story, the U.S. government’s attempt to move away from animal research, and why the number of beagles used in lab research has dropped from 70,000 when she adopted Hammy to 40,000 today.

In the wake of the pandemic, North Dakota, like many states, suddenly saw a splintering of opinion around vaccines. “Not only was I concerned about the decline of vaccinations, but I was even more concerned about the fabric of communities,” Sandy Tibke, executive director of the Foundation for a Healthy North Dakota, said on the this week’s podcast. So she teamed up with Josh Gryniewicz of Odd Duck, a communications consultancy.

Together, they crisscrossed North Dakota, hosting listening sessions on health-related topics that went well beyond vaccines.

On this episode of the “First Opinion Podcast,” host Torie Bosch spoke with Sandy and Josh about their work and the lessons it offers others in public health.

James Watson, who won the Nobel Prize for co-discovering the structure of DNA, died last week at the age of 97. He was a scientific giant, but in the final two decades of his life, he falsely stated that women and Black people are, as populations, not as smart as white men.

Nancy Hopkins knew Watson better than most, having first worked with him when she was just an undergraduate. She is a retired MIT professor known for her work on zebrafish as a cancer model, and for her advocacy on behalf of women in science.

Today, she is trying to reconcile her “lifelong friend,” the Watson one who encouraged her and other women to go into molecular biology, with the one who emerged late in life.