When people receive a medical diagnosis or experience a new symptom, the first thing many of us do is reach for our phone. If a doctor isn't available to provide an answer, someone else is.

On The Dose podcast, host Dr. Joel Bervell talks with Dr. Mike Varshavski, a primary care physician with more than 30 million social media followers, about what it takes to fight health misinformation at scale, what health institutions still get wrong about social media, and why entertainment and education aren't opposites.

Doctor Mike, as he's known, didn't set out to become a popular online figure. He says he was driven to act as he watched misinformation fill a space that medicine was too cautious to engage with.

"We trust you to cut people open, to prescribe all these medicines that have potential side effects — but we don't trust you to make a video on the subject you're an expert on," he says, describing the double standard physicians face online.

Show Notes:

The Checkup with Doctor Mike

Dr. Kaytura Felix didn't set out to document the Black maternal health crisis. She set out to find the people who are already doing something about it.

On this episode of The Dose podcast, Dr. Joel Bervell talks with Felix, founder of the Black Birthing Futures project, about what she discovered: a constellation of Black community midwives providing "deep care" — clinical, emotional, social, and spiritual support centered on care of the birthing family.

"The family is the sun and all the providers are orbiting them," says Felix.

But keeping the family at the center isn't easy. Felix shares what stands between deep care and the families who need it most.

Four in 10 Americans have medical debt. Most don't know there's a federal law that could eliminate it.

On this episode of The Dose podcast, host Joel Bervell talks with Jared Walker about his nonprofit, Dollar For, which has helped Americans erase more than $100 million in medical debt by connecting them to the charity care programs that hospitals are legally required to offer but rarely publicize.

"These hospitals are great. They're saving people's lives every single day," says Walker. "The problem is that they're also ruining people's financial lives."

With Medicaid cuts on the horizon and health care costs continuing to rise, Walker explains how Dollar For's free screening tool works, why some states are doing a better job of protecting patients than others, and what it will take to make hospitals do what the law already requires.

Seventy billion dollars is flowing into health care AI, but the people building it and the patients who need it most are rarely in the same room.

On this episode, host Dr. Joel Bervell talks with pediatrician, researcher, and tech optimist Dr. Ivor Horn about what responsible AI innovation in health care requires. Drawing on her work building open-access datasets and equity frameworks for machine learning, Horn says that rigorous research, community partnership, and critical thinking are not obstacles to the work of building powerful tools — they are the work.

"If you build for the most vulnerable patients," Horn says, "you will build a better product for everyone."

Uterine fibroids may affect up to 80 percent of women in their lifetime, but they remain under-researched, underfunded, and routinely dismissed. Lupita Nyong'o is working to change that.

"I could not believe that women were partially or wholly losing their reproductive organs because of this noncancerous tumor situation."

On this episode, Dr. Joel Bervell talks with Academy Award–winning actor and activist Lupita Nyong'o about her own diagnosis, and her decision to share an MRI of her body while launching the Make Fibroids Count campaign with the Foundation for Women's Health.

"I realized without research we can't get any further," Nyong'o says. "We need to understand more in order to be able to equip the doctors who can then equip the patients."

Show Notes:

Lupita Nyong'o

Make Fibroids Count (through the Foundation for Women's Health)

The White Dress Project

The Fibroid Foundation

A new movement in the United States is taking shape in maternal care, one that seeks to restore trust, center women, and protect lives.

On this episode of The Dose podcast, Dr. Joel Bervell talks with author and advocate Elaine Welteroth about her own struggle finding patient-centered care during pregnancy and how the organization she founded, birthFUND, is funding midwifery care, supporting new mothers, and reimagining what safe, empowering birth can look like in America.

Across Oklahoma, a community-powered doula network is reshaping what equitable maternal care looks like.

On this episode of The Dose, Dr. Joel Bervell talks with Omare Jimmerson of the Oklahoma Birth Equity Initiative about how culturally rooted doulas, smart policies, and practical supports—from rides to diapers—are helping hundreds of families thrive each year.

AI therapy for children with anxiety, mental health training for staff at nonprofits that work with young people, and an "art pharmacy" that prescribes free museum tickets to kids — these are just some of the things Dr. Kevin Simon and his team are doing to help meet the mental health care needs of Boston's children.

Simon, the city's first chief behavioral health officer, talks to host Dr. Joel Bervell on the new episode of The Dose, which centers on America's youth mental health crisis and the innovative things states and cities are doing for struggling children.

"The proportion of energy and resources that goes into getting paid instead of taking care of patients is out of whack."

That's Dr. Mai Pham's assessment of how we pay for health care in the United States — where all too often the imperative is volume over value, and billing over better care. In the latest episode of The Dose podcast, host Dr. Joel Bervell talks with Dr. Pham about how we can do better and deliver on the promise of equitable, person-centered care.

Medical care for people with obesity is changing rapidly. Body mass index, or BMI, was once considered the gold standard for diagnosis but has proven to be less accurate than once thought. Meanwhile, the advent of GLP-1 drugs has provided patients with treatment options that were unimaginable just a decade ago.

Dr. Fatima Cody Stanford, an obesity medicine physician, joins host Dr. Joel Bervell on a new episode of The Dose podcast to talk about the state of obesity care in the United States. Together, they explore why insurers are hesitant to cover medications like Ozempic, how BMI fails to catch real health risks, and what the future of obesity treatment looks like for patients and public health.