First Opinion Podcast

Back in February, physician and advocate Joel Zivot wrote a First Opinion essay shortly after Kenneth Smith was executed using nitrogen gas in Alabama. In “A new Louisiana capital-punishment bill would fundamentally alter physician licensing,” Zivot argues against proposed bills in both Kansas and Louisiana that would

De-Shaine Murray is working at the cutting edge of neurotechnology. As a postdoctoral fellow at Yale, he is developing a device to monitor the brain following traumatic brain injury or stroke. He is also trying to fight the long legacy of racism in neuroscience. He sees a direct line from racist pseudoscience like phre

Manil Suri and Daniel Morgan are an unusual team: Manil is a mathematics professor and author, while Daniel is a physician and professor of epidemiology, public health, and infectious diseases. But they recently teamed up for a First Opinion essay, “Diagnostic tests for rare conditions present a mathematical conundrum,

Before he joined Congress, Rep. Raul Ruiz, a Democrat from California, worked in another chaotic environment: the emergency department. Today, he says, he tries to bring his background in medicine and public health to policymaking. In particular, he has turned his attention to a shortage of infectious disease physician

When Prozac first entered the psychiatry scene in in the late 80s, the profession was still Freud's territory. Meaning: it was considered by many a failure to take medication to cure depression. But that was all about to change, with early stewards like psychiatrist Peter Kramer, who refused to shy away from the new dr

Fifteen years ago, Mara Buchbinder and colleagues came up with the concept of the “patient in waiting.” The concept described a new category of patients created by cutting-edge testing for conditions that may never appear. The patient in waiting was, quite literally, someone who was waiting to see if they would become