First Opinion Podcast STAT

Millions of people around the world are living with long Covid, a potentially debilitating and medically perplexing condition. Rachel Hall-Clifford is one of them. As a medical anthropologist, she’s well suited to understand the condition. But as a mother, wife, friend, researcher, and teacher, it drags her down, just as it does so many others.

This week's episode of the "First Opinion Podcast" explores the issue of medical debt, which burdens as many as 40% of U.S. adults. They collectively owe more than a whopping $200 billion. Many organizations and even federal and state governments have established debt relief programs to tackle the problem. Such programs make intuitive sense. But they may not work and, in some cases, could even harm the mental health of some individuals on the receiving end. That's the surprising takeaway from a study that Katherine Hempstead, a senior policy adviser at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, wrote about in a First Opinion essay and talked about with STAT's Pat Skerrett on the podcast. They were joined by Allison Sesso, the CEO of Undue Medical Debt, a national nonprofit organization that helped sponsor the study.

The medications methadone and buprenorphine are considered “gold standards” for the treatment of opioid use disorder. They are so effective, in fact, that they are considered nearly curative for people that use them as prescribed. Unfortunately, a multitude of social and physical barriers to access means that only about 20% of people that need them have access to these treatments. That access is even harder for pregnant people, who face additional stigmas and challenges.
Judith Cole, a nurse practitioner, and addiction psychiatrist Arthur Robin Williams join the podcast this week to speak about these specific challenges, including the reality that federal law allows for child protective services to be called when people receiving legal effective treatments for addiction have given birth. Despite medications like methadone being fully safe during pregnancy, they continue to carry a stigma that can result in trauma for both birth parents and newborns.

When it comes to childhood and young adulthood, most people in the U.S. think of carefree times of life with few major responsibilities. But for a small subset of young people, these years also mean caring for loved ones. Harvard medical students Kimia Heydari and Romila Santra both have firsthand experience being young caregivers, and spoke with "First Opinion Podcast" host Pat Skerrett about the unique challenges of taking care of family members at ages when few of their peers had similar experiences. 

If you ask a chatbot how to cause a pandemic, it will suggest the 1918 influenza virus, according to researcher Kevin Esvelt. It will even tell you where to find the gene sequences online and where to purchase the genetic components.
Esvelt is a biologist and MIT professor whose work has included altering the genes of mice to prevent the spread of Lyme disease. In a recent First Opinion essay, he wrote about how easy and inexpensive it has become to order genetic components that could be used to create harmful pathogens or toxins and how the biotech industry and government agencies must strengthen safety precautions to prevent this.
Esvelt sat down with host Pat Skerrett to chat about the amazing things genetic technology can accomplish when used correctly, as well as the dangers of such technology in the hands of someone with bad intentions.
 

University of Pennsylvania oncologist and researcher Ezekiel Emanuel and Matthew Guido, a project manager in the Healthcare Transformation Institute, discuss their original research on tuition-free programs with former host Pat Skerrett, who is filling in while Torie Bosch is on maternity leave. They make the case that medical school debt is only one of many factors that influence new doctors to choose less-popular specialties and geographic locations for their residencies.