Healthcare is Stupid

Rahul Parikh & Jonathan Mates
  • 4.9 (13)
  • Medicine
  • Updated Biweekly

Physicians Rahul Parikh and Jonathan Mates explore the absurdities of modern American healthcare—what it’s like, how we got here, and what practical steps might move it in a better direction.

  1. 5d ago

    Will AI Replace Your Doctor? Wrong Answers Only

    Health policy strategist Ezekiel Emanuel, billionaire Vinod Khosla, and two others just published a viral JAMA article claiming autonomous AI will soon replace human doctors. The result—probably due to the prominence of the authors and the prestige of the journal—created a disturbance in the Force of the medical world, and broke the healthcare internet for a couple of weeks. Despite that, we aren’t so sure the quality of the argument justifies the attention or the conclusions.  We break down the article with AI Expert and guest Rachel Lomasky, and give our thoughts on what questions we should really be asking.  Links: Will Autonomous AI Exceed AI-Aided Physicians as the Best Medical Care? (link from Khosla Ventures web site) Artificial Intelligence and the Future of the Clinical Workforce (Dhruv Khullar perspective) Here we go again – AI vs humans Jonathan’s blog post response Read more from Rachel Lomasky

    Will AI Replace Your Doctor? Wrong Answers Only

  2. Sep 19 ·  Bonus

    2,977+1: A 9/11 Story

    This is a special mini-episode. It's about the events of 9/11, but not the ones you you're thinking of.  Rahul shares a story of what he was doing on that day, 25 years ago.

  3. Sep 10

    Should You Trust Your Wearable Health Device?

    That "smart" thing on your wrist, your finger, or wrapped around your bicep—can you actually trust what it's telling you? Is it doing real medicine, or just guessing? It may say in the fine print that it's not a medical device, but let's face it a lot of people use it like it is. This episode: Apple Watches, Oura rings, Whoop bands, and the regulatory loophole that lets devices that promise to measure your health get away with not being that great. We get into why that's allowed, what your doctor actually faces when you hand them months of this data, and our experience with our own devices.

    Should You Trust Your Wearable Health Device?

  4. Aug 26

    The Alphabet Soup of Healthcare

    You booked an appointment with a doctor. You saw a nurse practitioner instead. Was that a downgrade — or the only reason you got in at all? This week we sort out what actually separates the roles. NPs and PAs handle a huge share of routine care well: the sore throat, the med refill, the blood pressure check, the stable chronic condition on a stable plan. But are they always the right team member for your issue? And where did these different roles come from, anyway? More importantly, what can you do to make sure you're getting the right care? Links: Hattiesburg experience

    The Alphabet Soup of Healthcare

  5. Jul 29

    How Should Your Doctor Get Paid?

    Every time you see a doctor, somebody has already decided how they get paid for it — and that decision can shape what happens next. Fee-for-service rewards doing more and capitation rewards doing less, but the incentives get more complex, with payors, healthcare delivery organizations, and regulators trying to enforce standards. Sitting in the exam room, naked under a gown, you want what’s best for your health, not someone else’s business model. In this episode, we sit down with Dr. Imran Junaid, who's practiced medicine on nearly every side of this problem — a capitated system, his own fee-for-service group, and building outcomes-based care sold to health plans. He helps us work through how these models actually shape the care you get, why the "obvious" fixes tend to grow their own problems, and who quietly wins and loses under each one. Links: Imran Junaid

  6. Jul 8

    Screening Strikes Back

    Last episode, we sat down with Dr. TR Levin — the gastroenterologist who built one of the most effective colon cancer screening programs in the country — and worked through why screening is so much harder to understand than it looks. Some tests find things that would never have hurt you. A simple test sent to your home may work better as a screening program than a more invasive procedure, mostly because people actually do it. And we talked about how knowing more is not always better, and sometimes no test is the best test. A lot of you came back with the same question: fine, but what am I supposed to actually do? In this follow-up, we talk about how to think more clearly about screening: what questions to ask, how to think about your own risk, and how to tell the difference between a test that is worth your time and one that is mostly worth someone else’s money.

    Screening Strikes Back

  7. Jun 17

    Should You Get That Cancer Test?

    Cancer screening saves lives, and it has been thoughtfully constructed to do so. But the version of cancer screening that some of us experience is one where nobody explains the odds, nobody mentions the alternatives, and a positive result sends you into a cascade of procedures that may or may not have been necessary. That version feels stupid. And there’s another version of screening, where someone in a 60 second video sells you the idea that the medical establishment is playing it safe and you need to take care of your own health by purchasing these additional tests…that just happen to have celebrity endorsements. That can also be stupid—with a price tag. In this episode, we sit down with Dr. TR Levin, the gastroenterologist who built one of the most effective cancer screening programs in the world. He’s the person who figured out that the best screening test isn’t the most invasive one — it’s the one people will actually do. He helps us understand how screening fits into the world of medical testing, and how we can do it better. Links: US Preventive Services Task Force

    Should You Get That Cancer Test?

  8. Jun 3

    Should AI Replace Your Doctor?

    “Will AI replace doctors?” makes for a great headline, a great dinner party argument, and a great way to stress out a podcast co-host. It’s also, unfortunately, the wrong question. In a follow up to our last episode, we respond to our listeners’ feedback. We put co-host and radiologist Jonathan Mates on the spot and use radiology as our test case — the specialty that’s been at the center of this conversation longer than any other, partly because the job looks simple from the outside. You look at pictures. AI looks at pictures. What’s the problem? It turns out there are a lot of problems. We get into what radiology actually involves, why AI can be impressive and still not replace humans, and some other factors we need to consider when answering this (wrong) question. Links: Geoff Hinton on radiology

    Should AI Replace Your Doctor?
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Ratings & Reviews

4.9
out of 5
13 Ratings

About

Physicians Rahul Parikh and Jonathan Mates explore the absurdities of modern American healthcare—what it’s like, how we got here, and what practical steps might move it in a better direction.

Information

  • Creator
    Rahul Parikh & Jonathan Mates
  • Years Active
    2026
  • Episodes
    15
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2026 Healthcare is Stupid
  • Show Website
    Healthcare is Stupid

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