Return to Healing: Common Sense Health Care

Andy and Alan
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The authors of A Return to Healing give you tips and advice about how to improve your health and negotiate an often deceptive health care system.  And it all comes down to common sense!

  1. 3d ago

    How Does your Address Impact your Health

    Your zip code has some impact on your health, but the details are not as simple as one might imagine.  We know, for instance, that lifestyle health benefits are more difficult to achieve in people in the inner city, who work long hours, who have lower income with financial stress, and who live in rural areas.  People traditionally who live in areas with more health care also tend to engage in more beneficial lifestyle practices.   But in fact, as indices such as the Dartmouth Atlas have shown, it's not the healthcare making them healthier, it's them.  Higher proportions of hospitals, academic centers, and specialty care is inversely connected to health outcomes; the more specialists, the worse the health, the more the overtreatment, and the higher the cost.  This has been a consistent finding.  What matters more in medical health is access to primary care and to an emergency room; both are in short supply in rural areas, and the inner city lacks robust primary care, as does most of the country.   We will dissect the relationship between where you live to your health, and it comes down to two factors we often discuss: primary care and lifestyle. "The greater the ignorance, the greater the dogmatism."  -William Osler, MD www.returntohealing.com

  2. Oct 25

    Health Care in Your Home: Safety, Medical Devices, and Gadgets

    A lot of people have started buying devices promising to find problems and lead to cure.  These may include sugar monitors, blood pressure cuffs, and even monitors to find heart irregularities including the dreaded afib.  But are these devices helpful, or could they have a dark side?  We discuss all of this today, but we also focus on what is most important to home safety and health promotion, and it has nothing to do with gadgets.  Well, one gadget is beneficial, one that you can press if you fall!  But a major goal of the home is to set it up to prevent falls, to let in light, to enable you to get out (and others to get in) to keep you social, to help you to eat well.  We talk about the best ways to assure you are safe and thriving at home, and talk down the recent focus on gadgets to find problems that are not really important. "The greater the ignorance, the greater the dogmatism."  -William Osler, MD www.returntohealing.com

  3. Oct 18

    Our Healthgevity: Why we don't only live shorter, but we live worse

    Alan and Andy discuss the HALE scale, a subset of longevity that measures the average length of years people live without being disabled.  The longevity in our country averages 79 years, about  4 years lower than most industrialized nations.  But we do far worse in the HALE score, where our healthgevity (the average length of life we live not disabled) is 63 years, meaning that on average we spend the last 16 years of our lives suffering poor health or frank disability.  Compare this to other industrialized nations, where the average HALE age is 74 years, a full 8 years longer than us, with less end of life disability.  Why? We spend far less on primary care and lifestyle care than virtually any other country.  We are a specialized, high tech system that becomes interested in you only when you get sick.  Thus, little attention is spent on prevention.  How can we fix this?  We lay it out in our book, and we talk about it on this podcast.  The solution is easier than you may know, but it will take some pushback from those most harmed to create change. "The greater the ignorance, the greater the dogmatism."  -William Osler, MD www.returntohealing.com

  4. Oct 11

    Measles and Health Scares

    We are hearing a lot about measles on the news.  The escalating cases.  The unprecedented deaths.  The tragic repercussions of the anti-vaxxers and Kennedy in particular  It has become a war between those who fear vaccines and those who demand that everyone get every vaccine we have.  Two extremes fighting it out, as the sensible middle falls prey to this battle and media scare campaign.   Yes, measles is preventable with vaccination, but are we in the midst of a health crisis because some parents choose not to vaccinate their kids?  And is this a case of public health exigency whereby parents should be forced to vaccinate?  As of now the CDC reports 5 total measles deaths nationwide in 2026.  There were 3 deaths in 2025. All are in the unvaccinated, one at least in an infant too young for vaccination, none in any who who ever received a vaccination.  Meanwhile, in 2026, 1000 people die every day from smoking related deaths, 1000 die a day from being in the hospital, 500 die a day from poor diets, and yet the media chooses to point its finger at measles.  Why? In this podcast we talk about how extremism drives not only media coverage but policy decisions as well.  We also discuss how absolutism, shaming, and extremism voiced by public health advocates only creases more mistrust in the system, especially knowing that the vaccine industry is extremely profitable.  As always, we advocate for the middle road, one that advocates vaccine education and advocacy when vaccines are reasonable, but which allows choice and common sense shared decision making.  But, isn't that the road all of heath care should take?  We think so! "The greater the ignorance, the greater the dogmatism."  -William Osler, MD www.returntohealing.com

  5. Sep 13

    The Medicalization of Aging

    Age has become a diagnosis meant to be treated, not a time of your life to enjoy living.  More medicines, more specialists, more tests, more fear.  We have transformed age itself into a disease as we measure and "fix'" everything we can find, a windfall for the medical industrial complex, but a tragedy for the trusting souls who are tossed into the medical fire.  Alan and Andy use data and their collective 75 years of experience to show how errant this approach is. Slow medicine, a focus on function and symptoms, a leap away from tests and specialization are the ingredients of successful aging.  We talk about all of this and how patients can get back on track, even if the medical system will likely continue to steamroll its older victims. In addition to our own book, Return to Healing, we highlight some other books that have explored the issue of slow medicine and the medicalization of aging: Byock, The Best Care PossibleSweet, Slow MedicineLazris, Curing MedicareHadler, Rethinking AgingMcCullough, My Mother, Your MotherIt's important to know that your later years need not be spent chasing numbers and falling prey to the fearmongering of specialists and drug company propaganda.  Work with your primary care doctor and let the medical system back off and help you to live well and long. "The greater the ignorance, the greater the dogmatism."  -William Osler, MD www.returntohealing.com

  6. Aug 30

    How to Age Well

    We grapple with the question many people ask: how do we age well, live longer, live better?  That is why many people go to the doctor, why they check their numbers and take medicines, why they buy that apple watch to monitor nearly everything!  But as we discuss, none of that is the ticket to longevity.  And is longevity the only barometer of aging success?  We argue it is not. We discuss that how long you live healthy and independent is, to most people, even more important than how long you live.  Independence, mental acuity, the ability to engage in activities and be with people important to you is part of what we call quality of life, and how long you can maintain that is crucial.  Our country does the worst in the world on that score.  While we have among the lowest longevity of industrialized countries, we have even a lower health-gevity, how long you can remain healthy.   Taking a medical path to wellness when you are old is often a way to make things worse.  We discuss why this is the case, and what's really important including your social interactions, your family, your diet, your mobility, and your happiness.  Drugs don't fix any of that, lowering your cholesterol and blood pressure can make those worse without helping you live a day longer, but paving a path towards wellness through your own devices is always the best way to go.  There is science behind this, and a lot of experience, and we'll lay it all out. "The greater the ignorance, the greater the dogmatism."  -William Osler, MD www.returntohealing.com

  7. Aug 24

    AI and primary care: how to use it responsibly

    AI in such mediums as Google, Chat GPT, and Claude is becoming a device through which doctors and patients can make diagnoses, prescribe treatments, and distill symptoms down to diseases.  If you are dizzy, what can be causing it, is it an emergency, how do you fix it?  What if you are having chest pain?  Are all your medicines necessary, can there be interactions?  In some ways AI can answer simple questions, but like most protocols and many doctors, it will typically suggest a conservative approach with more tests and visits, sometimes a trip to the hospital, because it cannot fully understand you as a person and the nuances of how your symptoms may not be diagnosable through the algorithms and the large studies it can access.  Primary care providers who know you well, who know the data well, who understand how to apply that data to you and how your symptoms may not fit in protocolized boxes, are far more likely to find the right diagnosis in conjunction with you.  That's something a computer or protocol or even physician-held calculator can't do.  This is why good primary care is not replaceable with AI.  We  run through several examples of this and show where AI is useful and where it can be lacking.   "The greater the ignorance, the greater the dogmatism."  -William Osler, MD www.returntohealing.com

  8. Aug 17

    Vaccine Nuance: Politics vs Science

    The Trump Administration has elected to decrease the recommended vaccine schedule for children, and the political boxing gloves came out immediately.  The mere notion of vaccine reduction, and the fact it occurred in Trump's administration, made the issue a left vs right slugfest. But hold on, these changes have been suggested by some of the most prominent scientific minds in our nation, and they mirror what's already been done in Europe based on ample evidence.  They are not anti-vax; they promote certain vaccines with proof of efficacy and dispute the need to recommend others that do not.  Today we not only discuss the science of vaccination, and dispel the utility of their being anti-vax and pro-vax camps, but also go through many vaccine controversies and take our own fact-based center road.  Science should not be imbedded in politics and should not be driven by specialty medical societies and drug company ads.  We need sense, and every patient needs a good primary care provider to discuss what the internet and the media has turned into political infighting. "The greater the ignorance, the greater the dogmatism."  -William Osler, MD www.returntohealing.com

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The authors of A Return to Healing give you tips and advice about how to improve your health and negotiate an often deceptive health care system.  And it all comes down to common sense!

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