Advertise on podcast: The Future of Medicine

Odette Harris, MD, MPH, Professor of Neurosurgery and the Paralyzed Veterans of America Professor of Spinal Cord Medicine at Stanford, joins The Future of Medicine for a conversation about concussion, traumatic brain injury, and what it takes to change how medicine thinks about the brain. The conversation was recorded in front of a live Medicine Grand Rounds audience. Dr. Harris has spent her career arguing that concussions should be understood as brain injuries, not minor bumps. She explains her work with the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine to rethink how these injuries are labeled and treated. She also describes how research with the NFL is helping inform safety protocols in other sports. Her message for parents is practical: the children who come to her clinic are more often soccer players, divers, volleyball players, and cheerleaders than football players. She adds that every sport carries some risk, and families deserve better data to make decisions. She also discusses her research on women with traumatic brain injury in the military. Because so few women were in the studies, their experiences were often lost in the data. When her team examined them directly, they found high rates of depression and balance-related problems that were not being addressed. Women veterans were also having a harder time returning to work and daily life, even though they were better educated than their male counterparts. Dr. Harris reflects on her own path, from immigrating to the U.S. from Jamaica, to Dartmouth, to Stanford Medical School and neurosurgery training at a time when very few women entered the field. She describes the mentor who told her to "go where you can write the script." That advice led her to spend her Van Wagenen Fellowship studying brain injury in Jamaica. There she found that death rates from brain injury were the same as in wealthier countries. The differences were in how quickly patients died and how well survivors recovered. She also shares stories from her recent Dartmouth commencement address and what it means to have the Congress of Neurological Surgeons name a lectureship in her honor. Together, Dr. Harris and Euan Ashley discuss concussion science, fairness in medical research, and why the future of brain injury care depends on asking better questions. Thank you for listening! Call to action: If you enjoy The Future of Medicine, subscribe for more conversations with leading scientists shaping the next era of healthcare. Please rate and review the podcast to help others discover these important discussions. Share with friends and colleagues who are curious about how science becomes medicine.

Pascal Geldsetzer, MD, PhD, Assistant Professor of Medicine in Primary Care and Population Health at Stanford, joins The Future of Medicine to discuss a striking line of research: evidence that shingles vaccination may reduce the risk of dementia. Geldsetzer and his team study “natural experiments” — real-world situations that can allow researchers to get closer to determining cause and effect without conducting a traditional randomized clinical trial. In the case of shingles vaccination, age-based eligibility rules created unusually comparable groups of people: those born just before a cutoff were not eligible for the vaccine, while those born just after it were. Using these natural experiments, Geldsetzer’s team has found evidence across several countries that shingles vaccination is associated with a substantial reduction in dementia risk. In one analysis, the researchers estimated that vaccination reduced the risk of dementia over seven years by about 20%. Similar patterns have appeared across different datasets and health systems, as well as in studies examining mild cognitive impairment and outcomes among people already living with dementia. The conversation explores why a vaccine designed to prevent shingles might affect the brain. Geldsetzer discusses possible roles for the virus that causes chickenpox and shingles, inflammation, blood vessel health, and broader effects of vaccination on the immune system. He also explains an important open question: much of the strongest evidence comes from an older live-attenuated shingles vaccine, so additional research is needed to understand whether newer shingles vaccines have similar effects on dementia. Thank you for listening! Call to action: If you enjoy The Future of Medicine, subscribe for more conversations with leading scientists shaping the next era of healthcare. Please rate and review the podcast to help others discover these important discussions. Share with friends and colleagues who are curious about how science becomes medicine.

Jyothi Tirumalasetty, MD, a Stanford Medicine allergist, immunologist, and researcher, joins The Future of Medicine to explain an overlooked source of health care emissions: the propellants used in many common asthma inhalers. In this episode, Dr. Tirumalasetty explains how metered-dose inhalers, including many commonly prescribed albuterol inhalers, use hydrofluorocarbon propellants to deliver medication into the lungs. Most of the propellant ultimately enters the atmosphere, where it acts as a potent greenhouse gas. Depending on the inhaler, she says, the emissions from a single albuterol inhaler can be comparable to driving dozens of miles in a gas-powered car. The conversation explores why reducing those emissions is more complicated than simply switching medications. Some patients need metered-dose inhalers, alternative devices may be more expensive or difficult to access, and treatment decisions must account for asthma control, cost, patient preference, and safety. Dr. Tirumalasetty emphasizes that patients should not stop using an inhaler because of its environmental impact without first talking with their physician. Dr. Tirumalasetty and host Errol Ozdalga, MD, also discuss lower-emission inhalers, medication costs and access, and how health care can reduce emissions while keeping patient care first. The episode closes with Dr. Tirumalasetty reflecting on her own unconventional career path – from nearly two decades of predominantly clinical work to a growing research program focused on inhalers, health care sustainability, and patient care — and why physicians can pursue new research questions at any stage of their careers. Thank you for listening! Call to action: If you enjoy The Future of Medicine, subscribe for more conversations with leading scientists shaping the next era of healthcare. Please rate and review the podcast to help others discover these important discussions. Share with friends and colleagues who are curious about how science becomes medicine.

Stanford hematologist and microbiome researcher Ami Bhatt, MD, PhD, joins The Future of Medicine to explore the microbes living in and on us—and how understanding their evolution could help scientists tackle hospital infections and develop new approaches to cancer therapy. In this episode, Dr. Bhatt explains why the microbiome is far more dynamic than a collection of bacteria living in the gut. Microbes interact with our immune system and metabolism, but they also evolve rapidly in response to their environment. For patients undergoing treatments such as bone marrow transplantation, those changes can have serious consequences. Bhatt discusses research in which approximately 40% of bloodstream infections in a Stanford bone marrow transplant population could be traced back to microbes already living in the patients’ guts. The conversation also explores why certain bacteria become particularly dangerous in hospitals. Bhatt describes “jumping genes” — pieces of DNA that can move within a genome — and her lab’s work investigating how this process may help Enterococcus faecium rapidly adapt and emerge as a hospital superbug. Bhatt also reflects on the experiences that shaped her career, her commitment to patient-centered research, mentorship, and her work expanding access to cancer education through Global Oncology. Thank you for listening! Call to action: If you enjoy The Future of Medicine, subscribe for more conversations with leading scientists shaping the next era of healthcare. Please rate and review the podcast to help others discover these important discussions. Share with friends and colleagues who are curious about how science becomes medicine.

Ash Alizadeh, MD, PhD, a Stanford hematologist-oncologist and physician-scientist, joins The Future of Medicine for a conversation about cancer blood tests, DNA, early detection, and the growing ability to find traces of cancer that traditional scans may not yet reveal. Alizadeh has helped pioneer approaches that search for tiny amounts of tumor DNA circulating in the bloodstream. In this episode, he explains the science in simple terms: as cells throughout the body die, fragments of their DNA enter the blood. Cancer cells can do the same. The challenge is finding those rare cancer signals amid an enormous amount of normal DNA — what Alizadeh describes as essentially a “needle in a haystack” problem. The conversation explores two major possibilities for these technologies. One is detecting cancer in people who have not yet been diagnosed. Alizadeh discusses the promise of multi-cancer early detection tests, but also why showing that a test finds cancer sooner is different from proving that screening ultimately helps people live longer. He argues that these approaches may prove particularly useful when focused on people already at higher risk rather than trying to use a single test equally across dozens of cancers. The second application may be closer to transforming cancer care: looking for molecular residual disease after treatment. Once doctors know the specific DNA changes within a person's tumor, a blood test can search for those same changes later, potentially revealing that cancer remains or is returning before it becomes visible on a scan. Alizadeh discusses how personalized DNA tests are already being studied and used across cancers including bladder, colon, lung, and breast cancer — and how emerging evidence could help doctors decide who needs additional treatment and who may be able to avoid unnecessary therapy. Together, Alizadeh and host Euan Ashley explore what cancer DNA can tell us, where early detection still falls short, why finding residual disease could change treatment decisions, and what it may take to make cancer monitoring far more precise. Thank you for listening! Call to action: If you enjoy The Future of Medicine, subscribe for more conversations with leading scientists shaping the next era of healthcare. Please rate and review the podcast to help others discover these important discussions. Share with friends and colleagues who are curious about how science becomes medicine.

Ross L. Levine, MD, Chief Scientific Officer at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, joins The Future of Medicine for a conversation about blood cancer, cancer genetics, and how a laboratory discovery can eventually lead to new treatments. More than 20 years ago, Levine helped discover a genetic change in JAK2, a gene that plays an important role in controlling blood cell growth. When JAK2 is altered in certain ways, the signal that tells blood cells to grow can become stuck in the “on” position, contributing to a group of chronic blood cancers called myeloproliferative neoplasms. That discovery helped give doctors a new way to diagnose these diseases and helped pave the way for targeted drugs. In this episode, Levine looks back on the moment he first saw the mutation in sequencing data and realized the finding could have immediate consequences for patients. He also explains why the first generation of JAK2-targeted drugs, while helpful for reducing symptoms and improving outcomes, generally does not eliminate the underlying cancer — and why researchers are now working on new approaches that may target the disease more effectively. The conversation then expands to a bigger question: how much more is there still to learn from the genetic information contained in cancer cells? Levine describes how studying DNA from increasingly large numbers of patients continues to reveal unexpected patterns, new biological pathways, and possible treatment targets. He also discusses the growing importance of combining DNA data with other information, including how a cancer responds to treatment, how it changes over time, and what doctors can see in blood tests or under the microscope. Thank you for listening! Call to action: If you enjoy The Future of Medicine, subscribe for more conversations with leading scientists shaping the next era of healthcare. Please rate and review the podcast to help others discover these important discussions. Share with friends and colleagues who are curious about how science becomes medicine.

Clarence Braddock, MD, MPH, a nationally recognized medical educator and former Executive Vice Dean and Vice Dean for Education in the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, joins Euan Ashley on The Future of Medicine to explore how we train future doctors, why changing long-established systems can be so difficult, and what leaders often misunderstand about creating meaningful change. Braddock describes how experiences ranging from serving as a physician in the Navy to teaching trainees and studying conversations between doctors and patients shaped his thinking about what medicine asks of both clinicians and educators. The conversation then turns to medical education itself. Braddock challenges assumptions that have shaped medical school for generations and discusses newer approaches, including simulation-based learning and a growing shift away from expecting physicians to function as encyclopedias of medical knowledge. As AI and other technologies increasingly bring information directly to the point of care, he argues that tomorrow’s doctors will need to become skilled and responsible consumers of knowledge. Braddock and Ashley also examine the human side of organizational change. Drawing on lessons from major curriculum reforms, Braddock explains why the process of change can strain colleagues and institutions, and ultimately, why he concluded that how change happens can matter even more than what is changed. Together, they discuss shared decision-making, the evolution of medical training, AI in medicine and what medical schools should be preparing their graduates to do in the decades ahead. Thank you for listening! Call to action: If you enjoy The Future of Medicine, subscribe for more conversations with leading scientists shaping the next era of healthcare. Please rate and review the podcast to help others discover these important discussions. Share with friends and colleagues who are curious about how science becomes medicine.

What can fasting teach us about aging, and can the body receive some of its benefits without giving up food completely? Valter Longo, PhD, professor of gerontology and biological sciences, director of the Longevity Institute at the University of Southern California, and author of The Longevity Diet, joins The Future of Medicine for a wide-ranging conversation about nutrition, fasting-mimicking diets, protein, chronic disease, and the biology of longevity. In this episode, Longo traces an unconventional path from aspiring rock guitarist to longevity scientist. He describes how the early death of his grandfather and the striking differences he observed between relatives living in Italy and Chicago helped shape his interest in why people age and develop disease. Longo explains how experiments in yeast led his laboratory to study the effects of sugar, amino acids, and fasting on lifespan. He also discusses the development of the fasting-mimicking diet, a five-day, low-sugar, and low-protein eating plan designed to trigger some of the biological responses associated with fasting while still providing food. The conversation also examines caloric restriction, time-restricted eating, breakfast skipping, and today’s enthusiasm for high-protein diets. Longo distinguishes between short-term changes in weight or metabolic markers and the much harder question of whether a dietary practice improves long-term health.  Together, Longo and host Euan Ashley explore what scientists are learning about nutrition and healthy aging, why extreme approaches can carry tradeoffs, and how carefully designed dietary interventions might one day become part of preventive medicine. Thank you for listening! Call to action: If you enjoy The Future of Medicine, subscribe for more conversations with leading scientists shaping the next era of healthcare. Please rate and review the podcast to help others discover these important discussions. Share with friends and colleagues who are curious about how science becomes medicine.

How can medical AI help doctors make better decisions while preserving clinical judgment and human connection? Travis Zack, MD, PhD, an oncologist, researcher, and chief medical officer of OpenEvidence, joins The Future of Medicine to discuss the future of AI in clinical care. OpenEvidence is an AI-powered platform that helps clinicians find and understand information from peer-reviewed medical research, clinical guidelines, and other trusted sources. In this episode, Zack explains why reliable medical AI depends not only on avoiding fabricated information, but also on finding the right evidence for each clinical question. He discusses how OpenEvidence is designed to bring relevant research into physicians’ workflows while leaving the final decision in the clinician’s hands. The conversation also looks ahead to more proactive forms of care. Zack describes a future in which AI could identify meaningful changes in a patient’s health or in the medical literature and alert physicians before the patient’s next scheduled visit.  Zack also shares his research using language from medical records to improve cancer care. By analyzing how patients describe symptoms such as chemotherapy-related nerve damage, researchers may be able to better predict when treatment should be adjusted to prevent lasting side effects. Together, Dr. Zack and host Errol Ozdalga, MD, explore whether reliance on AI could weaken physicians’ skills, how medical education may change, and why human reasoning and empathy will remain essential to medicine. They also consider a central question for health systems: Will AI be used only to increase efficiency, or will some of the time it saves be returned to patients? Thank you for listening.  Call to action: If you enjoy The Future of Medicine, subscribe for more conversations with leading scientists shaping the next era of healthcare. Please rate and review the podcast to help others discover these important discussions. Share with friends and colleagues who are curious about how science becomes medicine.

Michael Osterholm, PhD, MPH, one of the world’s leading experts on infectious disease threats and pandemic preparedness, joins The Future of Medicine for a wide-ranging conversation about COVID-19, vaccines, airborne transmission, public trust, and what the world must do before the next pandemic arrives. Osterholm is director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota and has spent nearly five decades investigating outbreaks and advising public officials. In this episode, he reflects on the experiences that first inspired him to become a “medical detective,” including an unusual outbreak linked to thyroid tissue entering the food supply through hamburger meat. The conversation then turns to COVID-19 and the lessons that remain unresolved. Osterholm explains why he believes the United States needs an independent, nonpartisan review of its pandemic response—one focused on identifying what worked, what failed, and how changing evidence shaped decisions about schools, hospitals, masking, and public gatherings. “The pandemic clock is ticking,” Osterholm says. “We just don’t know what time it is.” He also discusses why public health guidance must be able to evolve. As Osterholm puts it, “Science is not truth. Science is the pursuit of truth.” New variants, new evidence, and changing risks do not necessarily mean earlier recommendations were made in bad faith; they reflect the reality of responding to a rapidly developing threat. Watch the full conversation to learn what COVID-19 revealed about the strengths and weaknesses of modern public health—and how science, vaccines, and more honest communication could help the world respond differently next time. Thank you for listening! Call to action: If you enjoy The Future of Medicine, subscribe for more conversations with leading scientists shaping the next era of healthcare. Please rate and review the podcast to help others discover these important discussions. Share with friends and colleagues who are curious about how science becomes medicine.

Dr. Michelle Mello, professor of law and health policy at Stanford University, joins The Future of Medicine for a conversation about one of the most frustrating and consequential parts of American healthcare: prior authorization. For many patients and clinicians, prior authorization is the process behind the letter saying an insurance company will not cover a medication, procedure, or service unless additional criteria are met. As Dr. Mello explains, this system is already difficult, time-consuming, and often painful for patients and care teams. Now, artificial intelligence is beginning to reshape how these decisions are made. In this episode, Dr. Mello and host Dr. Euan Ashley discuss how insurers and healthcare systems are using AI in prior authorization, billing, appeals, and utilization management. AI may be able to speed up routine approvals and reduce administrative burden, but it also raises serious questions about transparency, bias, accountability, and whether patients are being protected from wrongful denials. The conversation explores what Dr. Mello describes as an “arms race” of AI systems, with insurers using technology to evaluate requests and health systems using their own tools to identify denials most likely to be overturned and draft stronger appeal letters. She also explains why appeals matter: a large share of insurance denials can be reversed, but many health systems do not have enough staff to appeal every case. Together, Dr. Mello and Dr. Ashley consider what responsible AI governance should look like in healthcare, why simply banning AI may not solve the underlying problems, and how AI could be used in ways that support patients, clinicians, and fairer decision-making. They also discuss the need for greater transparency from insurers, the role of private governance, and why academic medical centers have a responsibility to help shape the safe and ethical use of these tools. Thank you for listening! Call to action: If you enjoy The Future of Medicine, subscribe for more conversations with leading scientists shaping the next era of healthcare. Please rate and review the podcast to help others discover these important discussions. Share with friends and colleagues who are curious about how science becomes medicine.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and one of the nation’s most influential public health leaders, joins Stanford Department of Medicine’s The Future of Medicine for a conversation with Dr. Euan Ashley about science, service, public trust, and the future of public health. In this episode, Dr. Fauci reflects on his early career as a physician-scientist, the first years of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, the creation of PEPFAR, the scientific foundation behind COVID-19 vaccines, and the challenge of communicating evidence in an era of misinformation. Together, Dr. Fauci and Dr. Ashley discuss what it means to lead with integrity when the stakes are high, and why long-term investment in science remains essential for pandemic preparedness and medical progress. Thank you for listening! Call to action: If you enjoy The Future of Medicine, subscribe for more conversations with leading scientists shaping the next era of healthcare. Please rate and review the podcast to help others discover these important discussions. Share with friends and colleagues who are curious about how science becomes medicine.

Dr. Christopher J.L. Murray — health economist at the University of Washington, physician, and founder of the Global Burden of Disease framework — joins The Future of Medicine to discuss what decades of data across 204 countries reveal about human health, and where it's headed by the end of this century. Dr. Murray's Global Burden of Disease project involves 19,000 collaborators in 167 countries and has produced more than 5,000 published papers. In this conversation, he explains what that data shows: remarkable progress on childhood infectious disease and HIV, a profound global shift toward chronic conditions like heart disease, diabetes, and chronic kidney disease, and a mental health crisis — rising steadily for over a decade — whose causes experts still actively debate. He also discusses why the widely circulated claim that American obesity rates had flattened is likely a statistical artifact, what the data projects for the coming decades (including diabetes overtaking heart disease as the world's leading cause of death), and the compounding health crisis facing the Sahel as population growth, poverty, and climate change converge. The conversation closes on the Lancet Commission on existential and catastrophic risks — a project Dr. Murray helped initiate that takes a data-driven look at long-range threats to humanity, from AI and synthetic biology to nuclear risk, out to 2100. It's a rare conversation that takes a long, honest look at the future — and doesn't flinch. Thank you for listening! Call to action: If you enjoy The Future of Medicine, subscribe for more conversations with leading scientists shaping the next era of healthcare. Please rate and review the podcast to help others discover these important discussions. Share with friends and colleagues who are curious about how science becomes medicine.

Dr. Samuel Klein, Division Chief and William H. Danforth Professor of Medicine and Nutritional Science at Washington University Medicine, joins The Future of Medicine for a conversation about obesity, metabolism, insulin resistance, and the revolution sparked by GLP-1 medications like Ozempic. In this episode, Dr. Klein explains why obesity is far more biologically complex than many people realize — and why some individuals with obesity remain metabolically healthy while others develop diabetes, heart disease, and fatty liver disease. The conversation explores how fat functions not only as stored energy, but also as an active endocrine organ that communicates with the rest of the body through hormones and inflammatory signaling molecules. Dr. Klein discusses visceral fat, insulin resistance, inflammation, and why procedures like liposuction do not produce the same metabolic benefits as weight loss through diet, surgery, or GLP-1 medications. Dr. Klein also reflects on the unexpected rise of GLP-1 therapies, including how medications originally developed for diabetes transformed obesity treatment and may hold broader implications for cardiovascular disease, addiction, and other chronic conditions. Together, Dr. Klein and Euan Ashley discuss the future of metabolic medicine, precision approaches to obesity care, and why understanding metabolism may reshape the future of healthcare itself. Thank you for listening! Call to action: If you enjoy The Future of Medicine, subscribe for more conversations with leading scientists shaping the next era of healthcare. Please rate and review the podcast to help others discover these important discussions. Share with friends and colleagues who are curious about how science becomes medicine.

In this episode of the Future of Medicine, we welcome Dr. Robert Wachter, physician, author, and chair of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, for a conversation about artificial intelligence, healthcare, and the future of medicine. Dr. Wachter reflects on how the digitization of healthcare reshaped modern medicine — and why many of the frustrations clinicians experience today, from burnout to endless documentation, emerged during the first wave of the electronic health record revolution. The conversation explores why large language models like ChatGPT feel fundamentally different from earlier healthcare technologies, and how AI may finally help medicine move beyond the limitations of current electronic health records. Dr. Wachter discusses the promise of AI scribes, clinical copilots, patient-facing tools, and digital assistants that can help clinicians synthesize information, reduce administrative burden, and improve access to expertise. At the same time, he examines the risks of overtrusting AI systems, including hallucinations, deskilling, automation bias, and the challenge of keeping humans engaged when machines are right most (but not all) of the time. Together, Dr. Wachter and Euan Ashley discuss empathy, medical education, patient trust, and what happens when technology begins to act increasingly human. Looking ahead, Dr. Wachter shares why he remains optimistic about AI in medicine — and why the next few years could fundamentally reshape how healthcare is delivered around the world. Thank you for listening! Call to action: If you enjoy The Future of Medicine, subscribe for more conversations with leading scientists shaping the next era of healthcare. Please rate and review the podcast to help others discover these important discussions. Share with friends and colleagues who are curious about how science becomes medicine.