Healing Through History
Season 1
by Shaan Bhandarkar
1/18/23. - The recent COVID-19 pandemic has further illuminated the importance of end-of-life care discussions between physicians and patients' families, with particular considerations toward the balance of the medical and deeply personal dimensions of the event of death. To begin to reconcile the question of how physicians should confront the concept of death in medicine, I review important end-of-life vocabulary as well as the history of right-to-die movements including Dr. Jack Kevorkian's advocacy and the case of Teri Schiavo.
1/11/23 - A historical predecessor to the specialties of neurology and psychiatry, phrenology is a pseudoscience that acquired a massive following in antebellum America for its appealing scientific racism. Music by Bensound
There is no doubt that insulin is a life-saving drug for millions of diabetics. But we have to ask at what cost (quite literally) its discovery and implementation in America has come at. In this episode, we uncover the hidden history of insulin shock therapy in American psychiatry and modern issues with the affordability of insulin medication.