Law professor Rebecca Allensworth has been studying another realm of civic-minded individuals charged with helping society function: medical licensing boards. They’re mostly doctors deciding whether other doctors should be allowed to keep practicing medicine.

We meet the doctors. Rana Awdish spends hours of each day walking the floors of the ICU checking in on her co-workers, which means that maybe more than any single person in the hospital she knows best what the staff has been going through at each stage of this pandemic. One doctor that has deep ties to Detroit is Geneva Tatem.

An endocrinologist wrote the show about a wave of parents coming to her to treat their short (but otherwise healthy) children with human growth hormone. Contributor Scott Brown investigates.

When Jessica Hopper was inappropriately groped by an anesthesiologist, during labor, she tries to out him that same day, to a roomful of hospital staff who don’t believe her. That sets her on a many year mission to get someone to take up her cause.

Host Ira Glass plays a strange voicemail left by a 96-year-old surgeon about a letter that was written five decades ago. (6 minutes)

When health care premiums went up in New York State, a bunch of people got mad and wrote letters to the state.

A doctor tries to investigate something that horrifies her, but people tell her it’s not worth thinking about. It’s the way it’s done.

Medical Examiner D.J. Drakovic, in Pontiac Michigan, explains how every crime scene is like a novel.

Eileen was desperate to help her son, and the only way to do it involved a perverse legal loophole. But should she dare try it? Shannon Heffernan tells the story. She’s a reporter at WBEZ Chicago.

Host Ira Glass tells the story of what might be one of the most daring surgeries ever performed.

Donald Trump has promised to get rid of Obamacare. Producer David Kestenbaum talks with someone who’d lose their insurance.


When Mariya Karimjee was little, members of her family made a decision that would affect her entire life. Years later, she wants to know why.

Sigrid Fry-Revere was fed up with the kidney donation system in this country. So, she went somewhere that seemed to be doing a better job with its transplant patients— possibly one of the last places you’d expect.

In this act, writer Michael Kinsley describes harnessing the power of his own mind to deal with his Parkinson's diagnosis. Michael Kinsley is a contributing columnist for Vanity Fair and the Washington Post.

Journalist David Epstein tells the story of Jill Viles, who has muscular dystrophy and can’t walk. But she believes that she somehow has same condition as one of the best hurdlers in the world, Priscilla Lopes-Schliep.

On September 29th a medical researcher in Philadelphia fired off a simple, well-meaning tweet, and then barely thought twice about it. Little did she know that by doing that, she was perpetrating covert propaganda on behalf of the U.S. government.

Producer Nancy Updike takes some personal questions about death and dying to a place where they're happening all the time.

Alex Blumberg talks to Shane Dubow about a time decades ago, when Shane went sea kayaking and camping with his friends on the beach in Baja California, Mexico. When Shane’s neck stiffens up on him, he finds himself looking for an unlikely chiropractor, in the middle of nowhere.

Deborah Lott comes from a family that obsesses over health. And when they all get together for dinner, their banter goes on overdrive.

Host Ira Glass tells the story of Sarah Erush, a pharmacist at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. She was contacted by the Food and Drug Administration and encouraged to examine cases of acetaminophen overdose at her hospital.