Starting in the colonial period and crystalizing during the Republican Period, American doctors differentiated themselves from their European colleagues and from non-traditional healers by instituting a medical-racial script. We'll discuss what the script is, how it helped American healthcare and its white male doctors to establish legitimacy, and the toll it took on the African American community. The script will be woven throughout this course. Nothing more united white male doctors, helped grow the American medical infrastructure and academic foundation, and imprinted on American medicine its enduring stamp than the script. As we study the nidus of the AMA in the mid 1800's, the Progressive rise of orthodox medicine in the early 20th century, and the consolidation of modern orthodoxy, the script emerges as an often covert but powerful catalyst to the health care system we know today.

I will be presenting a series of lectures on the history of American Health Care through 1920. These lectures are interesting in how they lay a framework for the system we have today. The first lecture explores our colonial origins. How did the American healthcare system and its doctors change from their European mentors? What about the American landscape fermented something unique in the colonies regarding the practice and study of medicine?

Antibiotics are one of the most impactful medical discoveries in the past century. Along with sanitation and sterile technique, antibiotics have led to a dramatic increase in life expectancy. However, now we have moved down a different road. We are over-using antibiotics, killing our gut bacteria, causing resistance leading to superbugs that can't be stopped by any of our technology. The judicious use of antibiotics is lifesaving. The overuse of antibiotics is just the opposite. Hear the two docs talk about this important issue!

Drug companies, the media, physician groups, and patient advocacy groups, month others, have convinced the American public that the key to health is more testing, more doctor visits, more drugs, more procedures. We have invented more diseases and diagnoses the past decade, scared more patients into falling prey to "necessary and lifesaving" interventions for conditions that are more phantom than real, and yet no one is talking about what really matters. In areas of the world where people live far longer than we do, and have far less chronic illness, they don't see doctors, take drugs, or suffer from fabricated diseases. They eat well, exercise, and have strong communities, all of which contribute to their better health. While our system is excellent at fixing urgent problems such as a ruptured appendix or heart attack, it is awful at keeping us healthy, largely because it has spread a false gospel that people are sick when they're not and that they need more of what our system has to offer, all of which contributes to the $5 trillion healthcare cost and simultaneous drop in life expectancy. Today Alan and Andy discuss what really matters! And it's not what your doctor will likely tell you!

Today we talk about the impact of drug advertisement on both patient and physician decision making. These companies know that a huge investment in ads will result in more prescriptions, one of many ways Big Pharma infiltrates so many aspects of the medical industrial complex.

With the opioid crisis looming on the horizon always, the question comes as to how to treat pain. So many medicines have side effects an are overall dangerous. Some work about as much as placebo. We'll talk about medicines, but then discuss better ways to deal with pain, from mindfulness to exercises to other non-medical modalities. Pain is real, but pain should not be an invitation to be smothers by medicines and the medical system. We will help you through this!

We have always known about basic cancer screening tests, like mammography and colonoscopy. But we have expanded the universe of cancer screening, relying on scans, blood tests, and genetic testing. As we screen more, we find more, we treat more, but are we saving lives? Much of the screening we do has not been shown to save as many lives as advertised, if any at all once the complications of the screening are taken into consideration. A new study in JAMA questions some newer screening tests, and past studies in Archives of Internal Medicine have found that overall most screening is not life saving. The new screens are even more perilous, introducing increased uncertainty to an already uncertain field. It's interesting to read Malcom Gladwell's take on screening in the New Yorker, helping us to learn about the promise and perils of basic screening. Alan and Andy will tackle this issue through the lens of their experience and a whole lot of data!

Many books and studies have pointed to the fact that we are a nation swimming in mental health diagnoses and drugs. The DSM--the bible of mental health diagnoses--has exploded the numbers of mental health sicknesses you may have, and for every sickness there is a drug. Both the DSM and the American College of Psychiatry are heavily funded by the drug industry, and their recommendations have led to a skyrocketing of drugs for the brain, without any reduction in depression, anxiety, hyperactivity, or any other common ailment; in fact, they are all on the rise. We are exposing kids and elders to these drugs which are outright dangerous. We'll talk about this disturbing trend and highlight some books and articles that may be helpful.