This Podcast Will Kill You

The TPWKY book club is back in action, and we’re thrilled to be starting this season’s reading journey with Dr. Deirdre Cooper Owens, reproductive rights advocate, Associate Professor in the University of Connecticut history department, and award-winning author of Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology...

In many ways, this week’s episode on myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) is a companion piece to last week’s episode on Long Covid. The two share many similarities: a wide range of debilitating symptoms lingering long after infection, an illness which can transform from day to day or week to week, dismissal and downplaying by the medical community, a big question mark under “pathophysiological cause”, and so many others...

We’re back with our season 7 premiere, and we’re kicking things off with a topic that we’ve wanted to cover for a long time, even if the topic itself hasn’t been around all that long. That’s right, we’re taking on Long Covid. When SARS-CoV-2 began making its way around the world in 2020, it was thought to cause a mild illness in most people, with complete recovery a couple of weeks after first getting infected...

For our season 6 finale, we’re spending some time with menopause. How many nicknames can you think of for menstruation? Quite a few, I’m sure. “That time of the month”, “Aunt Flo”, “the red wave”, “period”, the list goes on. But what about euphemisms for menopause? We’ve got “the change” or “change of life”, “climacteric”, and… that’s it? There may be more out there, but the comparison is revealing...

Raise your hand if you or someone you know has had their tonsils removed. If your hand is sky-high, there’s a pretty good chance that you (or that person you know) are from the US and were born before 1980. Of course, maybe that’s not the case, but tonsillectomies certainly fit in the category of 20th-century fads, along with Tamagotchis and the Atkins diet...

This one’s not just for the dogs. It’s also for the cats, the raccoons, the wax moths, the birds, the mice, and so many other critters. Oh, and of course the humans. Even though most of us may be familiar with parvovirus through our canine friends, the world of parvoviruses is much larger...

Often, the more we learn about a disease, the more we learn about ourselves and the world around us. The story of the genetic disorder osteogenesis imperfecta (OI), colloquially known as brittle bone disease, illustrates this perfectly. As researchers continue to uncover the mechanisms responsible for OI development and progression, the better we understand the varied and crucial roles collagen plays in all parts of our biology...

Parkinson’s is a disease of many dimensions...

In the 16th century, a series of deadly epidemics swept through much of the region of Mesoamerica known as the Aztec Empire, killing untold millions. By the start of the first of these epidemics, the area had become woefully accustomed to devasting epidemic disease, as the Spanish conquistadors had introduced smallpox, measles, typhus, and influenza, among other infections...

With a history extending back millennia, with a biology that leads to permanent disability for tens of millions of people globally, and with a bacterial endosymbiont that may prove to be its Achilles heel, the filarial parasites that cause lymphatic filariasis are quite the complex creatures. In this episode, we explore the intricacies of this neglected tropical disease - also known as elephantiasis...