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For thousands of years, the value of medical treatments of the day was disparaged with some frequency mostly in the form of quips from prominent people in health care, the arts, government, and social commentary. More recently, the quips evolved into formal philosophical arguments conveying a view that the likelihood of any new medical treatment becoming a major breakthrough is low. The term “medical nihilism” is now associated with this view.

In this episode, with the physician and philosopher Dr. Ross Upshur, we cover medical nihilism conceptually and assess how well the term fits the arguments underlying it. We discuss some of the components comprising the arguments, which are generally real, and how they can contribute to medical nihilism, and validate the uncertainty existing in medicine for some. We talk further about how to accept this uncertainty and manage our health care decisions as providers, educators, and consumers without falling into the despair of medical nihilism.

Note that throughout the episode, we mention Jacob Stegenga and his book, Medical Nihilism, and also Jonathan Fuller and his book, The New Modern Medicine. We mention Ross Upshur and Maya Goldenberg’s article, Countering Medical Nihilism by Reconnecting Facts and Values in Studies in History and Philosophy of Science. Citations for each are listed below.

Primary Sources

Upshur, Ross, and Maya J. Goldenberg. "Countering Medical Nihilism by Reconnecting Facts and Values." Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A, vol. 84, Dec. 2020, pp. 75–83. (Available as pdf at Maya Goldenberg’s website.)

Stegenga, Jacob. Medical Nihilism. Oxford University Press, 2020.

Fuller, Jonathan. The New Modern Medicine: Disease, Evidence, and Epidemiological Medicine. Oxford University Press, 2025, academic.oup.com/book/61541. (Available as open access at Oxford University Press.)

Links

Biosketch for our guest Dr. Ross Upshur

FDA list of recalls, market withdrawals, and safety alerts.

Attributions

For audio clip:

From Atonement by Ian McEwan, read by Jill Tanner. Audiobook. [Recorded Books, 2002]. Accessed via Spotify.

Episode image:

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr

Credit: Oliver Wendell Holmes. Colour lithograph by Sir L. Ward [Spy], 1886. Wellcome Collection. Source: Wellcome Collection. License: Public Domain Mark.

Please send us comments, recommendations, and questions to fan mail link above, or email to: russell.teagarden@gmail.com.

Thanks to Dr. Ross Upshur for his interesting and insightful contributions to this episode.

Thanks for listening, and please subscribe to The Clinic & The Person wherever you get your podcasts.

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The diagnosis and clinical management of various mental disorders are aided by knowing the predisposing, precipitating, and perpetuating factors in a given case. Both the themed album and the full-length movie of Pink Floyd’s, The Wall, depict these factors in the course of the main character’s—"Pink’s”— mental health deterioration through music and film. In this episode, we draw from selected songs on the album and from selected scenes in the movie connecting the three factors with particular behaviors Pink manifests. In the process, we show how they are used in medical education and training in real time.

Joining us is Dr. Anthony Tobia, who is the campus chair in the Department of Psychiatry at the Rutgers School of Medicine and is also the Service Chief of Psychiatry at Robert Wood Johnson Barnabas Health in New Brunswick, NJ. Dr. Tobia is certified by the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology and is certified in internal medicine and psychosomatic medicine. He also holds a secondary appointment in the Division of General Internal Medicine at Rutgers. Dr. Tobia is the Director of Graduate and Interprofessional Education at Rutgers University Behavioral Health and has received the Outstanding Clinical Faculty Member Excellence Award in 2018 and 2019. He is an active contributor to the medical literature with publications, reviews, and abstracts. Dr. Tobia’s educational interests include the merging of popular culture and the field of behavioral medicine, which is evident from this episode and from his previous appearance on the podcast episode featuring The Who’s Tommy. Along with Dr. Tobia for this episode is Kevin Frederiks, who at the time of recording, was a fourth-year medical student at Rutgers.

Citations

For the recorded album: Pink Floyd. The Wall. Columbia Records, 1979.

For the movie: Parker, Alan, director. Pink Floyd The Wall. MGM, 1982.

Link

The movie, The Wall, is available on YouTube here.

Please send us comments, recommendations, and questions to this text link, or email to: russell.teagarden@gmail.com.

Thanks to Dr. Anthony Tobia and (by now) Dr. Kevin Fredriks for their interesting and insightful contributions to this episode.

Thanks for listening, and please subscribe to The Clinic & The Person wherever you get your podcasts.

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The Clinic & Person podcast returns, and this short episode recounts the reasons for its return and what can be expected.

The general objectives of the podcast remain the same in that we will still draw from certain works such as literature, art, film, music, etc., but source content will also come from certain ideas or disciplines such as philosophy, ethics, sociology, economics, history, and the like. We talk briefly about episodes we have in the works, which derive from these and various other content sources

You can see the list of our previous 30 episodes here. You can also listen to them from there or from many established podcast providers. They can also be accessed at medhum.org, where there is also a curated forum of reviews, interviews, and opinion pieces on the types of subject this podcast considers in addition to many more.

Get in touch

We would love to hear from you with any suggestions, comments, or questions. You can use the “Send us Fan Mail” link above, or to russell.teagarden@gmail.com

We hope you will join us again for new episodes, follow us where you get your podcasts, and tell all your friends and colleagues about us. Our next episode will be posted soon.

Episode image: One Open Window, Chris Downer (source: Wikicommons)