I have a podcast. It is called A Better Question, it is made with the Texas Medical Association, and this is the short explanation of why it exists.
Psychiatrist Thomas Kim, MD, engages his guests in discussions about the challenges of patient care amid an unprecedented volume of medical information from social media, peer networks, and artificial intelligence.
The problem I keep running into
Every person who comes to see me has already done some reading. That is not a complaint — it is a good thing, mostly. But the volume has changed. A patient arrives having absorbed something from a forum, something from a friend who is also a nurse, something from a video, and increasingly something from a chatbot that answered with total confidence and no idea who they are.
The instinct in medicine is to respond by correcting. Sorting the good information from the bad, one claim at a time. I have done plenty of that and it does not work very well. You cannot out-argue the internet, and trying tends to damage the thing that actually helps, which is trust.
So: a better question
What I have found more useful is to change the question. Debates get stuck because of how they are framed, not because the people in them are stupid. Reframing is most of my job as a psychiatrist, and it turns out to be most of the job here too. Ask a better question and the answer often becomes obvious — or at least becomes something two people can look at together.
That is the whole format. I bring on physicians and other guests, and I push them to pose more rigorous questions in pursuit of evidence-based insight. Not to perform certainty. To get somewhere.
The practical details
The show is produced by the Texas Medical Association, funded by a grant from the American Medical Association, and comes out every other week. I sit on the TMA Council on Science and Public Health, which is how it came about.
You can listen on Apple Podcasts or PodBean, and every episode is collected on the TMA site.
The content of the podcast does not constitute medical advice, and does not substitute for a clinician's own professional judgment.