The Paradocs Podcast with Eric Larson

Latest Episodes:

Episode 157: The Testing Industrial Complex Strikes Again with Dr. Basavana Goudra Jan 15, 2022

Show notes

Whether you are in medicine or not, you are affected by the board certification and board recertification process. The certification and recertification process is not only expensive but also stressful contributing to burnout with physicians. After completing a specialty residency training, candidates for board certification have to jump through a number of tests to become board certified. These include a written exam and then possibly other components like oral exam, case review or something else. That something else is the subject for today's show - the Objective Structural Clinical Examination (OSCE).

What is the OSCE?

The OSCE is a new addition to the board certification process by the American Board of Anesthesiology whereby the trainees are subjected to various tests with 'standardized actors' to see how they can perform various personal skills like informed consent, canceling cases with surgeons, etc. This type of extremely subjective exam (despite the title) is ripe for interpretation that puts residents at the whim of cultural, personal, and acting disadvantages. The further question would be does this actually add anything to the skills of the physician?

What do Residents (And Program Directors) Think of OSCE?

The study conducted by Dr. Goudra looked at what residents thought of the value of OSCE was not good. In fact, 90% felt that it was a useless component that provided no benefit to determining whether someone was a good physician or better clinician. A previous study conducted by the ABA actually found that a majority of program directors also thought the exam was not worthwhile - yet it was implemented and still exists. This is about as good an example of the specialty boards' complete lack of accountability and focus on revenue. We've talked about all their problems with recertification here, here, and here.

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Episode 156: Can We Repair Trust in Public Health after COVID with Dr. Aaron Pomerantz Dec 24, 2021

Show notes

Throughout the pandemic that has raged over the past two years, the press and public have leaned heavily on experts on navigating our way through uncertainty. The most prominent member of this class of public health experts is Dr. Anthony Fauci who is essentially the face of the pandemic response and sets policy used by most state, county, and local public health officials. Unfortunately, through a number of missteps and poor communication techniques, the trust in Dr. Fauci and public health in general have suffered tremendously this year.

How Mistrust Develops

Dr. Pomerantz points out that the loss of trust in public authorities is multifactorial and influenced by things like over reassuring the public, panicking and overreacting, flubbing the rationale for lockdowns, abandoning the flatten the curve plan, and insisting that public health be in charge of many aspects of the pandemic response. All of these points were areas where the public health authorities made mistakes leading to a continued erosion of trust in their abilities, motivations, and perception of expertise.

Can We Rebuild Lost Trust in Public Institutions?

Losing trust in public health, or the health system in general, is not one that should be viewed lightly. It can have profound long lasting effects. This is exhibited by the research from Dr. Sara Lowes (from episode 120) where she found distrust towards modern medicine generations after unconsented medical experimentation in parts of previous colonial France (Congo). What is amazing is the passing down of distrust towards medical authorities for years despite obvious advances in medicine and ethics.

Unfortunately, for trust to be rebuilt there must be a tremendous effort put in by public health authorities. This begins with a big mea culpa for all their mistakes in messaging and getting things wrong (like mask flip flops, vaccines stopping transmission, etc.) and also the endless shaming and 'othering' of those who run contrary to their edicts. The most critical aspect of all of this is to bring back the part of the public that has been pushed out of the group by showing empathy. Unless that is done - and soon - we risk delegitimizing public health for generations.

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Episode 155: DonorSee is a New Innovative Way to Run a Charity with Gret Glyer Dec 16, 2021

Show notes

DonorSee is a New Innovative Way to Run a Charity with Gret Glyer

When Gret Glyer decided to search for meaning in his life after a short stint in corporate America by flying on a whim to Malawi, he never expected that in less than ten years he would create and run a multi-million dollar global charity. In his search for a fulfilling life, Gret found much more - an innovative way to raise money for those in need.

Using Video to Fundraise

Soon after arriving in Malawi - one of the poorest countries on Earth - Gret recognized the tremendous material needs for so many and he sought to find ways to help. He began by blogging and asking for help but found that it didn't resonate the way he had hoped. So on a whim, he figured he would harness the power of video and document those in need and then follow up after people had provided the financial support. He was struck by how capturing the need and success in video brought people the personal connection they rarely got with traditional charitable organizations was so powerful.

Later, he harnessed the powerful draw of video to launch an incredibly ambitious project to build a self-sustaining all girls high school - in 12 weeks.

Building a School

Prior to crowdfunding for the school, all of the projects Gret had done were small in their scope. He had never embarked upon a project this ambitious He would need to raise a little over $100,000 in just twelve weeks in order for the school to open in time for school that year. Perhaps the most critical steps of this project were that there was overwhelming support for the creation of the school within the village and he had a local partner who had a plan. Her plan was not just to build a school but how to fund it, staff it, and educate girls in a self-sustaining manner throughout the years.

So he then embarked on a fund raising plan to document by video weekly laying out the vision and then the construction of the school as they raised the money. Through this concept Gret pulled all the donors along the way to show exactly where their money went and the progress it made. Amazingly, his efforts raised the necessary capital to complete the school and it opened that fall in 2016. To this day, the Sunshine Academy is doing great graduating girls in a country where girls almost never receive secondary education.

DonorSee is Born

With this proof of concept, Gret launched DonorSee a few weeks later where people anywhere in the world can donate directly to a project and then receive a video update afterwards where they are usually personally thanked by the receiver of the funds. Projects range from buying a goat, paying for simple medical expenses, building homes, and paying for education. You can either pick out individual projects or donate monthly to random projects. No matter how you choose to contribute, you receive video feedback of the impact of your donations.

Relief Vs. Development

An important aspect to charity is being mindful of the impact that the donations have. We must be careful to separate relief from development. Sometimes, an individual just needs relief like after a natural disaster or medical emergency. But we must be careful to not provide services and goods that result in preventing the local economy from developing properly. That is why it is so important to have people on the ground with local knowledge to vet projects and makes sure the relief allows for human flourishing and not dependence.

To that end, Gret and his partners in Malawi started a very ambitious project to build a self sustaining STEM school to train the next generation of scientists, doctors, and technicians to help move Malawi into the 21st century and serve as a bright example for other African countries.

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Episode 154: Rethinking Vaccine Mandates and the Omicron Variant with Dr. Monica Gandhi Dec 09, 2021

Show notes

Vaccine mandates, mask mandates, boosters, and variants have been a constant source of debate and controversy with the pandemic. My guest today is Dr. Monica Gandhi, an expert in immunology and infectious disease who runs the HIV clinic at UCSF. She has been a fairly prominent voice in support of the mask and vaccine mandates in her home state of California and city of San Francisco. She returns from her visit in June where we discussed the delta variant for SARS-CoV-2 in which she guessed that it wouldn't evade the vaccine or prior infection (spoiler alert: she was right).

Do Vaccine Mandates Make Sense?

Dr. Gandhi is the first to point out how she has been very supportive of mandating vaccines in the general population and specifically for health care workers. She has written extensively in many local and national outlets about the case for vaccines to reduce transmission of SARS-CoV-2 and hospitalizations. However, she has begun to rethink her support for these draconian measures because of a number of reasons:

It can cause a problem with mental health in those who are restricted from interacting normally with society.
It erodes the public trust in public health officials and well established measures.
Even when vaccinated and boosted, those individuals can still become infected and infect others limiting its value as a way to stop transmission in its tracks.
The political payback for politicians who support these measures may be significant at the ballot box.

Are there Good Therapeutics Coming Out?

One of the more exciting developments out of the pandemic is the emergence of designer drugs for this coronavirus. The newest therapeutic drugs are protease inhibitors which can be developed with a specific virus in mind. These drugs work by blocking the ability of the virus to successfully hijack your cell's ribosomes to create more viruses. Molnupiravir has been approved by the FDA but hasn't been shown to be all that effective because it was not designed with this specific virus. However, the new drug Paxlovid has show extremely high efficacy approaching levels seen with the vaccine around 90%. The advantage of these drugs is obviously that as soon as you show signs of symptoms it can arrest the extent of the infection and prevent hospitalizations and worse outcomes.

Is Omicron Worth Worrying About?

Finally, the question of whether the new SARS-CoV-2 variant, Omicron, is one that should concern us was posed to Dr. Gandhi. Much like the Delta variant, she is very confident that those who have gotten an adequate immune response from vaccination or prior native infection should be well protected from serious harm. Additionally, reports out of South Africa and elsewhere have seemed to show that this variant causes a much more benign infection. She believes it is possible that this variant - if it is truly more infectious but benign - might be the world's ticket out of this awful pandemic.

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Episode 153: Crowd Health is Go Fund Me for Health Care on Nitro with CEO Andy Schoonover Dec 02, 2021

Show notes

What happens when you take Go Fund Me and put it into an ecosystem of likeminded folks who want to build a community to care for each other's health care expenses? You get Crowd Health which draws upon some of the concepts of crowd funding for one time health care expenses within its community. By taking people from all over the country and putting them into a community where there are expectations of caring for others, Crowd Health offers a solution to paying for health care expenses without breaking the bank.

Is Crowd Health Insurance?

If you've been paying attention to the US health care space for the last, well, forever, then you know that it is expensive and keeps getting more so. People stay at jobs they don't like just to keep their health care coverage which is often not very good anyway. However, for those who are self employed or with a very small business, it seems their only option is to go out onto the open ACA exchange and grab a lousy and expensive plan that hardly covers anything.

Crowd Health offers an alternative to paying for health insurance. Although it definitely isn't insurance since you are asked to pay into your own bank account each month to be prepared to pay others' health expenses. There is also no guarantee that your expenses will be paid as you often have with a traditional insurance policy. However, oftentimes even with traditional insurance you don't get everything covered and have to cover up to the deductible and everything over until you hit your out of pocket maximum. And that's before considering the inflated prices paid by insurance companies.

Is Crowd Health a Health Sharing Ministry?

The answer to this question is more complicated. In short, yes and no. We discussed sharing ministries in my previous ventures with Samaritans and an episode with Liberty Health Share. Basically, in a sharing ministry you send your monthly 'premium' to someone in the community. If you have a health expense, you submit a claim after you pay the bill and people will then mail you checks to cover the expense. The down side of this process is that the delay to getting paid can be fairly long (months) meaning you will have to have the funds to cover the bill that might be fairly large. And people don't often have that much money sitting around in the bank.

How Does Crowd Health Work?

CEO Andy Schoonover describes the fairly simple mechanics of Crowd Health. You take a group of like minded people who want an alternative to the traditional way of paying for health care. Then you have them commit to contribute a small amount to run the overhead of the community which helps pay for the technology and people tasked with negotiating with local hospitals, etc. and assisting patients with their navigation through the health care space. Community members pay the first $500 of a health care event and then request the community fund the remaining amount. Each community member then has the option of helping out or not. Each member carries a social credit score determined by how often they 'help', ask for help, or shop around for less expensive health care options.

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Episode 152: The COVID Drawdown Nov 25, 2021

Show notes

The COVID Drawdown

Today we are going to discuss the COVID drawdown. Essentially, this is what must inevitably happen for us to return to lives of normalcy where we have typical interactions with others at family gatherings, sporting events, concerts, and business meetings. Unless we are prepared to radically change the way we live our lives and choose isolation (which probably has far greater physical and mental health detriments) then we have to consider how the drawdown occurs and what conditions ned to be present for it to happen.

What HaS TO HAPPEN FOR THE DRAWDOWN TO OCCUR?

We've talked to numerous experts who all have various opinions on how the pandemic will play out and what strategies will be needed to get to the 'other side' of the pandemic. You can find the initial conversation with Dr. Graham, immunology with Dr. Gandhi, and science ethics with Dr. Bhattacharya on the episode list at the end of this writeup. The following is a short list of what conditions need to be present to return to normal:

Broad acceptance of the fact that the virus, SARS-CoV-2 which causes COVID-19, will become endemic.
Recognition that the endemic virus cannot become eradicated and will absolutely infect everyone - probably multiple times.
Understand that vaccination including booster shots will not significantly stop transmission of the virus but only provide protection from serious illness.
Sterilizing immunity (protection from infection) for SARS-CoV-2 will be temporary whether one has had vaccination or prior natural infection.
Accept that no measures to stop transmission outside of severely draconian restrictions on movement and social interaction have middling effects on the spread of the virus.
We will have to be comfortable with no longer 'looking' for the virus with every respiratory illness and only test those whom we feel are at high risk or can use novel therapeutics.
Public health officials, politicians, and policy makers have to accept that there is very little that can be done to 'contain' the virus.

What the Drawdown Will Look Like

The drawdown will look different depending on what part of life you are looking.

Schools: Most schools will continue their current policies through the end of this school year. Next year, most school systems will have returned to pre-pandemic policies of no temperature checks, mask wearing, etc. Only the most heavily unionized schools or urban will mandate extreme measures like vaccinations. This will become even harder to enforce as the majority of the country has returned to normal and we see a striking similarity of outcomes between the two ways of schooling.
Universities: Already there are differing policies in place between schools and the lack of differences with outcomes will move nearly all universities to eliminate all restrictions next school year.
Mask Mandates: These will disappear completely by next year in almost the entire country. The political cost for maintaining these measures will be increasingly steep and politicians will declare victory over the virus and insist that their earlier measures did their job to save lives but are no longer needed.
Vaccine Mandates: Despite attempting to impose these mandates through federal fiat on transportation and for air travel - these will disappear as more and more states reject their use.
Hospitals: Health care facilities will still likely be burdened with extraordinary personal protection measures like masking at all times throughout all of next year. The federal government controls this regulation and unless there is extraordinary political pressure these will continue. Perhaps the loss of workers in health care will encourage the removal of this rule but that will take longer than this year.

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Episode 150: Make Sure Your Health Insurance Broker is Working for You and not the Insurance Company with David Contorno. Nov 14, 2021

Show notes

When you run a business, one person you usually meet and hire is a health insurance broker. In theory, these brokers work with the employers to secure the best deals for health insurance to meet the company's health care objectives. However, in practice, the brokers serve as a sales force for the insurance companies who lavish them with bonuses, trips, and gifts. The seedy underbelly of the health insurance broker industry is that they are really not working to save money or get deals for their clients - the checks are written by the insurance carriers and that's who they answer to.

Who do the brokers work for? You or the Carriers?

I spoke to Katy Talento in episode 111 who runs a business where she unbundles health insurance for employers and helps them run an efficient and less expensive health care plan. One of the problems she saw is that insurance carriers bundle all these services and then charge a very large administrative fee to run the plan. Also, their plans rarely save you money as they build in enough profit to cover the agents who sell those plans - the brokers.

That's the world that David Contorno is trying to combat with his company at ePowered Benefits. The business was founded with the intent of looking at real ways of not just unbundling but finding high quality and inexpensive ways to receive care. As Contorno said, "The only way to pay less for health care is to pay less for health care."

Health Plans Are Gimmicks

Through his 18 years of experience in the health insurance broker field, David points out that most of the various plans sold by insurance carriers are really just gimmicks that don't really change the cost of care. Whether it is an HMO, PPO, of some hybrid FFS plan - it ultimately just ends up being the same in failing to control costs. The reason is that the care comes from the same hospitals and with the same contracts no matter how they make the employers and employees pay with copays, deductibles, and coinsurance.

Even HSAs (health savings accounts) which are held up as a way to control costs by putting the patient in charge, rarely bring about the cost control as advertised. This is primarily because even using an HSA and picking where you get your care still is within the framework of hospitals, insurance contracts, and provider networks which all have massively marked up prices. Only by leaving the insurance network entirely can one see real savings.

Why Don't the Brokers Work for You?

Simply put, the work that health insurance brokers do is to carry water for the insurance carriers. The carriers are the ones who pay their bonuses, provide them with expensive trips to Tahiti, and give them sales targets for selling their plans. The checks aren't written by employers but by the insurance carriers. So naturally, the brokers respond first and foremost to what the carriers want. This doesn't make them bad people but understandably their incentives are not aligned with those you'd hope.

The reason most brokers don't even know they're working for the wrong people is best summarized by the quote from Upton Sinclair, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on him not understanding it."

David Contorno is the CEO and founder of ePowered Benefits. David spent 18 years as a traditional broker in health insurance but felt that it could be done in a better way.

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Episode 149: Is Asymptomatic Spread of SARS-CoV-2 a Thing? with Daniel Halperin, PhD Oct 22, 2021

Show notes

Not only has the COVID pandemic politicized our country - it has led to a lot of misinformation and a shutdown of communication. For instance, is there really asymptomatic spread of COVID? Or just pre-symptomatic and symptomatic spread? That might seem like splitting hairs but it can have a profound effect on policy for quarantining and testing. We've talked about this before on the show as well as general discussions on COVID policy which can be found here, here, and here.

12 Myths and 12 Facts About COVID-19

If there is one certainty during this confusing pandemic it is that there are plenty of myths circulating in the media and popular culture about COVID. In fact, many of the things we think we know are wrong. Public officials get them wrong. Doctors and nurses get them wrong. The CDC and FDA get them wrong. Unfortunately, once we discover the truth, often the word doesn't get out there widely enough to change behavior, regulations, or rituals. Dan Halperin points these out in his book on 12 common myths and 12 uncommon facts about COVID-19.

One great example of this is the transmission of SARS-CoV-2 on surfaces. We have almost no instances of the virus transmitting in this manner and it travels almost exclusively through aerosol means. However, despite this, businesses, individuals, and regulatory agencies still act as if 'deep cleaning' and intense adherence to eliminating surface contamination will help prevent viral transmission. This is patently false but it's been over a year since we have known this and yet we are still wasting our time practicing this type of hygiene.

Another example of a myth believed by many is the transfer of viral particles from asymptomatic individuals to uninfected people. There are almost no documented cases of this type of infection yet we treat asymptomatic infection almost as a common vector. It is important to note that there is pre-symptomatic spread but people who never develop any symptoms just aren't infectious. It is also true that you never know if you're about to become symptomatic but we could certainly change the way we approach close contacts if the infected person never develops any symptoms.

Is the Current Environment of Scientific Debate Akin to McCarthyism?

Not only has Dan Halperin written on the epidemiology of COVID but he has also weighed in on his concerns with the academic and public nature of scientific debate. He notes how one of the creators of the mRNA technology expressed some "strange views" which many did not agree with. But instead of rebutting the researcher's concerns, he was virtually eliminated from history. His contribution to the development of mRNA technology was removed from Wikipedia and he has been eliminated from all common public forums.

Dr. Halperin says it feels a little like McCarthyism which happened in the 1950's over concern that the Soviet Union and communists were infiltrating American government and society. At the time, most Americans were in favor of the practice of 'blackballing' people because of the perceived threat of nuclear annihilation from our Cold War adversary. Only through the lens of time can we now look back and find the practice objectionable and he suspects the same will be the case with our current lack of public acceptance of differing opinions on COVID.

Daniel Halperin is an epidemiologist and full professor at the University of North Carolina School of Public Health and the author of the book: Facing COVID without Panic: 12 common myths and 12 lesser known facts about the pandemic.

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Episode 148: Urgent Care as Primary Care with Dr. Juliet Breeze of Next Level Medical Oct 13, 2021

Show notes

There are a lot of urgent care clinics all over the country. But few of them, to my knowledge, also operate as regular primary care clinics. But that is exactly what is happening today in the Houston, Texas area with the emergence of Next Level Medical. If you think about it, it makes perfect sense to leverage all the facilities needed for a primary care clinic - exam rooms, physicians, etc. and use it to deliver regular and sometimes non-urgent care. We've discussed free standing ERs before that lower the cost of care with transparency so this seems like the next logical step with urgent care. We have also discussed pediatric urgent care clinics but those never had the component of doubling as primary care.

What is Urgent Care?

Probably the most puzzling questions you can ask even someone who works in health care is: What is the difference between urgent care and emergency care? The answer is that it depends which is why you really need a better triage system that people (patients) can access before then head across town to either the ER or UC clinic. It's this triage that is probably the most important way to keep ER visit costs low and less frequent. This is one of the services offered by Next Level Medical to their members.

Why Urgent Care Membership?

At first, it seems strange that one would establish any sort of membership status with an urgent care clinic. But Next Level has made it work by basically selling it as a one stop primary care clinic. Or a primary care clinic on steroids that comes equipped with supplies for taking care of fractures, lacerations, laboratory studies, and imaging. And if you have the same staff working a regular schedule you can get physician continuity for patients making well care a very achievable goal.

Employers like the flexibility as it provides the primary care for their employees with convenience since there are clinics all over town. Additionally, the clinics can care for their employees who might get injured either at home or work. This added benefit means a whole lot less in expensive ER care and probably healthier employees since their primary care is taken care of without all the copays and hidden costs that keep lots of hourly employees from staying on top of their chronic conditions.

Doctors Like the Schedule

Doctors looking to become employed usually have to make a lot of concessions. First in their autonomy and second in the lack of control over their schedule. The amount of work they take home or 'unpaid' time can be large at times making a forty hour a week job quickly turn into 50 or 60. This is where Next Level can offer doctors the opportunity to truly do shift work, have a regular patient panel, but not take home their work and let the sophisticated call center triage their patients overnight.

Dr. Juliet Breeze is the founder and CEO of Next Level Medical which offers membership based urgent care services in the Houston, TX area. show notes

Episode 146: Today's show

Next Level Medical: Dr. Breeze's urgent care clinic company.

jbreeze@nlucc.com - Dr. Breeze's email if you want to contact her.

LinkedIn: Dr. Breeze's profile

Episode 035: Free standing and fully transparent ERs is Oklahoma

Episode 069: Pediatric urgent care clinics to eliminate a lot of the burden from the ERs.

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Episode 147: Has the Pandemic Led to Infants Losing IQ? - with Sean Deoni, PhD Oct 07, 2021

Show notes

The COVID pandemic has brought on all sorts of changes to the way we live our lives. From wearing masks, working from home, stay at home orders, and restrictions on social interactions, the virus has caused untold disruption to the way our society functions. Although the changes COVID has brought to our schools and the lives of our school age children, it is perhaps less appreciated what changes have occurred for our infants.

It is a well known fact that our environment and meaningful stimulation is necessary for normal intelligence and brain development. Infants are completely dependent on their parents to put them in environments where they can maximally interact in the world. This interaction is what spurs on their brain development and social connections to others.

Early Learning

My guest today was Dr. Sean Deoni at Brown University described that the first 1000 days of a child's life are some of the most critical for its brain development. Babies interact with their environment and figure out how to communicate and manipulate the physical world through exploration. The less stimulation that is present, generally, the worse their neurodevelopment outcome is. One can use the Mullen Scales of Early Learning to test infants and young children on where they are developmentally on motor and language skills.

Concerning Findings - A Drop in IQ Equivalents

The lab at Brown University had been collecting infant and child development testing data for over ten years. Their findings generally fell in line with what would be considered 'normal' for children at that age. But suddenly, in 2020, their lab noticed a sudden change in the scoring for children. A massive loss in development scores (which are used as a proxy for IQ) were seen in infants born during the pandemic.

The losses were on the order of 22 IQ points or 1.5 standard deviations from the norm. This was an incredible finding and one that they couldn't explain. The findings were more pronounced in those with low socioeconomic status and males.

Where was the drop?

One would expect that the drop in scores would be related to problems with language since we are now more frequently wearing masks. However, their findings were actually a massive drop in motor skills. This might explain why male infants were more significantly affected since early motor development seems to progress a little more in them than females

What's Causing the Drop?

Unfortunately, it is very hard to determine what is causing this decline in scoring for infants. The research team has been able to rule out a few factors like maternal stress or actual COVID infections. It is very probable that this is due to a general lack of physical interactions and stimulation for the infants with their parents and caregivers. Perhaps it's because of increased isolation at day care or parents working remotely at home and less capable to spending valuable time with their infants.

Limitations to the Findings

Whenever we get concerning findings like these we have to be sure of a few facts.

Are the results corroborated/reproducible: The University of Columbia did a similar study and found the same results. However, they don't have long term validation to their testing methods so perhaps this finding is an outlier.
Is this a representative sample: This study (and the one from Columbia) represent a probably skewed sample of families who live in urban areas and heavily rely on day care for their child care needs. It's possible that these findings would not be found in areas with lower levels of day care usage since parents probably don't interact that differently at home with their child.
COVID restrictions: PPE, limited social interactions, and masking all varied throughout the country. It's possible that one, some, or all of these significantly affected the results of child development. Perhaps masking and limited social interactions decreased infant and toddlers' physical play. Also, maybe seeing less relatives who would physically interact with the child led to lower scores.

How Permanent are these Deficits?

This is the million dollar question. Can the children recover from such a huge developmental deficit. It's entirely possible that they will just reach these milestones later in life and it will have no impact on their future intellect. However, oftentimes, if one does not catch up by 2 years of age or so, one never catches up which could put these children at a huge disadvantage in academics, athletics, and the arts.

The lab will continue to follow the children but only time will tell whether they are ever able to catch up.

Sean Deoni, PhD, holds a doctorate in MRI Physics and is a lead researcher at Brown University studying neurodevelopment of infants and young children. show notes

Episode 147: Today's show

Children Born During the Pandemic Score Lower on Cognitive Tests: Dr. Deoni's Study from Brown University

Birth but not Maternal SARS CoV-2 Infection Related to Lower Developmental Scores at 6 months. - University of Columbia study referenced in the show.

Baby Imaging Lab: The laboratory where Dr. Deoni works at Brown University.

Legaci Long COVID Study: An opportunity for children and adults with long COVID to enroll in research.

Episode 143: We were so, so, so, so right about COVID

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