
Show Notes
Thank you Bruce Lanphear, Clyde Wilson, Tracy Dennis-Tiwary, Diego Pereyra, Dr Mike Hunter, and many others for tuning into my live video with Charlotte Blease! Join me for my next live video in the app. Whether A.I. will transform the practice of medicine in a positive way remains controversial. Health researcher Prof Charlotte Blease, on faculty at Uppsala University in Sweden and researcher at Harvard University, has written a new book —Dr. Bot—that critically assesses the unmet needs in healthcare and whether A.I. can fulfill them. She provides an optimistic viewpoint (see the subtitle), and our conversation probes whether that is justified. She has a substack, too, here
Thanks for listening to Ground Truths. Through analytic essays and podcasts, I try to cover the important issues and discoveries in life science and medicine. If you have suggestions for topics I should get into, please pass them along.
Get full access to Ground Truths at erictopol.substack.com/subscribe
More from Ground Truths
Michael Lewis is one of the best storytellers of our era. You know and likely have read his books Moneyball, The Big Short, The Blind Side, Flash Boys, Liar’s Poker, and The Undoing Project, to name a few. He has long been one of my favorite authors. This was the first interview that Michael did on his new book, BLOCKERS, published on October 6th, streamed live on Substack Sept 29th. It’s his 21st book and 4 of the last 5 have been about the US government: The Fifth Risk (2019), Premonition (2021), and Who Is Government? (2025). His ability to talk with the silent civil servant heroes of multiple government agencies (the Blockers), members of the DOGE destruction team, and much more from the current US government administration.
In recent weeks the results (announced by press release) of 2 major placebo-controlled randomized trials—ZEUS, testing an interleukin-6 (IL-6) blocker vs inflammation, and HORIZON, testing a drug to lower Lp(a), indicated failure to achieve their primary endpoint. Are we maxxed out for new treatments vs heart disease, as this article in the WSJ (←gift link) today asserts? “Cardiovascular drug development is starting to look a bit like the modern oil industry. The easy wells have been tapped. What’s left is in deep water: expensive, technically perilous and less likely to strike oil.”
This podcast is meant to complement my recent Ground Truths post Why Our Memory Slips After Age 50 which has all the relevant links to the 2 papers, key graphics, and other related publications. If you haven’t had a chance to read that, it would be helpful to spend a few minutes to do so before listening to this podcast. Links to the 2 papers for those who don’t want to look back Zemke et al in Science https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adt8307 Belk et al in Nature https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10939-0
Deb Cohen is an award winning investigative journalist and correspondent who trained as a physician and has worked with the BBC and BMJ. She just published BAD INFLUENCE, a book which takes us deep into the wellness-industrial complex—the confluence of the supplement, testing, tech, and pharma industries, and how they sell health anxiety to healthy people.
Sarah Urbut is a physician-scientist at Harvard Medical School and the Massachusetts General Research Institute. She and her colleagues published a landmark paper in Nature on patient health journeys for 3 different cohorts—the Mass General Brigham patients, the UK Biobank, and the All of Us research program—with a cumulative 683,000 individuals, 348 diseases, and up to 52 years of follow-up. Integrating electronic medical records and polygenic risk scores (N=36). An AI model was developed and validated called ALADYNOULLI, with each individual represented latent disease signatures (N=21), mathematically and biologically driven. An example of a patient’s dynamic life journey (health arc) is provided in the Figure below (adapted from the paper, made with NotebookLM). The longitudinal story for each individual is key here. Using a Gaussian process, the risk continually shifts like a GPS navigation when you make a wrong turn and you are re-routed. Considerable effort was dedicated to addressing selection bias with inverse probability weighting.