Show Notes
Kidney disease affects millions of Americans, but corporate capture of dialysis, along with disparities in treatment and transplant access, mean that not everyone's journey is the same.
On this Science Talk podcast, we speak with Carrie Arnold, lead reporter in an ambitious, year-long reporting project into the current state of chronic kidney disease treatment in the U.S., from diagnosis to dialysis, and from maintenance treatment to transplant (for those who are lucky).
You can read the first part in the series here.
It's a story of technological and procedural advance, but also one that has seen just two large, for-profit enterprises come to dominate the market for dialysis delivery. It's a story of expanding access, but also one still marked by racial and ethnic disparities. And it's a tale of medical innovation and adaptation, but also one beset by conflicts of interest and an inability to adapt to holistic modes of care that other disease specialities, from cardiology to oncology, have long ago embraced.
For the 37 million Americans navigating the corridors of kidney disease, these are likely familiar issues. But for the third of Americans at risk for renal disease — and for anyone who cares about how the nation's health care dollars are spent — this five-part collaboration between Undark Magazine and Scientific American pulls back the curtain and provides an unflinching look at what's working, and what's not. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
More from Science Talk
On this show, we’ve been talking about uncertainty from a variety of different angles. We’ve heard how uncertainty can be a spark for creativity and scientific discovery. We’ve discussed how uncertainty can go unseen and make science really difficult. And we’ve explored some of the research techniques and habits of mind that researchers use to deal with uncertainty. Today we’re going to end with two final questions: If science is always uncertain, how can we ever know anything? How can we have confidence in science if there’s always underlying uncertainty? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Science is an iterative process. Progress comes from people coming up with ideas that are sort of right and then new evidence and ideas coming in to update them to become even more correct. Underlying this process is a willingness by scientists to accept that they might be wrong and be open to updating their ideas. It turns out that social scientists have a term for this mindset. To find out more, I talked with two researchers who are studying this thing they call “intellectual humility.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Today’s episode of Uncertain is about the ways that studies can leave us overconfident and how “just-so stories” can make us feel overly certain about results that are still a work in progress. And sometimes studies get misleading results because of random error or weird samples or study design. But sometimes science gets things wrong because it’s done by humans, and humans are fallible and imperfect. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In this episode, we’ll talk with two researchers whose work probes the uncertainty surrounding how we perceive the world around us. It turns out that what we see may not always be a perfect reflection of reality.
Welcome to Uncertain, a five-part podcast miniseries from Scientific American. Here we will dive head first into the possibilities of the unknowing. Over the next five episodes, I’ll be talking with people like her: explorers who work in the realm of uncertainty. Through them, we’ll discover the ways that uncertainty can spark curiosity and scientific breakthroughs. But we’ll also find out how uncertainty can bite us in the butt and make science really hard. We’ll see how neglecting uncertainty can lead to overconfidence and how embracing uncertainty can allow for a more nuanced and accurate understanding of the world. We’ll finish by examining how it’s possible to have confidence in scientific findings, even with their uncertainties.