HuMed with David Spiro, MD

He looked fit, ate well, exercised, and had a calcium score of zero six months earlier. Then, at 34, Dr. Stephen Hussey had a widowmaker heart attack.

Diagnosed with type 1 diabetes at age nine, Dr. Hussey, a doctor of chiropractic with a master's in functional medicine and author of Understanding the Heart, spent his adult life trying to do everything right. In this episode, pediatric ER physician Dr. David Spiro talks with him abo...

After years in emergency medicine, Dr. Vassily Eliopoulos (Dr. Vass) coded a man in a rural Wyoming ER who was his age, had no other risk factors, and looked exactly like him. That night pushed him from the ER toward longevity medicine and cardiovascular prevention.

In this episode of HuMed, pediatric ER physician Dr. David Spiro talks with Dr. Vass about why doctors neglect their own health, the "golden handcuffs" that kept him stu...

"I did healing for myself first, so I could become a better healer."

Before Dr. Melissa Mondala treated patients with lifestyle medicine, she needed it herself. She lived with IBS and reflux from her teens, and during her training at Loma Linda she was diagnosed with an atypical breast cancer. Changing how she ate, moved, slept and handled stress changed her health, and her husband's, and it reshaped how she practices medicine.

On th...

Dr. Rick Pescatore was driving to Pittsburgh with a woman he had met on Hinge, describing a kind of patient he sees every ER shift: pain, nausea, vomiting, and tests that all come back normal. She said the person he was describing "sounds exactly like my mom." A few weeks later her mother was dying in an ICU, and nobody could solve her mystery illness. The missing piece turned out to be vitamin B1 (thiamine). The woman from that dr...

A Monday morning, 6:45. Dr. Kim Blankshain is changing her infant son when she hears a crash in the next room. Her husband is sitting on the edge of the bed, bleeding from a gash in his forehead. She expects a few stitches. Hours later an ER physician says the CT scan came back and he is being sent downtown to see neurosurgery right away. "What is happening?"

Dr. Blankshain is a neuro-ophthalmologist in the Chicago suburbs, a specia...

A resident on night call writes one word in a chart to describe his patient's husband, a man in his 90s: "senile." He thinks it means "very old." The note gets corrected, but the word stays in the edit trail, and a few days later the record shows the patient has read it. Every instinct tells him to leave it alone. He calls the family to apologize anyway.

Dr. Aditya Pawar is a transplant nephrologist at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical ...

Dr. James Wittig built his career saving children's limbs from cancer. Then a heart scan he asked for himself led to a catheterization that found a 99% blockage in his left anterior descending artery. "I was hanging on by a thread."

Dr. Wittig is an orthopedic oncologist and sarcoma surgeon with more than 25 years in limb-sparing surgery for bone and soft tissue tumors in children and adults. In this conversation with Dr. David Spir...

Dr. Lauren Fine had a thriving allergy practice, a faculty position and patients lined up at the door, and she still felt she needed someone's permission to change. Her answer now: "Stop asking other people for permission."

Dr. Fine is an allergist and immunologist, a teacher, a clinician at the VA in the Fort Lauderdale area, and a life coach. In this conversation with Dr. David Spiro, she tells the story of a patient who casually ...

Rejected from medical school. Failed anatomy. Failed his emergency medicine boards by two points, then by one. Today Dr. Mark Pappadakis teaches at the medical school that turned him down three times.

Emergency physician Dr. Mark Pappadakis joins Dr. David Spiro, MD for an honest conversation about failure, resilience, and the human side of medicine. He shares:

- Why he applied to only three medical schools, and what failing a post-b...

"How can a child be taken away from the mother?" When cardiologist Dr. Jaya Mallidi lost her daughter, Saachi, at 19 weeks, the trust she'd always had with the universe "lay broken like a vase in an empty room."

In this deeply honest conversation, Dr. Jaya Mallidi joins host Dr. David Spiro to explore the human side of medicine from the other side of the bed. She shares surviving a rare, life-threatening hemothorax from thoracic end...

"One of our social workers knocked on the door and said, so-and-so killed himself. I was just in shock."

What do you do with the rest of your day after that? Psychiatrist Dr. Paniz Johari joins Dr. David Spiro to talk about one of the least-discussed parts of medicine — losing a patient, and carrying it afterward.

Dr. Johari, an attending psychiatrist at Mather Hospital / Northwell Health, wrote a JAMA "A Piece of My Mind" essa...

What if the biggest threats to a child's life are also the most preventable? Dr. Lois Lee — pediatric emergency medicine physician and researcher at Boston Children's Hospital, professor of clinical pediatrics at Harvard Medical School, and a candidate for AAP president-elect — joins Dr. David Spiro on HuMed to talk about the work of keeping kids safe: from gun violence and injury prevention to vaccines, Medicaid, and t...

Dr. Zachary Meade watched his grandfather shoot his father to save his mother's life. He was a child. He thought it was normal. "Apparently it's not normal."

Dr. Meade is a Navy anesthesiologist based in San Diego who took one of the least conventional roads into medicine you will ever hear. Before medical school he was an Army bomb squad technician, a firefighter, an EMT, and an electrical engineer, and he served in the Army, the A...

Two attending physicians declared medical futility on a man in his

late 40s. He was awake. He was begging for the ICU. He was begging

for his mother. And the only doctor at his bedside that night was

an intern on his second call shift.

Dr. Robert Beck has carried that night for nineteen years.

In his second appearance on HuMed, Dr. Beck tells the story of a

patient at New Orleans' Charity Hospital in July 2007 — and what it

taught h...

Dr. Joana Mack has been called "bossy" her whole career — in training, at work, even by her own mom. Now, she just says it back differently: "I'm not bossy, I'm the boss."

Dr. Mack is a board-certified pediatric hematologist-oncologist, NIH-funded researcher, and mother of five daughters, practicing at Arkansas Children's Hospital and UAMS. In this conversation with Dr. David Spiro, she opens up about the everyday bias she sti...

Can regenerative medicine help us live healthier for longer?

Physician-scientist and biotech entrepreneur Dr. Mari Mitrani joins Dr. David Spiro to explain the evolving science of stem cells and exosomes—including how these therapies work, where the evidence stands, and why responsible research and regulation are essential.

They also explore the foundations of healthy aging that are available to nearly everyone: nutrition, slee...

What happens when a surgeon suddenly finds himself on the other side of the patient–doctor relationship?

Dr. Adam Bitterman—orthopedic surgeon, educator, and chair of orthopedic surgery at Huntington Hospital—joins Dr. David Spiro to discuss being diagnosed with an aortic aneurysm and undergoing urgent open-heart surgery.

Dr. Bitterman shares the fear of preparing for a seven-hour operation, the atrial fibrillation ...

Not every anal health problem is a hemorrhoid. Board-certified general surgeon Dr. Talar Tejerian joins Dr. David Spiro to explain the differences between hemorrhoids and anal fissures—and why persistent pain, bleeding, or other symptoms should not be dismissed.

Dr. Tejerian is the founder of Booty MD, a nonprofit dedicated to making anal health education clear, evidence-based, and free from shame. She discusses why anal healt...

What would you do if someone were bleeding severely—and help was miles away?

In this episode of HuMED, Dr. David Spiro welcomes back surgeon and critical care physician Dr. David Shapiro for a powerful conversation about the moment that changed how he understood emergency preparedness.

Years ago, while mountain biking through remote terrain between Bryce Canyon and Zion National Park, Dr. Shapiro encountered an injured cyclist ...