White Coat, Black Art

Like many Canadian small towns, Carberry, MB had become a healthcare desert. In 2023, the small ER closed and the last doctor left. Carberry embarked on the fight of its life to get healthcare back. Just days before the first of two new MDs starts work, Dr. Brian Goldman visits Carberry to learn about the Herculean efforts it takes for one town to reinstate healthcare, and make sure they don't lose it again. 

For three decades, Dr. Brian Day has been at the centre of the debate around private health care in Canada. Despite losing his court battle to bring it to B.C., Day still wants to see more private, for-profit clinics. The orthopedic surgeon and owner of Vancouver's Cambie Surgery Centre says competition from the private sector could push the public system to deliver faster and better care.

Gurleen Kaur Chahal is one of the inaugural students at Toronto Metropolitan University’s new Peel Region medical school, designed to serve the area’s diverse population. She's determined to be part of the solution for the kinds of struggles her multigenerational Punjabi household has faced accessing care.

After a seemingly innocuous question about pi, Allan Brooks tumbled down a ChatGPT rabbit hole. Three weeks later, he emerged, after spending 300 hours in a spiralling 7,000-prompt exchange with the chatbot. Dr. Keith Sakata, the psychiatrist whose viral thread on X breaks down the phenomenon known as “AI psychosis,” says the built-in sycophancy of large language models like ChatGPT needs to change before more harm is done.

As a rapper, Bishop Brigante was no stranger to on-stage battles. We met up with the then-45-year-old when he was battling Stage 4 colon cancer, which he said was caught too late. Bishop wanted Canadians to have easier access to colonoscopies and said advocacy had given him newfound purpose.

 Many women report difficulties with orgasms, low libido or pain around intercourse. And given that many have never even learned much about their genitals, they don’t always know where to get help. A cadre of Canadian doctors specializing in women’s sexual health is trying to change that. They’re helping patients boost pleasure, while empowering them to get to know their sexual anatomy.

Attracting a family doctor to work in a community is challenging, with fewer physicians choosing family medicine. That's why Cheryl Gnyp, the recruiter for Castlegar, B.C., needs to stand out. She uses the board game Operation and specialized coffee as part of her 10-minute sales pitch to potential recruits at conferences. It can take years before a doctor starts working in the community, but she’s in it for the long haul.

Judith Morrison needs a kidney. While she's on dialysis, her sister Catherine is putting out a public plea for a living donor. But the search has been hard. And if they do find a donor, the sisters say that person will have to go through a long and opaque testing process. A process that experts say needs to be improved across Canada because the demand for kidney donations is high.

One morning as she arrived for her hospital shift, Winnipeg nurse Jennifer Noone was assaulted outside the staff entrance, leaving her with a bad concussion and PTSD. Rather than stay silent, she took the unusual step of having her assailant charged with assault. Manitoba Nurses Union President Darlene Jackson says there needs to be more and better security and violence should not be accepted as just part of the job.

When Kalpit Sharma started smoking high-THC weed several times a day, he thought he was just “living his life” as a university student. But then, he started hearing voices. Researcher Dr. Daniel Myran shares the science behind stories like Kalpit’s – and why young men are particularly at risk for concerning mental health outcomes.

Dr. Theresa Tam steps down this week after eight years as Canada’s chief public health officer. Best known for leading the COVID-19 public health response, Tam tells Dr. Brian Goldman in a sit-down interview that Canada urgently needs a national vaccine registry to better manage outbreaks like measles, and must do more to support science and fight misinformation.

Cardiologist, scientist and bestselling author Dr. Eric Topol's new book "Super Agers" distills decades of research on how to make us healthier for longer. Topol says that humanity is on the cusp of developing treatments to help tame cancer, dementia and other chronic diseases… just as political forces in the U.S. are shutting down that research.