The Blind Spot with Dr. Aditi Nerurkar

Nothing in medicine is risk-free. Even aspirin, a cornerstone of cardiology, carries a risk. Clinicians are running a risk-benefit calculation constantly. Patients are too. The challenge is making a decision, even though there’s risk, together. Cardiologist Dr. Akshay Pendyal returns to talk with Dr. Aditi Nerurkar about the gap between population risk and the individual patient, why even “sure, let’s run the test...

Nobody teaches a class on uncertainty. Nobody hands you a manual for breaking bad news, or for what to say when a patient asks a question you can't answer. Most of the hardest parts of medicine, doctors learn on the job.

The Blind Spot is the podcast for doctors who wish they had more time to talk shop with other doctors. In each episode, Harvard physician Dr. Aditi Nerurkar sits down with a fellow clinician to find one blind spot:...

Dr. Robert Wachter has spent his career watching medicine absorb newtechnology, from the paper chart to the electronic record to the current moment with AI. Theprofessor and chair of the Department of Medicine at UCSF sits down with Dr. Aditi Nerurkar towork out where these powerful new tools may be best situated to actually improve care. Forinstance, models flagging elevated breast cancer risk in scans that read as normal. Systems...

It can be scary to go to the doctor. Patients may be afraid of bad news, of seeming difficult, of taking up too much time. Doctors might feel uncomfortable delivering bad news, or bringing up the cost of care. This very human layer of healthcare is our blind spot.Dr. Lucy McBride, a primary care physician of more than twenty years and author of Beyond the Prescription, argues that fear is inevitable, but not irreducible. Dr. M...

Host Dr. Aditi Nerurkar sits down with Dr. Jeremy Faust, emergency medicine physician at Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, and editor in chief of MedPage Today, to trace what actually moves (and doesn't) when one clinician hands a patient to the next. They start with the shorthand. A phrase like "second trope and go" compresses an entire risk stratification into four words, and the person receiving that patient ...

Most physicians were trained to believe Munchausen by proxy is vanishingly rare. Andrea Dunlop has spent years talking to the clinicians, survivors, and researchers who know otherwise. In this conversation with Dr. Aditi Nerurkar, she makes the case that the condition is far more common than the medical community recognizes, and that the structural reasons physicians miss it are themselves a form of institutional blind spot.

Du...

Fifty-two percent of the top-performing TikTok videos about ADHD contain misinformation. That is where this conversation starts. But Dr. Judith Joseph, board-certified psychiatrist, principal investigator, and author of High Functioning, quickly moves it somewhere more complicated: what happens when a diagnosis is not a medical conclusion but a way of belonging?

Patients are arriving in the exam room already labeled because an...

Seventy-one percent of Americans trusted doctors and hospitals in January 2020. By January 2024, that number had fallen to forty percent. But the same data shows that eighty-five percent of patients still trust their own physician. Cardiologist Dr. Akshay Pendyal calls medicine the most complex social role in human history, and in this conversation with Dr. Aditi Nerurkar, he makes the case for why. Drawing on the placebo effect, t...

Host Dr. Aditi Nerurkar sits down with Dr. Thomas VanderMeer, surgical oncologist and interim director of the Upstate Cancer Center at SUNY Upstate Medical University, to trade notes on the real work of caring for the data-informed patient.

They start with a case. A woman with rising ctDNA, no imaging correlate, walking into Tom's office. He thought the conversation would be about the limits of detection. It wasn't. Her question, o...

Welcome to The Blind Spot. Every misdiagnosis, every missed diagnosis, has a story. This show goes looking for it.

In the premiere episode, host Dr. Aditi Nerurkar sits down with Dr. Nadine Jackson, gastrointestinal medical oncologist at Dana-Farber and associate professor at Harvard Medical School. Their conversation starts with a simple question. What does it actually feel like to practice oncology right now, when the science is ...

Every misdiagnosis–or missed diagnosis–has a story. The Blind Spot goes looking for it. Each episode goes back to the beginning, as physicians revisit the cases that kept them up at night and patients recount the persistence it took to finally break through a diagnostic wall. The clues were often there. The question is why no one connected them. From systemic biases where a woman's chronic pain is dismissed as "emotiona...