Doctoring the Truth
Welcome to Doctoring the Truth, a podcast where two dedicated audiologists dissect the world of healthcare gone rogue. Explore jaw-dropping stories of medical malfeasance, nefariousness, and shocking breaches of trust. The episodes provide deep dives that latch onto your curiosity and conscience. It's a podcast for truth-seekers craving true crime, clinical insights, and a dash of humor.
Episodes
82 episodes
Ep 82-Mesmer's Magic Tub, Mozart's Armonica Envy, and Ben Franklin's Dinner Disaster: Old Timey Medicine at it's Fanciest
A doctor in a lilac silk robe, a wooden tub packed with iron rods, patients linked together in a room with music, and “healing crises” that look like fainting spells. That sounds like theatre, until you realise how many smart, suffering people ...
Ep 81-When Prescriptions Become A Weapon: Dr. Craig A. Spiegel
A tire pressure alert leads to a nail in the tread, and a split second label check stops an anaphylaxis scare and then the tone shifts hard. We’re talking about the kind of betrayal that makes your stomach drop: a pediatrician accused of using ...
Ep 80-What Little We Know About Post Partum Psychosis: Otty Sanchez and Lindsay Clancy (Part 3)
A mother can be terrified, begging for help, and still be sent home. A mother can look organised on a video visit and still be collapsing behind the scenes. This week we close our postpartum psychosis series with two cases that force the hardes...
Ep 79-What Little We Know About Post Partum Psychosis: Dena Schlosser (Part 2)
A calm voice, religious music in the background, and a confession that makes no emotional sense unless you understand psychosis. We trace the Dena Schlosser case in Plano, Texas, where postpartum psychiatric illness, religious language, and the...
Ep 78-What Little We Know About Post Partum Psychosis: Andrea Yates (Part 1)
A mother who just gave birth can look “fine” in a short conversation and still be slipping into a psychiatric emergency by nightfall. That gap between what others see and what she is actually experiencing is where postpartum psychosis becomes s...
Ep 77-The House Of Horrors Clinic: Dr. Kermit Gosnell
A clinic door can feel like safety, especially when you’re scared, short on money, and out of options. But what happens when the “respectable” name on the sign is just a costume, and the system meant to protect patients stops looking closely?
Ep 76-Nonconsensual Studies: Dr. Halikas and Marginalization of a Hmong Community
A patient walks into a hospital for help with opioid withdrawal, accepts a medication offered by a doctor, and later learns that dose was part of an experiment. That single shift, from treatment to research, is where trust can break for good.
Ep 75-In the Trenches with Marybeth: Near Death By Boxcutter
He walks into triage at 3 AM with his girlfriend, dressed for a night out, calm as can be, and says he just needs stitches. Then we lift the paper towel and see the kind of injury that makes your stomach drop: a box cutter laceration to the nec...
Ep 74-The Surgeon Who Fooled The World: Paolo Macchiarini (Part 2)
A surgeon can save your life, but a story can steal your judgment. We pick up the Paolo Macchiarini saga with the part that sounds too wild to be true: an award-winning NBC producer, Benita Alexander, falls for the “super surgeon” while making ...
Ep 73-The Killer Surgeon with a Plastic Windpipe: Paolo Macchiarini (Part 1)
A plastic windpipe. A world-famous surgeon. One of the most prestigious medical institutions on earth. What could possibly go wrong when hope, headlines, and reputation move faster than evidence? We’re in Stockholm at Karolinska University Hosp...
Ep 72-Guinea-Pigging Geezer: An Unethical U of M Psychiatrist
A psychiatrist with a résumé full of prestige gets ordered to sit in on a medical ethics class. That single detail sent us down one of the most unsettling Minnesota medical board stories we’ve ever read, and it forced us to ask how clinical tri...
Ep 71-Fentanyl On The Night Shift
A single syringe can hold a hard truth: in an ICU, the difference between mercy and harm can come down to dose, intent, and whether anyone has the power to stop what’s happening. We start with a stormy night and a very real tornado scare, then ...
Ep 70-The Essential Oil Myth Machine: D Gary Young
A tiny bottle can carry a huge promise, especially when it is wrapped in “natural” language, a charismatic founder story, and a sales network that feels like community. We take a hard look at Young Living Essential Oils and founder D. Gary Youn...
Ep 69-Genital Mutilation Disguised as Love Surgery
A surgeon tells you everything went fine then you spend years in pain, ashamed, and confused because the truth never made it into your chart. We dig into the case of Dr James Burt of Dayton, Ohio, the physician behind “love surgery,” a set of e...
Ep 68-The Church of Bleach
A “miracle cure” gets whispered about at an autism conference, and the rabbit hole opens fast. We follow the bizarre rise of Miracle Mineral Solution (MMS), a two-part chemical kit that produces chlorine dioxide, and how it’s been promoted as a...
Ep 67-In the Trenches with Marybeth: Keep Your Wits
A masked team storms the classroom, guns drawn, and within seconds everyone is zip tied, hooded, and ordered face-first to a wall. It’s “only” training, but your body doesn’t know that and Nurse Mary Beth Beseke proves how fast fear can wipe ou...
Ep 66-A Partridge for Lunch (Part2 John Bodkins Adams)
He pockets morphine during a police search, shrugs off forged prescriptions with “God’s forgiveness,” and still claims it’s impossible to accuse a doctor. We follow the case of Dr John Bodkin Adams in 1950s Eastbourne as Scotland Yard’s Murder ...
Ep 65-The Doctor Who Inherited The Dead
A beloved doctor who prays at the bedside, shows up in the middle of the night, and somehow keeps ending up in his patients’ wills. That is the unsettling setup behind our deep dive into Dr John Bodkin Adams, the Eastbourne GP later suspected o...
Ep 64-Lucy Letby (Part 3) When Doubt Meets A Verdict and Introducing Mary Beth
A verdict can be final in court and still deserve careful re-testing in public life, especially when the case depends on complex medicine most jurors can only access through experts. We’re back for the third and final part of our Lucy Letby ser...
Ep 63-Lucy Letby (Part Two) When Medicine Meets Reasonable Doubt
A case can feel settled in court and still feel unsettled in science. We take on Part 2 of the Lucy Letby story by walking through what the jury heard, what the Court of Appeal later weighed, and why so many clinicians, statisticians, journalis...
Ep 62-Lucy Letby (Part One) and a Swiss Cheese Smuggler
A neonatal unit is supposed to be the safest room in a hospital and yet this story begins with a run of collapses that staff couldn’t make sense of. We’re finally digging into Part 1 of the Lucy Letby case, starting where so many explanations a...
Ep 61-Twelve Deaths in Thirteen Days: A Nursing Home Death Spike
Five people are reported murdered in their beds at 3 a.m. and the scene makes no sense. No broken windows. No forced entry. No masked intruder. Just a nursing home hallway, a butcher knife, and a night-shift supervisor with a wound that looks m...
Ep 60-Never Never Land: Rhode Island Hospital's Decade of Surgical Scandals
A hospital can have world-class branding and still be dangerously broken where it counts. We’re heading to Rhode Island Hospital, a major teaching hospital tied to Brown University, to follow a decade-plus trail of “never events” like wrong-sit...
Ep 59- Beware the Ice Pick: The Lobotomy Era
An ice pick through the eye socket. Ten minutes of “surgery.” A taxi ride home. That’s not an urban legend, it’s a documented moment in the history of lobotomy, and it captures the sick casualness that let psychosurgery become mainstream.
Ep 58-Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust: A Funeral Home Horror Story
They thought they were holding their loved one one last time, then they learned the urn held concrete. We’re walking through the Return to Nature Funeral Home scandal in Colorado, where investigators say nearly 190 bodies were left to decompose...