Doctoring the Truth

Send us a text A teenage girl crosses a border for a chance at life—and loses it to a mistake so basic it should have been impossible. We dive into the case of Jesica Santillán, the 17-year-old who received an incompatible heart-lung transplant, and trace how a single missed safeguard exposed cracks across donor services, hospital protocols, and communication chains. This isn’t a story about rare complications or experimental risk; it’s about the simplest check in medicine—blood type matching...

Send us a text A cookie-fueled cold open gives way to one of the thorniest questions in modern medicine: are we getting healthier, or just better at making numbers look good? Using Brian Johnson’s “Blueprint” as a case study, we unpack the science behind epigenetic clocks, the appeal of tight control, and the lesson medicine keeps relearning—lowering a risky marker isn’t the same as improving a life. We trace hard-won examples from ICU glucose control to HRT and anti-arrhythmics, then map tha...

Send us a text A newborn’s first breaths should be a promise. For too many families in Bristol during the 1980s and 1990s, that promise was broken by a system that mistook confidence for competence. We walk through how a respected pediatric cardiac unit drifted into preventable tragedy—where prolonged surgeries, poor post-op pathways, and a “club culture” sidelined data, silenced concerns, and cost lives. Then we connect the dots to the reforms that followed: centralizing complex surgery, rai...

Send us a text A quiet clinic. A calm voice in the hall. Then the shots that shattered a July morning in Petaluma, California. We follow the life and death stakes behind headlines: a breast cancer survivor seeking reconstruction, a competent surgeon navigating a fraught era of silicone implant fear, and the slow, chilling arc from anxious follow-ups to a fixed narrative of betrayal. We also step back to consider what safety looks like now. AI-assisted mammography is catching more interval c...

Send us a text A failed residency, a brittle ego, and years of simmering resentment—then two brutal double homicides that stunned Omaha. We unpack the Anthony Garcia case from the beginning, starting with his trajectory through medical school and pathology training at Creighton, the evaluations that documented poor judgment and disruptive behavior, and the dismissal that he interpreted as sabotage. What follows is a meticulous, evidence‑driven breakdown of how a professional grudge turned int...