Dr. Kaveh Hoda
speaker
194 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Mar 2025
Dr. Kaveh Hoda’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And at this point, the majority of people have had at least one experience or more in a year with telemedicine. It's become a part of a lot of people's lives. And if it goes away, you know, there's still going to be health care as it is. I mean, it doesn't mean health care is going away, but it is going to put a tremendous burden on patients and hospitals, for that matter, across the country.
Yeah. You know, I might just add to that, that aside from all the things we mentioned about it, how, you know, it helps people in rural areas, people with difficulty getting places or just really busy schedules. It also, you know, helps free up hospital beds. It helps prevent emergency rooms from being overwhelmed. It leads to faster testing. It leads to a higher number of people that we can see.
And in terms of its quality, we know it works well, but, And about 90% of cases of telemedicine, they get the same outcomes if the patient was there in clinic. And that 10%, that's not, it's not clear that they're getting inferior care in most of those cases. So it's an effective treatment. And you could make an argument that it is cost effective in some ways too.
It's particularly clearly for like things like dermatology, pediatrics. These are things where it's clearly cost effective to have it. But even beyond that, it's not even necessarily, I think a strong argument that we'll be losing money from it and that cutting it would help us in the long run. I feel like we're being smart about how to manage American healthcare system and how to keep it afloat.
Telemedicine is going to be an important part of that going forward.
I would add also, you know, we're seeing this active dismantling of the U.S. healthcare infrastructure. And our friends in the academic world in particular, it's a very stressful time for them. Who knows if their studies are going to go through? Who knows if they're going to get their funding? Who knows what's going to stay, what's going to go in the next couple of years.
There's a lot of concern over that, obviously. But even in the medical world outside of the academic centers, I know a lot of doctors right now are concerned. And they're concerned about what's going to happen to the state of our scientific community that helps us with new advancements in medical technology in the coming years. And it seems like, as Venkatesh was alluding to,
We're dismantling all our ability to follow, to study, to really closely track infectious disease in a time that is exceedingly dangerous across the world with rising disease, tuberculosis in this country, measles in this country. In Uganda, there's Ebola again. There's threats all over the world, and this is one of the worst times I could think of to be in this moment of austerity.
And particularly because so much of it seems unclear to us why. Why these things are being done. Is it all because of this ridiculous gender ideology? Do they actually think they're saving money with some of these things? It's a very unclear time. And of course, there are a lot of
People in the medical world, doctors included, that are conservative or Republican voters, getting into conversations with them about this is sort of a tough thing to do. Because, like Venkatesh mentioned, they, like a lot of us, want to make sure we're doing this in a cost-effective manner.
Something we talk about and we have been talking about in medicine for a long time, particularly academic medicine, interestingly enough. which is really on the cutting board. It's academic medicine that usually talks about, you know, trying to be cost-effective. What tests are we going to order? What labs do we need to get? How are we doing this in the most cost-effective way?
These are important things that are discussed. And across the political spectrum in medicine, I think there is some concern, even amongst some of the more right-leaning doctors. But again, it's hard because they've gone this far down the road. It's hard to know, you know, when they're going to pull back. What's the line in the sand for them about what is maybe too far for this administration?
Right.
Yeah, that's right. I mean, even here in the San Francisco Bay Area, you know, I've seen more vaccine hesitation than I remember ever seeing before in the past.
I would add, though, I agree with you on pretty much all of that. I agree that we need to have those conversations, even if they're difficult. We need to be able to look back objectively about things that worked and didn't work. But a lot of these sort of mea culpa's that have come out about like, you know, this is what we went wrong and why we lost trust.
If I'm being honest, including that one from Ashish Jha, it has a lot of, in my opinion, pick me energy, right? A lot of people who are trying to appeal to the incoming administration and be like, hey, look, I'm cool, too. I'm not always about vaccines. And to me, that's just as bad, too. And I do think we need to have an honest conversation.
And I do think we need to be clear about how we do science, something we need to be able to explain. And you're absolutely right, which we didn't do very well. is, look, we are working with information we have at hand. We're doing everything we can. This information may change. When it changes, our recommendations are going to change too. And that is tough.
That is a tough message to get across because people don't like nuance like that. People don't like the uncertainty of that. People want to know yes or no, absolutely. And sometimes it's hard. It's hard to find good communicators in science to do that. But you're exactly right. It is incumbent upon us
as doctors who have a substack like yours, have a podcast like mine, who are academics, who have a reach to students and beyond to communicate these things. And even though it would be awesome If for the next four years, my podcast was just about farts and poop, I know I have to do a lot of this stuff because I know how important this is now more than ever. So I totally agree.
It's going to start with conversations.
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