Venkatesh Ramnath
speaker
47 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Venkatesh Ramnath’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Mm-hmm. Or even just the questions that we are getting from patients. A lot of patients now are asking me really financial questions. I mean, literally the other day, I had a woman who was unfortunately having septic shock and was faced with having to amputate her leg. And I was speaking with her husband because she was becoming more and more delirious.
He was just asking me about, well, I'm going to have to sell my house in order to fund what might come down the pike as far as being at home with services. I was trying to get an understanding of how he viewed his wife actually going through the thing that we're watching in the moment.
But it's a preoccupation that has taken up a lot of space in the room, and it's now coming on to physicians to sort of navigate at least some questions and answer those questions around it. So that's a long way of saying that physicians and nurses and other healthcare professionals are feeling more and more stress in a system that's just buckling, right?
And the last thing anybody needs is to be having to do more without really a clear... understanding of the purpose around it, right? And we are all for cost effectiveness. We want that to work. We also want to provide care irrespective of someone's religious, political, or other beliefs. And yet, you know, we have to work within a system that we kind of
are not really understanding how they're approaching this issue. Are they with us or against us or somewhere in between? It's sort of a moving target. And so I think that's what's kind of sandwiched a lot of healthcare professionals. And we don't really know where to turn for some of the answers that we ourselves are looking for.
It's sort of a vexing question because I think some of this is... Let's be clear. Some of this is on our messaging. As healthcare professionals, I mean, there are more and more articles. In fact, there was a Wall Street Journal piece a couple weeks ago that was saying how patients are increasingly not trusting their doctors. And there are data to say that we don't communicate very well, right?
So there is that, and that's on us. Mm-hmm. And, you know, another op-ed piece in the Boston Globe by Ashish Jha, you know, did a mea culpa around some of the things that public health, we did wrong. We got it wrong in COVID where we didn't, you know, deal with some of the doubts and lack of evidentiary base for masking and some of these other things that basically hurt us in the end.
So there's definitely that. However, you know, restoring the trust in healthcare professionals is, is sort of like a basic step to anyone getting their health care. I mean, I think people still go to their doctors. Most people still trust their doctor to some degree. And I think that that's at least a bright spot in where we are. Because when we've lost that...
I think we're we're really in trouble. I mean, it's slipping, but I think that there is a way to to restore that trust. But it starts so that it just starts with a conversation. You know, if someone has a vaccine hesitancy or they don't understand what's going on, that's the opportunity to open the doors to a dialogue conversation.
And I think maybe that's, you know, maybe that's the starting point for any of this. We all want cost effectiveness. We all want, you know, transparency. We also want to have choices that make sense to us, but let's not make it an adversarial confrontation. And I think that that goes for both sides.
That's a hard question to answer. I would say, let me back up. You know, I think that the COVID pandemic Yes, there are a lot of things that went well. The vaccine development was phenomenal. I mean, revolutionary. Who would have expected that to happen?
However, it also just revealed how shattered our public health system really is in terms of messaging, even detection, spreading information, even the vaccine distribution. was completely chaotic, right? So I don't want to say that, you know, the public health response during COVID was some sort of paragon to be emulated or replicated, right? So that said, though, absolutely.
I mean, you know, how are we going to handle a new era of this what-if scenario where we don't know what virus is coming next. I mean, I'm seeing these days, I'm even seeing viruses that never caused the kind of respiratory failure in the past. They're doing it now, whether it's RSV, the respiratory syncytial virus,
or even non-COVID coronavirus, which should just give you a cold, the sniffles, and yet it's causing devastating, you know, pneumonias. So we're in a new era and, you know, antibiotic resistance is not getting any less, you know, problematic. So what do we do in this era? Well, I think awareness is the first thing. OK, awareness around. Yes.
I mean, these diseases are transmitted from person to person. You know, we all know somebody who doesn't want to take a vaccine. I mean, I don't think that's a surprise to say we know of somebody or directly or maybe one degree of separation. Right. And I think you need to have those community conversations. You need to have one on one conversations.
Yes, it's going to be uncomfortable, but we got to talk about it and talk to your health care provider about it. I mean, yes, you can look up stuff on TikTok. Yes, you can look up stuff on Google or you name your online resource, but you want to have a person that can actually understand from years of living and breathing this stuff
and also who listens to you as a human being in the same community or somewhere nearabouts, right? To put together what the science says in some sort of meaningful way to you and not some anonymous, you know, resource that may or may not have all the, you know, all the data at their fingertips, you know? So, so I guess it still goes back to how does anyone find reliable information and
Where do you go when you've got questions? Most people want a human being who's lived and breathed this with experience to help them navigate. I certainly see that not just as a doctor, but as a friend, as a family member. I mean, I constantly, you know, they're asking me these things.
And I would suggest that, you know, your audience may have connections both personally, but also professionally to those folks that can help them navigate.
if I could just follow up with that. I think part of what will help with the support for some of these programs is to take a few minutes to think about what the other side is worried about, right? I mean, we all know about
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