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Ground Truths

Owen Tripp: Why Can't I Find and Get to the Right Doctor?

13 Jul 2025

Transcription

Full Episode

6.005 - 37.943 Eric Topol

Hello, this is Eric Topol from Ground Truths, and I'm delighted to welcome Owen Tripp, who is a CEO of Included Health. And Owen, I'd like to start off, if you would, with the story from 2016, because really what I'm interested in is patients and how to get the right doctor. So can you tell us about when you lost your hearing and your right ear back, what, nine years ago or so?

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38.584 - 71.292 Owen Tripp

Yeah, it's amazing to say nine years, Eric, but obviously, as your listeners will soon understand, a pretty vivid memory in my past. So I sort of had been working as I do and noticed sort of a loss of hearing in my right ear. I'd never experienced any hearing loss before. And I went twice actually to a sort of national primary care chain that now owned by Amazon actually.

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71.332 - 103.794 Owen Tripp

And they described it as eustachian tube dysfunction, which you know is a pretty benign common thing that basically meant that sort of my tubes were blocked and that I needed to have some drainage. They recommended Sudafed to no effect. And it was only a couple of weeks later where I was walking actually some of the senior medical team at my company down to the San Francisco Giants game.

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104.155 - 129.524 Owen Tripp

And I was describing this experience of hearing loss. And I said I was also losing a little bit of sensation in the right side of my ear. And they said, that is not eustachian tube dysfunction. And, well, I can let the story unfold from there. But basically... My colleagues helped me quickly put together a plan to get this properly diagnosed and treated.

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129.564 - 146.863 Owen Tripp

The underlying condition is called vestibular schwannoma, even more commonly known as an acoustic neuroma. So a pretty rare, benign brain tumor that exists on the vestibular nerve. And it would have cost my life had it not been treated.

147.89 - 168.97 Eric Topol

Yeah, so from what I gather, you saw an ENT physician, but that ENT physician was not really well-versed in this condition, which is, I guess, a bit surprising. And then eventually you got to the right ENT physician in San Francisco, is that right?

169.54 - 193.827 Owen Tripp

Well, the first doctor was probably an internal medicine doctor. And I think it's fair to say that he had probably not seen many, if any, cases. By the time I reached an ENT, they were interested in working me up for what's known as SSNHL, Sudden Sensory Neural Hearing Loss.

193.807 - 218.008 Owen Tripp

which is basically a fancy term for you lose hearing for a variety of possible pathologies and reasons, but you go through a process of differential diagnosis to understand what's actually going on. You know, by the time that I reached that ENT, you know, the audio tests had showed that I had significant hearing loss in my right ear.

218.068 - 229.787 Owen Tripp

And what an MRI would confirm was this mass that I just described to you, which was quite large. It was already about a centimeter large and growing into the inner ear canal.

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