The slop we share

Now that I am back in clinic full-time I have tried and failed to pick up on the more clinical podcasts. Both ASCO and ASH have their podcast series, but they are all so formal and scripted you can see the teleprompter scrolling in front of the speakers’ eyes. One potentially bright note could have been Cancer Stories, which are spoken versions of Journal of Clinical Oncology’s Art of Oncology article series. Note the past tense; I have a longstanding antipathy towards “narrative medicine”, a mode of fiction in which doctors combine patient stories, or present a single patient’s story anonymously, to make a point. The fallen king of narrative medicine was the neurologist Oliver Sacks, and look at how that turned out. Social media are of course an even more fertile ground for this kind of fakery; I won’t go into the X, Bluesky, Mastodon, TikTok and YouTube accounts that are completely full of it, but there is a lot of content out there and all of it — all of it — is bullshit. So I was…