Primary care, bloodletting, and what medicine got right

Robert C. Smith is best known for arguing medicine lost its mind. This episode he explains why he is still proud to be a doctor. Primary care physicians deliver 75 percent of the nation's mental health care without training for it, and Smith has spent his career trying to fix that. But before the fix, he makes a case that may surprise his own readers: modern medicine has been astonishingly effective at what it was built to do. This episode is based on his article "How the mind-body split in medicine shaped modern clinical care," published on KevinMD. You will hear how 2,500 years of four humors and bloodletting gave way to a physical-disease framework that doubled life expectancy from 40 to 80. You will also learn why that same framework now leaves psychiatry stalled. Hear why the reformer who wants to overhaul mental health care still says medicine has never been better at the thing it was built to do.

Tune into our episode "2026 Cholesterol Guidelines: LDL goals, lipoprotein(a), and coronary calcium scoring," brought to you by Novartis Pharmaceuticals Corporation.

For the first time in eight years, LDL cholesterol goals have changed, and preventive cardiologist Seth Baum says the new guidelines are a long-overdue course correction. He breaks down the new LDL targets for your highest-risk patients, why the LDL hypothesis should be retired in favor of the LDL fact, why lipoprotein(a) screening finally belongs in every patient's workup, what a coronary calcium score over 300 really means for how aggressively you treat, and how to talk to statin-skeptical patients without losing their trust. Listen now at KevinMD.com/cholesterol.

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