There’s a machine lots of us encounter as a big impersonal, mechanical apparatus, that has a ghost in it. But it’s a ghost that appears to just a small handful of people. Jean Hannah Edelstein tells the story to Ira.

When Adele wrote into our show last summer, she described herself as “the worst phlebotomist in the whole hospital.” Producer Diane Wu couldn’t resist calling her up to find out exactly what she meant by that.

Pavan Bivigou writes about having sickle-cell anemia.

People given the difficult task of deciding who lives and who dies.

We meet the doctors. Rana Awdish spends hours of each day walking the floors of the ICU checking in on her co-workers, which means that maybe more than any single person in the hospital she knows best what the staff has been going through at each stage of this pandemic. One doctor that has deep ties to Detroit is Geneva Tatem.

When health care premiums went up in New York State, a bunch of people got mad and wrote letters to the state.

Medical Examiner D.J. Drakovic, in Pontiac Michigan, explains how every crime scene is like a novel.

Eileen was desperate to help her son, and the only way to do it involved a perverse legal loophole. But should she dare try it? Shannon Heffernan tells the story. She’s a reporter at WBEZ Chicago.

Host Ira Glass tells the story of what might be one of the most daring surgeries ever performed.

Donald Trump has promised to get rid of Obamacare. Producer David Kestenbaum talks with someone who’d lose their insurance.


When Mariya Karimjee was little, members of her family made a decision that would affect her entire life. Years later, she wants to know why.

Sigrid Fry-Revere was fed up with the kidney donation system in this country. So, she went somewhere that seemed to be doing a better job with its transplant patients— possibly one of the last places you’d expect.

In this act, writer Michael Kinsley describes harnessing the power of his own mind to deal with his Parkinson's diagnosis. Michael Kinsley is a contributing columnist for Vanity Fair and the Washington Post.

Journalist David Epstein tells the story of Jill Viles, who has muscular dystrophy and can’t walk. But she believes that she somehow has same condition as one of the best hurdlers in the world, Priscilla Lopes-Schliep.

On September 29th a medical researcher in Philadelphia fired off a simple, well-meaning tweet, and then barely thought twice about it. Little did she know that by doing that, she was perpetrating covert propaganda on behalf of the U.S. government.

Producer Nancy Updike takes some personal questions about death and dying to a place where they're happening all the time.

Alex Blumberg talks to Shane Dubow about a time decades ago, when Shane went sea kayaking and camping with his friends on the beach in Baja California, Mexico. When Shane’s neck stiffens up on him, he finds himself looking for an unlikely chiropractor, in the middle of nowhere.

Deborah Lott comes from a family that obsesses over health. And when they all get together for dinner, their banter goes on overdrive.

Host Ira Glass tells the story of Sarah Erush, a pharmacist at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. She was contacted by the Food and Drug Administration and encouraged to examine cases of acetaminophen overdose at her hospital.

How could whispering change your life? Andrea Seigel tells this story about finding out that she is undeniably not alone. She’s a novelist with several books including Like the Red Panda.