Empowered Patient Podcast

Dr. Anupam Jena is an economist, a physician, a podcaster, and the Joseph P. Newhouse Professor of Healthcare Policy at the Harvard Medical School. He's also the co-author, along with Dr. Christopher Worsham, of the newly published book Random Acts of Medicine: The Hidden Forces that Sway Doctors, Impact Patients, and Shape Our Health. Anupam, also known as Dr. Bapu, combines his medical training with curiosity about cause and effect to explore explanations for failures and successes in providing healthcare and how chance occurrences affect our health. Of particular interest is the power of natural experiments to enhance understanding of the effect of a treatment or drug within a larger universe than traditional randomized clinical trials.   Bapu elaborates, "One of the benefits of these natural experiments is that they are more generalizable. They tell us what might happen in a real world because you're exactly right. If a clinical trial is performed, it may be performed in a very particular geographic area