Welcome to Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health,

where we bring evidence, experience, and perspective to make sense of today's leading health challenges.

If you have questions or ideas for us, please send an email to public health question at jh.h.u.edu.

That's public health question at jh.u.org for future podcast episodes.

Hey listeners, it's Lindsay Smith-Rogers, producer of public health on call.

Today, examining a claim in the Make America Healthy Again report from the Department

of Health and Human Services.

Specifically, the claim that there are no benefits to children from some common surgeries.

We hear from a surgeon, Dr. Emily Boss, the director of pediatric otolaryngology at Johns Hopkins,

and Dr. Boss speaks with Dr. Josh

Starstein about tonsillectomy, adenoidectomy, and tympanostomy, otherwise known as getting

your tonsils and adenoids out and ear tubes. Let's listen. Dr. Emily Boss, thank you so much

for joining me today on Public Health on call. We're going to be

talking about a couple surgical procedures in children. I can't wait. Thank you for having me.

Now, let's be up front. The reason I gave you a call is that there was this report about making

America's children healthy again that came out of the Department of Health

and Human Services. And I'm reading along the report. And I noticed they took a couple swipes

at surgeries that are relatively common in kids. One of them is adenotonsalectomy when kids get

their tonsils and their adenoids out. And the other is tympanostomy tubes,

which are basically ear tubes, which also is a surgery that some kids get. And in the first case,

they said that there was no benefit for getting your adenoids and tonsils out. And they wrote

that there are many and often severe harms of this surgery, which they described

...