Hey, Drew.

Hi, great to be here.

So you've written for us for a long time, but in addition to being a writer, you are also a physician.

And so I'm curious, you know, when you have the CDC and HHS putting out guidance that's either contradictory or maybe even, you know, based

in something that's been debunked, how does that confusion show up in your conversations with

patients? It makes it really challenging. In the past, we had a system in which scientists at the

federal level and politicians at the federal level

were responsible. And they put out information that you could be confident in that you could

talk about in a thoughtful way with your patients and take that information and then translate it

to the person in front of you. And now that system has been kind of turned upside down.

So this idea that we can rely on the health recommendations that are coming out of the federal

government no longer stands, and that puts a lot of pressure on states and localities,

professional societies, to step in to fill that very large void. Do you find that you have a lot of patients sort of coming in having done their own research? Like they, obviously they're more confused, but do you think that there's a lot more of people kind of using websites and chat GPT to try to make sense of things? Well, you know, people have been, you know, quote unquote, doing their own research for a long time. I think with the rise of the Internet and Google at the, you know, beginning of that

era, we've seen people come in with access to information, good information, and bad information

that they didn't used to have. So that part isn't new. What's new now is that a lot of misinformation

or low-quality information is coming directly from sources of authority

that you would otherwise have trusted.

And now you can no longer trust it.

So it was the case until recently

that people who were skeptical of institutions

were the ones that weren't trusting

what was coming out

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