behind the knife the surgery podcast where we take a behind the scenes intimate look at surgery

from leaders in the field.

Welcome back to Behind the Knife. This is Patrick George Off. We've got an interesting

episode for you today and it's a bit of a departure from the standard clinical realm we find

ourselves in most of the time today. We're going to talk about this brave new world we have

stumbled into where facts do not always reign supreme and there's most definitely been an

extraordinary and really truly historic change in the way our society interacts with information,

whether it be misinformation disinformation or conspiracies theories or fake news and as this

pandemic just rages endlessly on and on we as healthcare providers have felt this in a really

major way and so for many of us it's been an exhausting slog through one COVID surge

after another and for many of us it's been really a visceral and at times an agonizing experience

and we can a lot of times literally watch folks die on a ventilator alone without family

and it's really quite awful but science caught up and it gave us vaccines and with these vaccines we

we got hope too and yet here we are slowly emerging from yet another surge and this one made up

almost exclusively of the unvaccinated so for many of us on the front line it's just hard to wrap

our hands around it all and you know when folks take positions against tried and true public health

measures whether it be our patients our neighbors our families or friends it can be both

incoherent and and really complex for us so fortunately we've got with us a very special guest

today Dr. Brian Southwell who is here to help us make sense of it all Dr. Southwell welcome.

Thanks so much Patrick it's really an honor to be here and it's a good opportunity to thank you

for your service as well I'm not doing all this. So Dr. Southwell is senior director of the

science and the public sphere program at the nonprofit research institute RTI International.

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