Hi, I'm Henry Bear.

And I'm Tyler Johnson.

And you're listening to The Doctors Art, a podcast that explores meaning in medicine.

Throughout our medical training and career, we have pondered, what makes medicine meaningful?

Can a stronger understanding of this meaning create better doctors?

How can we build healthcare institutions that nurture the doctor-patient

connection? What can we learn about the human condition from accompanying our patients in times of

suffering? In seeking answers to these questions, we meet with deep thinkers working across health

care, from doctors and nurses to patients and health care executives, those who have collected a career's

worth of hard-earned wisdom. Probing the moral heart that beats at the core of medicine, we

will hear stories that are by turns heartbreaking, amusing, inspiring, challenging, and

enlightening. We welcome anyone curious about why doctors do what they do. Join us as we think

out loud about what illness and

healing can teach us about some of life's biggest questions.

One of the most mysterious and frightening entities in medicine are prion diseases. These are a group of

rare neurodegenerative disorders that are usually infectious in nature,

but involve not bacteria or viruses, but proteins. Pryons are misfolded proteins that can induce

normal proteins to become misfolded as well, resulting in a chain reaction that leads to

irreversible brain damage and ultimately death. What makes

Priyons alarming is that they are incurable, resistant to usual disinfection methods, can incubate

for decades in a person's brain without symptoms, and are usually associated with 100% mortality

within months to a few years.

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