Support for The Nocturnist comes from the California Medical Association.

At the Nocturnist, we are careful to ensure that all stories comply with health care privacy laws.

Details may have been changed to ensure patient confidentiality.

All views expressed are those of the person speaking and not their employer.

You're listening to the nocturnous conversations.

I'm Emily Silverman.

Many of the people listening to this show are clinicians.

We see patients one by one, in the the office or in the hospital room.

But there's a different way of thinking about care, a broader way, which is focused on populations, neighborhoods, communities, even entire nations.

This is the field of public health, where something simple like attacks on sugary beverages or a law about speed limits can have enormous implications for the health of all of us.

And yet we spend 40 times more money on health care than we do on public health in the United

States.

Today's guest, Dr. Michael Stein, has written a book that explores this asymmetry in how we focus our resources, and offer some explanations for why that might be and for how we can harmonize these two seemingly very different worlds.

Michael is a primary care physician, chair of health policy at the Boston University School of Public

Health, and the author of several books, including Me versus Us, a Health Divided, which was a

finalist for the 2022 Association of Publishers' Prose Book Award. In my conversation with Michael,

he offers a definition for what public health is, discusses the

public health interventions that have been the most successful across time, and explores

the way that language and rhetoric shape how we perceive the efforts of those working in public

health. But first, I asked Michael to read an excerpt from his book, Me versus Us, a Health Divided.

Here's Michael.

I have a friend who runs a hospital.

...