Hey everyone,
If you’ve watched the show for any length of time, there’s a good chance you’ve seen Dr. Zachary Rubin.
Dr. Rubin is a double board-certified pediatrician, allergist and immunologist, and he has joined me on the show many times to help make sense of the latest health news and medical misinformation.
He’s also built an enormous audience online doing something that has become both incredibly important and increasingly difficult: giving people accurate, evidence-based medical information in an environment that often rewards exactly the opposite.
And that part is especially important to me.
I’ve spent a lot of time recently talking and writing about the attention economy and the way algorithms shape what information reaches us. It’s a major focus of my upcoming book, Pay Attention, because the basic problem is that the best information does not automatically win.
And getting good information in front of people is only part of the challenge. We also have to be able to evaluate what we’re seeing.
How do you know which health claim to take seriously?
How do you think about risk when there isn’t a simple yes-or-no answer?
How do you separate actual evidence from someone on social media who just sounds extremely confident?
That’s a big part of what Dr. Rubin has been helping people do for years, and it’s also the idea behind his upcoming book, Think Like a Doctor.
When Dr. Rubin joined me on the show recently, we actually got into this question of how doctors evaluate risk and uncertainty. He talked about the importance of understanding the risks of doing something versus not doing it, what alternatives exist, and how to have more productive conversations with your doctor when you may only get 10 or 15 minutes with them.
I like the premise of Think Like a Doctor because it isn’t expecting everyone to suddenly become a medical expert. It’s about helping them understand how doctors reason through evidence, uncertainty, risk and competing options so they can make better-informed decisions.
And if you’ve seen Dr. Rubin on the show or follow his work online, you know that’s very much what he does already.
His book is available for pre-order now, and pre-orders are one of the best ways you can support an author. They build momentum, signal demand to retailers, and help a book reach more readers.
If you appreciate the work he does and want to support more of it, I hope you’ll consider pre-ordering a copy.
I’ve said it before, but it’s worth repeating: independent creators succeed because audiences choose to support them. Whether it’s following on social, subscribing to a newsletter, or picking up a book, those decisions make more of a difference than most people realize.
Thank you, as always, for supporting independent media and for helping creators like us continue doing this work.
I appreciate it.
—David
Dr. Rubin is the best and I credit his wife's videos for having kept me safe while working retail throughout the Covid epidemic.
I recently became aware of a problem with online content that seems likely to impact health. AI could lessen it-- but doesn't. In fact it makes it worse. The problem is outdated information. The web is filled with old sites dating back over a decade, that have not been updated. When AI scrapes the web for information, it sometimes goes further back in time than the average user is apt to look (like who searches page 10 in Google? ) thus digs up information that may have since been disproved or even found dangerous. If you point out a factual error to Google AI it apologizes, but does it learn from its mistake and change the information dispensed? What, I wonder, are AI companies doing to ensure people in 2030 aren't taking horse medicine because AI found a 2020 Daffy MAGA Duck site and told them it was a fine idea? Seems like the web needs a Snopes-type site for all matters medical.
It isn't just medical misinformation that is exploding on the internet.