This Podcast Will Kill You
by Exactly Right and iHeartPodcasts
This podcast might not actually kill you, but Erin Welsh and Erin Allmann Updyke cover so many things that can. In each episode, they tackle a different topic, teaching listeners about the biology, history, and epidemiology of a different disease or medical mystery. They do the scientific research, so you don’t have to. Since 2017, Erin and Erin have explored chronic and infectious diseases, medications, poisons, viruses, bacteria and scientific discoveries. They’ve researched public health subjects including plague, Zika, COVID-19, lupus, asbestos, endometriosis and more.Each episode is accompanied by a creative quarantini cocktail recipe and a non-alcoholic placeborita.Erin Welsh, Ph.D. is a co-host of the This Podcast Will Kill You. She is a disease ecologist and epidemiologist and works full-time as a science communicator through her work on the podcast. Erin Allmann Updyke, MD, Ph.D. is a co-host of This Podcast Will Kill You. She’s an epidemiologist and disease ecologist curr
Episodes
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Special Episode: Dr. Lindsey Fitzharris & The Sleuth-Hound
Since his first appearance in A Study in Scarlet in 1887, Sherlock Holmes has captured hearts and imaginations around the world. Featured in countless tv shows, movies, books, plays, comic books, songs, and other media, Holmes has been firmly cemented as one of the most recognizable characters...
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Ep 225 Peptides: What your peptide dealer doesn’t want you to know
Looking to get swole (do people still say that)? Want to rewind the clock and smooth those bothersome wrinkles? Trying to lose weight rapidly and without a prescription? If you’ve spent any time on social media lately, chances are you’ve been inundated with ads, influencers, and podcast bros...
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Ep 224 Snake Oil: The Great American Fraud
Come one, come all to learn of the miraculous news we’re buzzing to share with you at this limited time, low price offer. If you’ve been troubled by aches and pains, sores and sneezes, look no further than this very special episode - good for whatever ails you. Brimming with historical detail and...
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Special Episode: Robert Kolker & The Vanishing Family
A diagnosis of dementia of any kind is devastating. For those with the hereditary form of frontotemporal dementia (FTD), it could mean an entire family is destined for the same fate. In this week’s TPWKY book club episode, award-winning author Robert Kolker paints an intimate portrait of one such...
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Ep 223 ALS: Unraveling the mystery
Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, has long mystified the medical community and brought tremendous sorrow to those impacted by the condition. But to tell the story of ALS as one solely of tragedy would do a disservice to those who have long fought to develop…
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Ep 222 Vitamin K: Calling the shots
Shortly after birth, many newborns are given vitamin K to help their blood clot properly and reduce the chances of hemorrhage. Increasingly, especially here in the US, parents are refusing this life-saving intervention, leaving these babies more likely to develop deficiency bleeding which can…
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Special Episode: Dr. Alanna Skuse & The Surgeon, The Midwife, The Quack
Imagine yourself as a 17th century English peasant or merchant or noble. Let’s say you’re dealing with some intense stomach pain or a cut on your leg that won’t heal. Where do you turn to for help? Today’s book club episode reveals that the answer depends on your medical needs, your wealth, your...
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Ep 221 Electroconvulsive Therapy Part 2: A current conversation
This week, we’re picking up where we left off last episode in our exploration of ECT by examining how this therapy is administered, which conditions it’s used for, and what we know about why it works. To start off, we take you through the procedure step-by-step, including prep and what someone...
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Ep 220 Electroconvulsive Therapy Part 1: A charged history
For many, a mention of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) conjures images of torture or mind control from popular media like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest or Requiem for a Dream. Comparatively few know that ECT is not only still used today but is an incredibly safe and effective treatment for an...
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Special Episode: Clayton Page Aldern & The Weight of Nature
Already this summer, heatwaves are causing thousands of deaths across the world, catastrophic flooding threatens millions, wildfires rage across enormous swathes of the globe, many regions face extreme drought conditions, and a very strong El Niño is predicted for later this year, leading to...
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Ep 219 The Brown Recluse: Fearsome foe or slandered spider?
Few spiders hold the dubious honor of name recognition among the general public. Most that do, like black widows, Australian funnel-web, the Goliath birdeater, are renowned not for their cute colors or weaving skills but for being fearsome, dangerous predators. The brown recluse is no exception.…
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Special Episode: Deborah Cohen & Bad Influence
If you have a medical question, where do you turn? How often is google or social media your first stop? As you sift through the AI overview and countless reels professing to have the answers, it becomes harder and harder to separate fact from fiction. Do these supplements actually do what they...
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Ep 218 The Lowdown on Statins
Last week, we set the stage by breaking down the science behind cholesterol: how it moves through our body, why it causes disease, and when we discovered the link between LDL and atherosclerosis. This week, armed with that knowledge, we’re asking the big question: what do we do about high...
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Ep 217 The High Stakes of Cholesterol
So your latest blood test results have come in, and you see a couple of numbers for cholesterol. What do those numbers mean, and why do we care about them? In this first part of our cholesterol miniseries, we break down the science behind this compound and trace how we made the link between…
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Ep 216 Cyclospora: Explosive Diarrhea Everywhere
You’ve seen the headlines: a food-borne parasite is infecting people across the US, leaving them chained to the toilet sometimes for weeks on end, as they are ravaged by wave after wave of gastrointestinal upset. What the heck is cyclosporiasis and where did it come from? How scared should we be…
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Special Episode: Alev Scott & Cash Cow
Social media ads for egg freezing. A craigslist-like site for breast milk. Fertility fairs featuring IVF clinics alongside shamanic nutritionists. Surrogacy contracts offering a discount for multiple embryos. The rapidly-growing global fertility industry promises hope, fulfillment, and control…
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Ep 215 The Hidden Depths of Earwax
In keeping with last week’s theme of “bodily excretions that are kinda gross that you don’t really think about but are actually really important”, we’re devoting this episode to earwax, aka cerumen. In one hour, we somehow manage to weave together stories of earwax impaction, misadventures in ear...
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Ep 214 Boogers: Digging for treasure
Hard and crusty. Green and gloopy. Clear and watery. Boogers come in a veritable rainbow of colors and a full spectrum of textures from liquid to solid. They’re really quite impressive if you think about it. Which, of course, few of us do, besides adding tissues to our shopping list or cursing…
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Special Episode: Dr. Carl Elliott & The Occasional Human Sacrifice
Stories of unethical medical experimentation often center around the individuals who spearheaded such atrocities or highlight how patient protection laws were changed in response to the studies. But rarely do they focus on the people who fought to bring these harms to light: the whistleblower.…
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Ep 213 Burns Part 2: It’s like sci-fi but real
At the turn of the 20th century, a severe burn was often a death sentence. Today, that is no longer the case. Over the past eighty years, burn care has undergone a profound transformation thanks to crucial advances across diverse areas of medicine, such as skin grafting, antiseptic technique, and...
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Ep 212 Burns Part 1: The first million or so years
Burns have been a part of the human experience since our hominin relatives began controlling fire 1.5 million years ago. Until very recently, we’ve been limited in our ability to manage burn wounds with any success, having instead to rely on our body’s innate healing responses. In this episode…
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Special Episode: Alexandra Sifferlin & The Elusive Body
An accurate diagnosis can give us so much. It can give us a path forward. It can give us answers to long-standing questions. And it can give us much-needed hope. Yet many people around the world wait years to receive an accurate diagnosis, which can take a profound physical and emotional toll.…
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Ep 211 Motion Sickness: It comes in waves
It comes on sneakily. You become aware of your stomach. You break out in a cold sweat. Your mouth fills with saliva. And before you know it, you’re leaning over the side of the boat (or out of the car, or into the airplane sick bag), barfing up your breakfast. Motion sickness. We’ve all been…
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Ep 210 Histoplasmosis: Bats, birds, and budding yeast
Once thought to be a rare, always fatal disease, histoplasmosis is now recognized as one of the most prevalent fungal infections in North America. It infects hundreds of thousands of people every year, and its distribution is growing. In this episode, we dissect this abundant fungus, examining…
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Special Episode: Dr. Olivia Weisser & The Dreaded Pox
In a time when smallpox, tuberculosis, measles, and typhus ran rampant through the streets of London, there was another disease that instilled even more fear than these other killers: syphilis. So feared and so stigmatized was syphilis that it was sometimes called “the secret disease.” A…
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Ep 209 Dietary Guidelines Part 2: Why is there protein in everything?
If you’ve come across the latest dietary guidelines, a few things may have caught your attention: a big ol’ steak front and center in the new “inverted pyramid”, beef tallow and butter recommended as “healthy” fats, a declaration that the war on protein is ending. “Since when have we been at war...
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Ep 208 Dietary Guidelines Part 1: Who’s behind these guidelines?
Over the decades, dietary guidelines have taken a diverse array of shapes, from pamphlets to wheels, from plates to pyramids. In many cases, the shapes have changed more than the recommendations they contain. This week and next, we explore those recommendations - who’s making them, how they have...
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Special Episode: Adam Kucharski & Proof
Why do we believe what we believe? Is what we believe the truth? How can we convince others of our beliefs? If you’ve ever found yourself pondering these questions, you know that the answers are rarely clear-cut. We need to form beliefs in order to navigate the world, but how skilled are we at...
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Ep 207 Tear Gas: How can a chemical weapon be “humane”?
Tear gas is an expected, normalized part of protests today. But its use in international war is banned. How can that be? That’s just one of the questions we investigate in this episode. First, we take you through the long history of tear gas and its emergence alongside deadlier chemical weapons...
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Ep 206 Oropouche Virus: More than a smidge worrisome
Though discovered relatively recently, Oropouche virus has been making headlines as an emerging vector-borne infectious disease on the rise. Not transmitted by the usual suspects (like ticks and mosquitoes), this virus is instead spread through the bites of midges or no-see-ums. Since these...
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Ep 205 Cancer Part 4: Where do things stand today?
For the entirety of our species’ history, our approach to cancer has largely been to react, to design new therapies and better combinations of treatments. This energy has certainly been well-spent, but what if we didn’t have to use treatment at all? Or what if we could minimize the use of...
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Ep 204 Cancer Part 3: How do we treat it?
A century and a half ago, the list of effective cancer treatments was essentially a single entry: surgery. Today, in 2026, you’d need pages to contain the number of treatments available, and multiple notebooks to delineate all of the various therapies currently in development. It is nothing short...
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Special Episode: Lawrence Ingrassia & A Fatal Inheritance
For centuries, physicians noticed that cancer sometimes ran in families, but until the 1960s, an answer to this mystery remained out of reach. Only then were scientists beginning to unlock the cellular dynamics underlying cancer, and what they found finally allowed grief-stricken families to put…
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Ep 203 Cancer Part 2: Why does it happen?
Each of our cells can become cancerous. It’s an uncomfortable, yet unavoidable truth. Nor is it a truth restricted to our species - cancer is a consequence of complex life. The features that make a cell cancerous are those that, under other circumstances, are beneficial, essential even, for an...
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Ep 202 Cancer Part 1: What is it?
Cancer has touched every one of us in some capacity, and learning of a diagnosis inspires many more questions than it answers. In this four-part series on cancer, we aim to lay a foundation of knowledge that will help make sense of this multifaceted disease. We begin our four-part series on…
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Special Episode: Jon Adams and Edmund Ramsden & Rat City
What happens if you put a bunch of rats in an enclosure and provision them with unlimited food and water? Researcher John B. Calhoun was committed to finding out. Results from Calhoun’s “rat utopia” experiments from the mid-20th century revealed a behavioral dark side that emerged as space grew...
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Ep 201 Poop Part 2: Flushed away
Poop is an incredibly valuable and massively underutilized resource. However, most of us don’t see it that way because of our evolutionarily ingrained disgust towards poop. Flush toilets and intricate sewer systems have revolutionized health and hygiene by whisking our poop far away where we…
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Ep 200 Poop Part 1: How the sausage gets made
It might be stinky and it might be unpleasant to behold, but we all do it. For many of us, our poop is out of sight, out of mind once we flush it away. But for the next hour and fifteen minutes or so, we’re going to bring it back into mind as we delve into the rich world of poop. This episode…
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Special Episode: Nicola Twilley & Frostbite
For much of the world, refrigeration is such a commonplace technology that we rarely stop to wonder at the many ways it has transformed our lives. From the foods we grow to where we grow them, from how they taste to what we eat, refrigeration has dramatically - and quite recently - changed our...
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Ep 199 Sleep Part 2: Predictably unpredictable
Now that we know just how critical sleep is, we’re all making sure we get the amount we need, right? Unfortunately no. One-third to one-half of Americans are not getting enough sleep, according to public health guidelines. Why is that? Hypotheses abound, but many point the finger of blame at...
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Ep 198 Sleep Part 1: Sleeping with one eye open
Sleep is a universal experience. It’s not just the lion that sleeps tonight - it’s also the butterfly, the chicken, the jellyfish, the dog, the snake, the worm, and of course the human. What is this widespread physiological process whose spell we are all under? What purpose (or purposes) does it...
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Special Episode: Daniel Stone & American Poison
The widespread use of leaded gasoline in the 20th century led to one of the world’s biggest public health and environmental disasters, the effects of which are still present today. Since its development in the 1920s, leaded gasoline has been linked to premature death, cognitive impairment, and...
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Ep 197 Detox: Enemas for everyone
Ah, the new year. After the last month and a half of indulgent food and drink, disrupted schedules, and laying around the house, who doesn’t feel like they’re in need of a whole-body cleanse? There are plenty of companies who are more than happy to provide that product or service that promises to...
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From the Vault - Endometriosis: Menstrual Backwash (Ep 88)
This episode originally aired on January 11th, 2022. Chances are you know someone with endometriosis, or perhaps you’re affected yourself. But despite its incredibly high prevalence, endo remains almost criminally understudied, undertreated, and underacknowledged. In this episode, we aim to shed...
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From the Vault - Hepatitis B: Hepatiti, Take 2 (Ep 89)
This episode originally aired on January 25th, 2022. In light of the recent changes by RFK jr’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) to eliminate the universal birth dose of the hepatitis B vaccine in the US, a decision which will result in preventable infections and deaths in this...
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Ep 196 Health Myths: Fact or fiction?
Did your grandma ever warn you against going out in the cold with wet hair because “you’ll catch your death”? Or have you ever tossed a few more carrots into your shopping basket in the hope that they’ll improve your vision? There are countless health myths about how to prevent or treat disease,...
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Special Episode: Dr. Homer Venters & Outbreak Behind Bars
[Content warning: self-harm, suicide, violence] In this day and age, we are equipped with an abundance of tools and knowledge to fight the spread of disease. Yet what good does that toolkit do if we lack the resources or the will to implement it where it is needed? One area of great need is our...
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Ep 195 Salt Part 2: The Substance
We ended last week’s episode on a bit of a cliffhanger: is salt actually bad for us and if so, why does there still seem to be a debate? This week’s episode holds all the answers. We’re sifting through the noise to figure out what salt actually does in our bodies, how it might impact our health,...
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Ep 194 Salt Part 1: The Seasoning
Have you ever thrown a pinch of spilled salt over your left shoulder? Or said to someone “well, take his opinion with a grain of salt”? Or looked up the potential salary of a job listing? Salt is so deeply embedded in our cultures, our languages, our history as a species that we often take its...
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Special Episode: Gabriel Weston & Alive
In an anatomy and physiology class, you may learn how the different heart valves work to circulate your blood, how the structure of your kidney helps to maintain electrolyte levels, and how the expansion and contraction of your lungs sets off a carefully orchestrated cascade of gas exchange and...
About this show
This podcast might not actually kill you, but Erin Welsh and Erin Allmann Updyke cover so many things that can. In each episode, they tackle a different topic, teaching listeners about the biology, history, and epidemiology of a different disease or medical mystery. They do the scientific research, so you don’t have to. Since 2017, Erin and Erin have explored chronic and infectious diseases, medications, poisons, viruses, bacteria and scientific discoveries. They’ve researched public health subjects including plague, Zika, COVID-19, lupus, asbestos, endometriosis and more.Each episode is accompanied by a creative quarantini cocktail recipe and a non-alcoholic placeborita.Erin Welsh, Ph.D. is a co-host of the This Podcast Will Kill You. She is a disease ecologist and epidemiologist and works full-time as a science communicator through her work on the podcast. Erin Allmann Updyke, MD, Ph.D. is a co-host of This Podcast Will Kill You. She’s an epidemiologist and disease ecologist curr
Hosted by
Exactly Right and iHeartPodcasts