Lethal Injection Ethics, Meditation Dangers, GRAIL Cancer Screening

Zubin Damania (0:00)

All right, welcome back to the show, VPZD Episode 44, Dr. Zubin Damania, Dr. Vinay Prasad. Today, we're gonna be talking about liquid cancer biopsies.

Should doctors be involved in state-sanctioned lethal injections and executions? We're gonna talk about the harms of meditation, which are rarely discussed, and we might talk about the measurement industrial complex in healthcare, and do measuring physicians and clinicians actually improve outcomes?

Vinay Prasad (0:28)

It's good to be back. It's good to be back here on a Sunday morning, and we're doing it live, so we'll also take listener questions.

Zubin Damania (0:34)

Exactly, and I'll say Evelyn's here, Happy Sunday. Kathy says, Happy Sunday, Branch with VPZD. So we are on fire today. They look mischievous. That's our thumbnail. We both look like we're ready to burn it all down.

So, all right, it's good to spend a Sunday here. Let's start with this thing, grail.

Vinay Prasad (0:53)

Grail, liquid biopsy.

Zubin Damania (0:55)

Liquid biopsy, so people have been talking about this as the grail.

Vinay Prasad (0:57)

Yeah, the holy grail.

Zubin Damania (0:58)

The holy grail of cancer screening. And what is a liquid biopsy? Maybe fill us in on from the beginning on this.

Vinay Prasad (1:04)

So, a liquid biopsy is a biopsy from a liquid, no. It's a blood-based test. It's a blood-based test. It's a fancy way of saying a blood test.

Zubin Damania (1:14)

Oh, a BBT.

Vinay Prasad (1:14)

A BBT, a blood-based test. Now I'm just making up acronyms. Speaking of which, you know, did you see this Elizabeth Holmes movies coming out?

Zubin Damania (1:21)

I've heard about this.

Vinay Prasad (1:21)

Oh, yeah. So, you can see everything. It's three hours long. It's supposed to be like haunting. Watch the preview. We should watch the preview after this. It's like, it shows her-

Zubin Damania (1:32)

Is it haunting just because she has the complexion of a ghost?

Vinay Prasad (1:36)

Because she doesn't blink her eyes. She doesn't blink her eyes? No, I think it's because she's so firmly committed to the fact that her product worked, Theranos worked, and that this is all a scam. And she's trying to manipulate the journalist who's following her and manipulate her husband.

Zubin Damania (1:50)

So, okay. I'll just say this real quick as an expert in delusion, as a delusional myself, and we will talk about meditation and delusion later.

The inability of the ego to let go of a particular fixated identity, like the one who's going to save lab medicine, is really profound. So, do you remember cold fusion? Were you too young to remember?

Vinay Prasad (2:11)

I remember the idea of cold fusion.

Zubin Damania (2:12)

Right. The idea that you could put a couple of electrodes in with palladium electrodes and actually cause fusion through electrolysis.

Vinay Prasad (2:19)

And then there's some like magnet that prevents it from going outside of the zone or something?

Zubin Damania (2:23)

It's a whole like thing where you could do it at room temperature.

Vinay Prasad (2:26)

Okay.

Zubin Damania (2:26)

Yeah. So not the magnet thing where you're controlling plasma temperatures of tens of millions of degrees. So this was going to save everything. And the Pons and Fleischmann were the scientists that came up with this in the 80s. And there was Newsweek articles. And I remember as a kid, a little nerd, I was like, oh my God, we've solved like everything. Like there's going to be no global warming. There's going to be, it's abundant.

Vinay Prasad (2:48)

It's the holy grail of its time.

Zubin Damania (2:49)

If you will. Pons and Fleischmann, of course, it was debunked. No one could replicate the experiment. It turns out there were measurement errors, whatever it was.

Vinay Prasad (2:56)

Sounds like you can be president of Stanford with that kind of.

Zubin Damania (2:58)

Yeah.

Vinay Prasad (3:01)

You're on your way. Exactly.

Zubin Damania (3:03)

I mean, the president of Stanford, Theranos.

And so to this day, those two guys swear to God that this thing's gonna work and it will work. And you think about the ivermectin guys do the same thing. You think about-

Vinay Prasad (3:16)

Oh, they were in my feed this week.

Zubin Damania (3:18)

Give everyone a booster and mask toddlers, people saying, we just didn't boost and toddle mask enough. So everybody, once you get an identity around a belief, you're gonna fight for it and it's very hard. It's almost like a death when it gets ripped from you. So Theranos.

Vinay Prasad (3:31)

Theranos, so I mean- So she's doing this. Yeah, so Theranos, I think the documentary would be great. We should go see it.