Course Description

Instructor: Karen Steinberg

What are we to make of constantly changing healthcare messages, messages that directly impact us? Should I get a PSA or a mammogram?  Can herd immunity be an alternative to vaccines during a pandemic? When do doctors predict a cure for cancer? To begin, we’ll explain the different types of studies that provide doctors with the necessary information to make screening and treatment recommendations as well as to prevent disease. We’ll then examine three examples of studies that led to important advances in preventing the biggest killers: infectious diseases, heart disease, and cancer. Next, we’ll explore examples of recommendations that continue to change and the reasons behind these changes, including PSA testing and mammography, as well as the evolving messages for prescribing medications to healthy people for disease prevention including statin therapy.

 We’ll delve into the idea of personalized medicine and separate realistic expectations from exaggerated claims. We’ll discuss pandemics, including Covid-19, which epidemiologists say was not “the big one.” What exactly is this “big one” known as x-disease? Lastly, we’ll discuss the problem of the politicization of healthcare.

Bio: Dr. Steinberg received her PhD in experimental pathology from Emory University and began working at the National Center for Environmental Health, CDC.  She served as Chief of the Molecular Biology Branch for most of her 33-year career at CDC.  She also served as Acting Director, Office of Women’s Health, CDC.  From 2004 until 2010 she was Senior Science Officer for the Coordinating Center for Health Promotion which was home for CDC’s activities in chronic disease, birth defects, and genomics. She has authored more than sixty peer-reviewed articles on genomics, cancer, osteoporosis, women’s health, ethics, and environmental health and wrote and produced a CD-ROM on the Genetic Basis of Cancer published by Oxford University Press.