Podcasts · Science · Health & Fitness

This Podcast Will Kill You

Exactly Right and iHeartPodcasts

300 episodes

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.

More about the show

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 currently in the final stretch of her family medicine residency program.

This Podcast Will Kill You is part of the Exactly Right podcast network that provides a platform for bold, creative voices to bring to life provocative, entertaining and relatable stories for audiences everywhere. The Exactly Right roster of podcasts covers a variety of topics including science, true crime, comedic interviews, news, pop culture and more. Podcasts on the network include My Favorite Murder with Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark, Buried Bones, That's Messed Up: An SVU Podcast and more.

Episodes page 1 of 6

  1. Special Episode: Dr. Lindsey Fitzharris & The Sleuth-Hound

    · 49 min

    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…

  2. Ep 225 Peptides: What your peptide dealer doesn’t want you to know

    · 1 h 05 min

    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,…

  3. Ep 224 Snake Oil: The Great American Fraud

    · 57 min

    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…

  4. Special Episode: Robert Kolker & The Vanishing Family

    · 48 min

    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…

  5. Ep 223 ALS: Unraveling the mystery

    · 1 h 21 min

    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…

  6. Ep 222 Vitamin K: Calling the shots

    · 1 h 07 min

    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…

  7. Special Episode: Dr. Alanna Skuse & The Surgeon, The Midwife, The Quack

    · 52 min

    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…

  8. Ep 221 Electroconvulsive Therapy Part 2: A current conversation

    · 58 min

    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…

  9. Ep 220 Electroconvulsive Therapy Part 1: A charged history

    · 51 min

    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…

  10. Special Episode: Clayton Page Aldern & The Weight of Nature

    · 45 min

    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…

  11. Ep 219 The Brown Recluse: Fearsome foe or slandered spider?

    · 59 min

    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…

  12. Special Episode: Deborah Cohen & Bad Influence

    · 52 min

    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…

  13. Ep 218 The Lowdown on Statins

    · 1 h 10 min

    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…

  14. Ep 217 The High Stakes of Cholesterol

    · 1 h 04 min

    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…

  15. Ep 216 Cyclospora: Explosive Diarrhea Everywhere

    · 55 min

    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…

  16. Special Episode: Alev Scott & Cash Cow

    · 49 min

    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…

  17. Ep 215 The Hidden Depths of Earwax

    · 54 min

    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…

  18. Ep 214 Boogers: Digging for treasure

    · 1 h 02 min

    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…

  19. Special Episode: Dr. Carl Elliott & The Occasional Human Sacrifice

    · 58 min

    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…

  20. Ep 213 Burns Part 2: It’s like sci-fi but real

    · 59 min

    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…

  21. Ep 212 Burns Part 1: The first million or so years

    · 56 min

    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,…

  22. Special Episode: Alexandra Sifferlin & The Elusive Body

    · 51 min

    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…

  23. Ep 211 Motion Sickness: It comes in waves

    · 1 h 17 min

    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…

  24. Ep 210 Histoplasmosis: Bats, birds, and budding yeast

    · 1 h 19 min

    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…

  25. Special Episode: Dr. Olivia Weisser & The Dreaded Pox

    · 51 min

    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…

  26. Ep 209 Dietary Guidelines Part 2: Why is there protein in everything?

    · 59 min

    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…

  27. Ep 208 Dietary Guidelines Part 1: Who’s behind these guidelines?

    · 58 min

    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…

  28. Special Episode: Adam Kucharski & Proof

    · 50 min

    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…

  29. Ep 207 Tear Gas: How can a chemical weapon be “humane”?

    · 1 h 15 min

    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…

  30. Ep 206 Oropouche Virus: More than a smidge worrisome

    · 1 h 13 min

    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…

  31. Ep 205 Cancer Part 4: Where do things stand today?

    · 1 h 19 min

    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…

  32. Ep 204 Cancer Part 3: How do we treat it?

    · 1 h 33 min

    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…

  33. Special Episode: Lawrence Ingrassia & A Fatal Inheritance

    · 46 min

    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…

  34. Ep 203 Cancer Part 2: Why does it happen?

    · 1 h 19 min

    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…

  35. Ep 202 Cancer Part 1: What is it?

    · 1 h 36 min

    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…

  36. Special Episode: Jon Adams and Edmund Ramsden & Rat City

    · 56 min

    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…

  37. Ep 201 Poop Part 2: Flushed away

    · 1 h 22 min

    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…

  38. Ep 200 Poop Part 1: How the sausage gets made

    · 1 h 12 min

    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…

  39. Special Episode: Nicola Twilley & Frostbite

    · 1 h 00 min

    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…

  40. Ep 199 Sleep Part 2: Predictably unpredictable

    · 1 h 11 min

    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…

  41. Ep 198 Sleep Part 1: Sleeping with one eye open

    · 1 h 14 min

    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…

  42. Special Episode: Daniel Stone & American Poison

    · 58 min

    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,…

  43. Ep 197 Detox: Enemas for everyone

    · 1 h 16 min

    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…

  44. From the Vault - Endometriosis: Menstrual Backwash (Ep 88)

    · 2 h 12 min

    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…

  45. From the Vault - Hepatitis B: Hepatiti, Take 2 (Ep 89)

    · 1 h 31 min

    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…

  46. Ep 196 Health Myths: Fact or fiction?

    · 1 h 06 min

    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…

  47. Special Episode: Dr. Homer Venters & Outbreak Behind Bars

    · 56 min

    [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…

  48. Ep 195 Salt Part 2: The Substance

    · 53 min

    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…

  49. Ep 194 Salt Part 1: The Seasoning

    · 56 min

    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…

  50. Special Episode: Gabriel Weston & Alive

    · 50 min

    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…

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