Health Anxiety, Vaccines and Making Sense of Medical News – Dr. Jen Ashton with Dave Asprey

In this episode of Bulletproof Radio, Dr. Jen Ashton brings a wealth of experience to the podcast as a physician, a medical correspondent for international news media, and an award-winning journalist. 

As the ABC News’ Chief Health and Medical Correspondent for nearly a decade, she reports on major health and wellness issues across all ABC News platforms. She also reports the latest breaking medical news for “GMA3: What You Need to Know.” She’s been on the front lines of Covid reporting on the science, the health toll and the development of Covid vaccines since the earliest days of the pandemic,.

And while that certainly keeps her busy, she wrote her sixth book during the world’s crazy pandemic year: “The New Normal: A Roadmap to Resilience in the Pandemic Era.” (Some would call that feat crazy in itself!)

“I found that in covering this pandemic, it really was more about communication, or as much about communication, and how to explain medical and scientific concepts to the world and to the country so that people can really use that information,” Dr. Ashton says.

She’s one of the few physicians with media platforms who still sees patients and has an active medical practice. 

“I think that there were a lot of really smart doctors and public health officials who I think missed the mark on communicating a lot of the information in the pandemic because they don't take care of real patients anymore,” Dr Ashton explains. “I think that when someone does interact with a real person, it changes their approach as communicators of medical information, because it becomes very real.”

One of the things that showed up in both her reporting on Covid and seeing her patients was the rise in health anxiety. This iis an obsessive and irrational worry about having a serious medical condition.

In her book, Dr. Ashton says, “It’s important to know that this kind of health anxiety can happen to anyone at any time, even months or years after a traumatic event like a pandemic is over.”

We talk about resilience in this episode and Dr. Ashton gives practical tips on how to navigate what’s happening in the world right now and how to move forward.

 Enjoy! And get more resources at Dave.Asprey/podcasts.

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