Why does this exist?

Everyone's getting screwed

Today's health systems are failing almost everyone.

Ordinary Americans experience medical care as a timesuck and a shakedown. Finding accurate health information feels harder (and less fun) than scrolling whatever the algorithm serves up. Increasingly, people see public health institutions as the fun police, if they perceive them at all.

Meanwhile, millions of people working in medicine and public health feel like cogs in a moneymaking machine, spending more time chasing bills and debunking nonsense than doing the work they signed up for. Attacks from the agencies meant to support them — and sometimes from people harmed by their employers — have backed many into an ideological corner.

The public is losing faith in health care and public health. Health and public health professionals are growing suspicious of the public they serve. Neither side is wrong to feel this way, and both are worse off for it.

My stake

I'm a doctor, epidemiologist, and journalist — but I'm also a patient, and I help support a family member with a severe intellectual disability. These systems have failed me too, as an employee and as a patient.

Over a decade of reporting on medicine and public health, and 15 years practicing it before that, I've watched the widening trust gap between the public and the people meant to look out for it. Over the past few years, that gap has cracked open. Despite their differences the people on either side have one huge thing in common: They’ve all been scammed by institutions and individuals chasing profit, attention, or chaos.

Our mission

Landmansplained exists to rebuild trust between health professions and the people they’re supposed to serve. We do that two ways: by helping the public understand how the health information sausage gets made, and by helping health professionals communicate more clearly.

What we do

We publish work that helps each side understand the other: naming the pain points, explaining why they exist, and highlighting what's actually working.

So far, we’ve published:

• Insider dispatches on public health culture

• Explainers on the health decisions clogging your feed

• Outbreak reporting filtered through the lens of institutional collapse

• Media criticism that calls out oversimplification

• Guidance for aspiring health communicators 

We’re just getting started, and this little project dreams big. And I need help understanding what will make it most useful. That’s…

Where you come in

Landmansplained is for people who want to spend less time being outraged and more time trying to create something better. It’s for exhausted Instagram scrollers who just want to do the right thing, burned out clinicians and public health workers tired of playing defense full-time, people who’ve been harmed by health care or public health systems who don’t know where to turn, and probably lots of others. Maybe even you!

It’ll work best if we build it together, so tell me what you want to see. Use the buttons at the bottom of this page to email me or fill out an anonymous form.

What we don’t do

Debunking health nonsense is important work, and plenty of people are doing it well. However, this newsletter isn’t your best source for that. Although I sometimes correct misinformation in this space, it’s usually part of a much bigger goal: helping you understand where it comes from and how to detect it in the first place.