The real medicine behind "Severance"

March 30, 2025 Check out STAT+

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By Torie Bosch First Opinion editor

This week on the "First Opinion Podcast," I spoke with the person who might have the coolest side gig in medicine: Vijay Agarwal, a neurosurgeon who consults on the Apple TV+ show "Severance." Agarwal wouldn't tell me what's really going on with Lumon, the sinister company that uses brain surgery to cleave workers identities in half. But he did talk about making a cameo on the show in Season 1, how seriously he (and director Ben Stiller) take medical accuracy, and why so many TV shows get medicine completely wrong. Last season on the podcast, I spoke with the man behind Dr. Glaucomflecken, medicine's favorite TikToker. Both conversations offered a chance to think about medicine in a more creative, humanistic way, which I deeply appreciated. In this tumultuous moment, when every day might bring a new shock to the medical system, I think that it's more important than ever to think about how the arts can offer both critique and escape. Is there a novelist who you think gets medicine right? (Abraham Verghese, author of "Cutting for Stone," comes to mind for me.) A new TV show or movie that is exploring health in compelling ways? Is there someone you'd like to read on arts and medicine? Let me know. Recommendation of the week: Manvir Singh's fascinating New Yorker article, "Medical Benchmarks and the Myth of the Universal Patient," examines how "the reliance on universal benchmarks has widened the disconnect between bodies and their measurements."

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