July 20, 2025

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First Opinion editor

This week, the TikTok algorithm introduced me to a physician who just started her medical residency in Chicago after practicing in the U.K. She's been sharing about the differences between her experiences in the National Health System and the U.S. health care system, and it's enlightening. The hardest part, she says, is remembering to write the dates as month/day/year and to use Z's instead of S's in words like "stabilize." But she also discusses how much quicker U.S. physicians are to order a CT scan and other differences in care (and treatment of residents). The Daily Mail even wrote about her videos, sparking a bit of a backlash.

It reminded me that I am always interested in pieces in which physicians who have also worked overseas talk about the U.S. system — not just how everything is more expensive here (STAT readers already know!), but processes, culture, the small differences that wouldn't occur to most people. So if you have experiences to share, please email me.

Recommendation of the week: Since I'm already talking about TikTok, I might as well mention that a kind soul is uploading full segments of the classic show "Unsolved Mysteries." The theme song still makes my chest tighten in fear just a tiny bit. The original is far superior to the recent Netflix version, which feels like a typical true-crime show — the real charm of the Robert Stack version was how we would careen from story about aliens to a bank robbery to a psychic child to a missing person. I've particularly enjoyed seeing old segments related to health care, like the fraudster who scammed Medicaid while living in Trump Tower.

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