Asia Johnson receives an intranasal H1N1 vaccine, Boston, Oct. 9, 2009. (AP)

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Ordinary flu kills thousands of people a year, but most are over 65 with underlying health problems.

H1N1 “swine flu” is different. Fully a third of those it kills are healthy, robust, often young.

Last week, H1N1 vaccine began its national rollout. The public still has questions.

Pundit Bill Maher told fans, “If u get a swine flu shot ur an idiot.” Medical professionals say you may be an idiot if you don’t.

This Hour, On Point: We’ll we’ll look at the new pandemic, with questions and answers on H1N1 and the swine flu vaccination program unfolding across the country right now.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Maggie Fox, health and science editor at Reuters

Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota.

William Schaffner, professor and chair of the Department of Preventive Medicine at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine.

 

Some answers on the H1N1 vaccine, at the NY Times.

Former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, left, and former Vermont Governor and Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean, right. Both are doctors. Both have strong views on health care reform. (Photos: AP)

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Republican Bill Frist, former Senate majority leader, is a heart surgeon, lung surgeon, and heir to the biggest hospital company in the world.

On Friday, Bill Frist said what not a single Republican now sitting in Congress has said — that he would vote for emerging health care reform.

Today we’ll ask him why.

Democrat and doctor Howard Dean is an internist and champion of the “public option” missing from the latest Senate bill. We’ll ask where his support goes now.

This hour, On Point: Bill Frist, Howard Dean, and the showdown ahead on health care reform.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Julie Rovner, health policy correspondent for NPR.

Bill Frist, former Republican Senate majority leader from Tennessee, served for 12 years in the U.S. Senate. A renowned surgeon, he practiced medicine for twenty years. His new book is “A Heart to Serve: The Passion to Bring Health, Hope, and Healing.”

Howard Dean, former Governor of Vermont, former chairman of the Democratic National Committee, and 2004 presidential candidate. He is also a medical doctor and a prominent voice in the health care debate. His most recent book is “Howard Dean’s Prescription for Real Healthcare Reform.”

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Writer Tracy Kidder’s new book, “Strength in What Remains,” deals with the travails of one African refugee — and the depths of the human soul, the capacity for good and evil.

Deogratias –- a young man from the obscure country of Burundi –- arrives in New York with nothing. No English, sleeping in Central Park. Within two years, he is attending Columbia University.

Kidder’s story goes further, though. It takes us back into the horrors of ethnic violence in Burundi. And as we stagger through the atrocities with Deo, we find ourselves asking questions about what we might have done — whether we would have survived — and how we would live afterward.

This Hour, On Point: an odyssey out of Africa — and war.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Jacki Lyden, guest host

Guests:

Tracy Kidder, Pulitzer Prize-winning non-fiction writer. He’s author of such books as “Mountains Beyond Mountains,” “The Soul of a New Machine,” and “Home Town.” His new book is “Strength in What Remains.” You can listen to Kidder’s 2003 On Point interview, which includes guest Dr. Paul Farmer.

Sarah Broom, executive director of Village Health Works, a medical organization based in Burundi that is featured in Tracy Kidder’s new book.

Read an excerpt of Tracy Kidder’s new book, “Strength in What Remains.”

President Barack Obama responds to questions during a news conference in the East Room of the White House in Washington on Wednesday, July 22, 2009. (AP)

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The president wanted health care reform, and he wanted it fast. By the August recess, he told Congress. So momentum doesn’t fade.

Now that August deadline seems to be moving back to September. But the president is still pushing hard for an American health care overhaul.

Last night in a prime-time news conference, he pounded on the need for change — for individual American families and for the health of the U.S. economy.

This hour, On Point: The great debate in Washington on health care reform. Is it too much, too little — or the best chance right now to take on an epic challenge?

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Joining us from Washington is Ceci Connolly, reporter for The Washington Post covering the national health care issue.

Also from Washington, we’re joined by Rep. Michael Burgess, Republican congressman from the 26th District of Texas, which  includes parts of Dallas and Cooke Counties. An obstetrician, he joined Congress in 2003, is a member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, and is founder and chairman of the Congressional Health Care Caucus.

Joining us from New York is Jonathan Oberlander, associate professor of social medicine and health policy & management at the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill, a visiting scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation in New York, and author of “The Political Life of Medicare” (2003).

And with us in our studio is Dr. Stephanie Woolhandler. She’s a practicing physician, an associate professor of medicine at Harvard, and co-founder of Physicians for a National Health Program.

Brown University medical student Jeremy Boyd displays his personal digital assistant, or PDA, Friday, Feb. 17, 2006, at Memorial Hospital in Pawtucket, R.I. (AP)

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By 2014, President Obama hopes to digitize the health records of every American. And the federal stimulus bill is funneling $19 billion dollars to do just that.

Proponents say electronic medical records will reduce spending. Cut down on repeat medical tests. Reduce errors. Even save lives.

Critics warn not so fast. What about the huge cost to implement such systems? And what about doctor-patient privacy? Do we really want a universal electronic health record database?

We’ll weigh the pros and cons.

This Hour, On Point: your e-health record.

You can join the conversation. What’s your view on computerizing Americans’ medical records? Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Jane Clayson, guest host

Guests:

Ashish Jha, professor of medicine and associate professor of health policy and management at Harvard University’s School of Public Health and a staff physician at the Boston VA and Brigham and Women’s Hospitals. He co-authored a recent article in “The New England Journal of Medicine” called, “Use of Electronic Health Records in U.S. Hospitals.”

Jennifer Brull, family medicine physician in Plainville, Kansas. Her clinic recently converted to an entirely electronic system of medical records.

Deborah Peel, founder and chairman of the Patient Privacy Rights Foundation. You can see her group’s position here.

More links:

Dr. Jermome Groopman, a highly respected medical thinker and supporter of President Obama, wrote a tough critique in the Wall Street Journal — “Obama’s $80 Billion Exaggeration” — of the new administration’s e-health record effort.

To hear how President Obama wants to cut health care costs — including through the e-health records push — listen to On Point’s show with hospital consultant Mitchell Seltzer, who has the ear of the White House, and Washington Post reporter Ceci Connolly.

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Babies so tiny they can fit in the palm of your hand. Terrified parents. Experimental therapies.

Inside the Neonatal Intensive Care, every day brings new challenges. For babies, parents, and doctors.

For 25 years, Dr. Christine Gleason has been on the front lines of saving premature babies. She’s had the painful conversations, made split second decisions, and been witness to the tiniest miracles and biggest heartbreaks.

Today, she’s sharing these stories of hope and heartbreak in an intimate and powerful new book.

This Hour, On Point: hope and the human spirit in the Neonatal ICU.

You can join the conversation. Do you know first hand of the miracles that happen inside the NICU? Do you know the heartbreak? Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Jane Clayson, guest host

Guests:

Christine Gleason, Chief of Neonatology and Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Washington and Seattle Children’s Hospital. Her new book is “Amost Home: Stories of Hope and the Human Spirit in the Neonatal ICU.”

Read an excerpt from “Almost Home.”

Liza Cooper, Director of NICU Family Support at the March of Dimes. You can see more details on the organization’s activities and walkathon here.

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ER is over. NBC’s path-breaking, long-running hospital drama — brainchild of Michael Crichton and Steven Spielberg — went out last night in a blaze of network hoopla and a final flurry of rushing guerneys and shouts for blood.

TV critics are declaring the end of the big network drama that the whole country sits down to watch. We’re thinking about the endless run of hospital dramas — from Dr. Kildaire, to Marcus Welby, to St. Elsewhere, Grey’s Anatomy, and House — and why they keep coming.

This hour, On Point: ER goes. Hospital dramas go on. We’ll ask you, and doctors, why?

You can join the conversation. Westerns are gone. Hospital dramas are not. Not at all. Why? Yes, there’s life and death, but why are we drawn to those in a hospital? And will you miss ER?

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Brian Lowry, media columnist and chief TV critic for Variety.

Dr. Lisa Sanders, MD, practices internal medicine in Connecticut and teaches at the Yale School of Medicine. She writes the “Diagnosis” column in The New York Times Magazine and is a consultant to the television show “House.” Her forthcoming book is “Every Patient Tells a Story: Medical Mysteries and the Art of Diagnosis.”

Dr. Mark Hoornstra, MD, director of the Department of Emergency Services at St. Francis Hospital in New York.

More links:

The official ER website has a section called “ER Remembered,” which covers the entire history of the series from 1994 to 2009.

Here’s some classic ER from the first season, courtesy of YouTube:

Photo: Flickr/Vidiot

Huge studies came out last week on the number-one cancer issue in men’s health. Women wrestle with breast cancer. Men: prostate.

It’s generally slow-growing. It can show up even among twenty-year-olds. And it can be an obsession for men over 50.

But how aggressive should we be in screening and treating? In cutting it out? The upside: it may save your life. The downside risk: incontinence and impotence, and expensive intervention that may not have been necessary.

This hour, On Point: The latest on prostate cancer, and whether the treatment is worse than the disease.

You can join the conversation. Have you been diagnosed with prostate cancer? Have you gone for the full treatment? Or hung back? What do you make of the new studies?

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Joining us from Berlin, Germany, is Dr. Gerald Andriole, chief urologic surgeon at Washington University School of Medicine and Barnes-Jewish Hospital in St. Louis. He led the U.S. study of 77,000 men published on March 18 in the New England Journal of Medicine. A European study was also published in the NEJM last week.

Joining us from Cleveland, Ohio, is Dr. Stephen Jones, chairman of the department of regional urology at the Glickman Urological Institute at the Cleveland Clinic.

From Wilmington, N.C., we’re joined by Dr. Nortin Hadler, professor of medicine and microbiology & immunology at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine. He is author of “Worried Sick: A Prescription for Health in an Overtreated America.”

In this photo made available by Advanced Cell Technology, a single cell is removed from a human embryo to be used in generating embryonic stem cells for scientific research. A Massachusetts biotechnology company has developed a new way of creating stem cells without destroying human embryos. (AP)

On August 9, 2001, President George W. Bush hit the brakes on embryonic stem cell research. Not a complete halt, but a big slowdown on research into the wonder cells that can turn into any other kind of cell in the human body.

Potential cures for cancer, diabetes, heart disease, MS, Parkinson’s, and more, all seemed further away. But the work didn’t stop. Scientists in other countries jumped in, in a big way. American researchers found new ways forward.

Now Bush is gone, Obama’s in, and hopes and expectations are rising again. Stem cell research has come in from the cold, once more promising medical miracles. Last month, the FDA approved the first trials of embryonic stem cell therapy for human patients — paralyzed patients with spinal cord injuries.

All this as new methods of creating new cells from adult tissue may bypass debates over human embryos entirely.

This hour, On Point: The leading edge of stem cell research — now.

You can join the conversation. Are you hoping that stem cell therapies may one day save you or someone in your family? Are you ready to let the research roll?

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

David Scadden, professor of medicine at Harvard University, where he’s co-director of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute, and director of Massachusetts General Hospital’s Center for Regenerative Medicine.

John Gearhart, director of the Institute for Regenerative Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1998, he led one of two teams — along with James Thomson’s at the University of Wisconsin — that first isolated and identified human embryonic stem cells.

From East to West, and further south than usual, the country has been blanketed in snow in recent days. Imagine if you were crossing it on foot, by canoe, on horseback, in a wagon; a settler, a pioneer, a frontiersman — and you got hurt, became ill.

The medicine of the American frontier was rough and ready — and often required for snake bite, bear slash, bullet wound, broken bone, fever. In deep woods and mountain pass. When doctors were rare – and sometimes more dangerous than the snake.

This hour, On Point: Wild stories of American medicine — native and otherwise — on the American frontier.

You can join the conversation. Does your family lore include tales of wagon-bed surgery? Medicine on the hoof? Fever and ax-wound and frontier survival? Would you have the grit to go mano-a-mano with a bear … tend your wounds … and press on?

-Tom Ashbrook

Guest:

David Dary, professor emeritus at the University of Oklahoma, where he ran what is now the Gaylord College of Journalism for eleven years. He is the award-winning author of more than a dozen books on the American West. His new book is “Frontier Medicine: From the Atlantic to the Pacific, 1492-1941.”

Read an excerpt from “Frontier Medicine.”

Millions of Americans are turning to acupuncture, homeopathy and herbal remedies to treat everything from headaches to constipation to cancer. Alternative medicine is a multi-billion dollar global business — offering the promise of natural healing and a comforting antidote to the cold bed-side manner of those white smocked MDs.

But a new book by a pair of skeptics is fueling a raging debate about its value. They say most treatments are unproven and untested — no better than a placebo at best, and potentially crippling at worst.

This hour, On Point: “Trick or Treatment” — the facts about alternative medicine.

-Anthony Brooks, guest host

Guests:

Simon Singh, best-selling author and science journalist. He is co-author of the new book, “Trick or Treatment: The Undeniable Facts About Alternative Medicine.”

Edzard Ernst, M.D., professor of complementary medicine at The University of Exeter, in the United Kingdom, and co-author with Simon Singh of “Trick or Treatment: The Undeniable Facts About Alternative Medicine.” He’s also the author of “The Oxford Handbook of Complementary Medicine.”

James Gordon, M.D., founder and director of The Center for Mind-Body Medicine. His new book is “Unstuck: Your Guide to the Seven-Stage Journey Out of Depression.”

Links:

Read an excerpt from “Trick or Treatment: The Undeniable Facts About Alternative Medicine.”

When actor Michael J. Fox was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, the whole country took notice. When Dr. Thomas Graboys got the news, it was — as for most of the thousands of Americans hit with Parkinson’s every year — a more private affair.

Graboys had been a tip-top doctor. Cardiologist to the stars. Now he was being tipped onto the Parkinson’s path, where tying your shoes is a major challenge.

Tremors. Dementia. Dependence. From power to powerlessness. Now, while he still can, he’s telling that story.

This hour, On Point: The doctor’s own Parkinson’s disease.

- Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Dr. Thomas Graboys, He was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease and dementia. He is professor of medicine at Harvard University, a senior physician at Brigham and Woman’s Hospital, president emeritus of the Lown Cardiovascular Research Foundation, Nobel Prize-winner and co-author (with Peter Zheutlin) of “Life in the Balance: A Physician’s Memoir of Life, Love, and Loss with Parkinson’s Disease and Dementia”

Vicki Baker-Graboys, CEO of “Su Casa Designs,” an interior decorating firm.

Dr. John Growdon, director of memory and movement disorders at Massachusetts General Hospital and professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School.

For a long time in life, Alzheimer’s seems like somebody else’s problem. An issue for the unfortunate old. A misty, separate continent of life.

And then, it can hit you. Your own parents, needing help. Losing their grip. Your own odds of following them into Alzheimer’s — higher than you’d ever wish.

One in 10 people get Alzheimer’s. New research suggests that if both your parents had it, your odds may be one in five. Now the Baby Boom generation and its children are lining up to learn their fate. And science is racing to intervene.

This hour, On Point: going after Alzheimer’s.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Reisa Sperling, neurologist and Alzheimer’s researcher at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston

Thomas Bird, Professor of Neurology, Medicine and Psychiatry at the University of Washington

Pierre Tariot, director of the Memory Disorders Clinic at the Banner Alzheimer’s Institute in Phoenix

There are headaches, and then there are migraines — gut-wrenching, brain-throbbing assaults to the head. They’re hard for most people to imagine, but for 30 million Americans, they’re a fact of life.

Once dismissed as psychosomatic, ‘in your head’ disorders, migraines are now gaining top billing as a disease and a public health issue. And if there’s no cure in sight, at least there are better ways to cope.

This hour, On Point: Living with migraines, and managing the pain.

-Jane Clayson

Guests:

Dr. Elizabeth Loder, chief of the Division of Headache and Pain at Brigham and Women’s/Faulkner Hospitals in Boston.

Martha Gaie, migraineur since 1984.

Paula Kamen, writer for The New York Times blog “Migraine: Perspectives on a Headache,” has had a chronic daily headache for 17 years.

When Dr. Jerome Groopman was making his rounds as a young hospital resident, he misdiagnosed a patient’s chest pain. She died.

Now, three decades on, Groopman is one of the country’s most respected and widely-read physicians. He is also a Harvard med school professor and a writer for the New Yorker.

Now he’s writing about how doctors really think when they’re sizing up you and your health. You need to know this.

This hour On Point: how doctors think, with Dr. Jerome Groopman.

-Tom Ashbrook

“We are taught in medical school to think in a deliberate, linear way. We mainly study cases on paper and everything is very calm and simple. The real world is very different. We learn by doing. And we look for patterns. … We try to fit the symptoms, and the physical findings and the laboratory results into a pattern. And then we often go with that. About 80% of the time we’re right.” – Dr. Jerome Groopman.

Guest:

Dr. Jerome Groopman, chief of experimental medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, staff writer at The New Yorker, and author of “How Doctors Think.”

For decades, breast cancer was seen as an affliction of affluent women in the industrialized West. And heaven knows it is that. In the U.S., one in eight women will be diagnosed with breast cancer.

But the world’s most lethal form of cancer for women is not bound by borders these days. From South America to Asia to Africa, breast cancer incidence is rising along with development. Yet detection and treatment lag far behind.

Up next, On Point: from Cleveland to Kenya and Boston to Beijing, we’ll look at the astounding reach of — and response to — breast cancer.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Kathleen Kingsbury, a correspondent for Time magazine based in Shanghai and author of this week’s cover story, “Why Breast Cancer Is Spreading Around the World”

Dr. Richard Love, an oncologist, he’s the scientific director of the International Breast Cancer Research Foundation and senior investigator researching global cancer problems for the National Cancer Institute

Dr. Peggy Porter, head of the Breast Cancer Program at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center

Mary Onyango, Executive Director of the Nairobi-based advocacy group KenyaBreast, and herself a breast cancer survivor.