THE GORGE — Best friends and One Community Health (OCH) pediatricians Corinda Hankins and Joanne Smith are fighting medical misinformation one podcast episode at a time.
“We have fun doing it,” Hankins said. “We talk all the time anyway.”
“Our kids say listening to the podcast is like sitting at a dinner table with us,” Smith said.
Hankins works at OCH in Hood River, and Smith in White Salmon. The two have a long history together — they met as 12-year-olds attending middle school in Indiana, following each other to high school and, later, medical school.
But then Hankins met her future husband, moved to Hood River and began working as a pediatrician in 2003, starting at One Community Health in 2016; Smith moved back to Indiana and began working at a children’s hospital in a suburb near Indianapolis.
Hankins will tell you that she’s been working on getting Smith to move to the Gorge for the past 20 years and is excited to be living in the same place again.
“I just kept bugging her,” she laughed. “And this ended up being a really good time.”
“It’s kind of been a 20-year project in the making,” Smith said. “It just had to work out at the right time for me. My daughter moved out here and my son moved out here, and a job opened up, so it seemed like the stars were aligned at the right time.”
Now neighbors, Smith had been in the Gorge only a couple of weeks when the idea for a podcast came up.
“Corinda said, ‘I really want to do something to help distribute more accurate pediatric information and correct some of the misinformation that is out there,’” Smith said. “We talked about what to do — and the way to get information out these days is podcasts.”
“And I was like, ‘And you should do it with me,’” Hankins said.
With OCH on board helping with production, “A Podful of Pediatrics” debuted in April, with six episodes released to date. Hankins and Smith plan to release two each month, one addressing a childhood health issue and another focusing on vaccines.
Each episode is researched ahead of time, with OCH taking care of the production, editing, and launch. Two more episodes have already been recorded and will be released soon.
“We put a lot of time into it,” Hankins said, noting each podcast includes notes and links.
Their first episode asked the question, “Are kids healthy?”
“There’s this whole narrative out there now that kids are less healthy, and that the world is in danger from chronic disease in children, and we’re raising a whole generation of kids that are not healthy — and that’s just not true,” Hankins said.
“We’ve been in the medical field long enough to see the transition of diseases and conditions that were our mainstay 20 years ago that we just don’t see anymore,” Smith said.
Kids are healthier than they used to be, they say, for a host of reasons, from better safety equipment like helmets, car seats and seatbelts to vaccinations and changes in insurance coverage.
“What changed with the Affordable Care Act is that pre-existing conditions couldn’t prevent you from being insured,” Smith explained. “So, we’re able to call things what they are instead of just talking about the symptoms. Asthma is a big one — you would sometimes not be able to insure your child if they got diagnosed with asthma. So now, we can call asthma ‘asthma’ and treat it appropriately.”
They’ve also released episodes on measles, pertussis, and polio vaccines, as there have been recent outbreaks of both measles and whooping cough (pertussis).
“I did have one family who was concerned about vaccinating their children, and then they listened to our podcast and they were like, ‘We’re going to get all the vaccines,’” Hankins said.
“There’s so much information coming from so many different sources,” Smith said. “It’s hard for parents sometimes to figure out who to believe and what to believe.”
“A Podful of Pediatrics” is available online at onecommunityhealth.org/podful-podcast, and can also be accessed through Spotify and YouTube. Upcoming information on newborn care and rotavirus vaccine are in the works.
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