Health stories with public consequences.
Slate Health is a cross-network feed for Slate conversations where health is never only medical. Episodes move from insurance premiums and vaccine politics to peanut allergies, SNAP benefits, TikTok therapy stories, queer church history, and intimate advice.
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Slate Health collects health-related episodes from across Slate, but the result has a sharper identity than a simple archive feed. It is about what happens when bodies meet institutions. The feed moves through health insurance, vaccines, food benefits, allergy science, autism politics, internet confession, sexuality, religion, grief, and care. The tone is controlled and explanatory. It favors interviews that begin with a clear question and then press toward specifics. How much did the premium rise? What can Congress actually do? What changed in the science around peanuts? Why does an unproven claim about Tylenol and autism travel so quickly when spoken from a White House podium? These episodes usually find a person inside the policy. A caller describes an insurance bill going up. Dr. Paul Offit names the image he cannot shake from the measles outbreak. Lindsay Allen explains SNAP as both a logistics question and a political choice. Dr. David Hill walks through the reversal in peanut allergy guidance while acknowledging how parents may hear that change. The feed also tracks health as a cultural signal online, including TikTok’s obsession with a woman who said she fell in love with her psychiatrist. Not every episode is strictly clinical. How To! follows listeners through personal questions about sex, reading, grief, and self-trust. Death, Sex, and Money brings in church history, LGBTQ community, and the AIDS crisis through voices and music from MCC San Francisco’s archives. Across these different Slate shows, the connective tissue is consequence. Slate Health keeps returning to who is protected, who is blamed, who is believed, and who is left to manage risk alone. It is serious without being sealed off from human texture. A barking dog, a tie-dyed lab coat, a viral Reels lag, or a church song can sit beside vaccine policy and federal benefits without making the reporting feel scattered. The feed is strongest for listeners who want health explained as evidence, politics, memory, money, and culture all at once.
Made for: For listeners who want health coverage that goes beyond wellness tips into policy, science, internet culture, family life, and moral consequence. It fits people who prefer careful context over quick takes.
What sets it apart: Slate Health draws from several Slate shows, so the same feed can pair Washington health policy with TikTok psychiatry discourse, allergy research, advice updates, and queer religious history. The range is broad, but the editorial posture stays steady: specific questions, plain explanations, and attention to who is affected.
A feed featuring episodes from across the Slate podcast network about health, wellness, and the science and business behind it all. You’ll see episodes from shows like What Next: TBD, The Waves, and How To!, containing coverage and conversations that go deeper than the headlines.
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Slate Health makes health policy and personal difficulty legible by connecting reported context with the people living through the consequences.
Slate Health moves between personal advice, reported history, and health policy, with presenters changing alongside the source program. Carvel Wallace and Courtney Martin revisit a listener's later-life sexual experience and the difficult return to reading after grief.
An insurance premium meets AIDS-era church singing, and your idea of a health story gets wider.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A grounded look at how expired subsidies turn health policy into unaffordable monthly bills.
Healthcare policy arrives as a bill in this episode, and What Next keeps the stakes close to the people absorbing it. A premium rising from $450 to $970, coverage that offers little before the deductible, and a therapist expecting she may have to close her private practice make…
A sober, human-scale look at vaccine backsliding and the children caught in its path.
What Next | The Year of Vaccine Backsliding tracks a public-health system under visible strain, with a third of the CDC's staff gone and an ACIP meeting expected to unfold differently than before.
A clear account of the congressional choices behind a threatened halt to SNAP benefits.
A threatened halt to SNAP benefits gives Mary Harris and Northwestern health economist Lindsay Allen a direct route into the political choices facing families who rely on nutrition assistance.
A clear look at how evidence for early peanut introduction overturned earlier allergy guidance.
Peanut-allergy prevention gets a thoughtful account of a major change in medical guidance. Mary Harris traces how clinicians moved from keeping peanuts away from babies to recommending early introduction.
A concise look at how an unproven autism claim gained White House force.
President Trump's White House announcement tying Tylenol use during pregnancy to autism lands here as more than a stray political sound bite. The episode treats it as a window into how an unproven health claim can gather institutional weight, especially when paired with Dan…
A gay Pentecostal pastor's story anchors a portrait of faith, exile, and LGBTQ communal care.
Slate centers this episode on a Christian church in San Francisco serving the LGBTQ community, then traces the care it offered as AIDS brought illness and death into the congregation.
Elizabeth's update becomes a careful conversation about courage, intentionality, and change that resists a tidy verdict.
The episode returns to Elizabeth, the listener from How To!'s "How to Lose Your Virginity at 43," after an emailed update brings her back into conversation with Courtney Martin.
Ben Brock Johnson and Amory Sivertson trace viral internet stories from Reddit threads to courtrooms.
A personal story of a lung cancer diagnosis and the transformative drug osimertinib for EGFR-positive patients.
This episode tells the story of MCC San Francisco, a pro-gay church that integrated AIDS into its identity during the crisis.
Two hosts discuss a viral TikTok story about a woman who fell in love with her psychiatrist, analyzing its spread across social media platforms.
An interview with Casey Johnston about her memoir on escaping diet culture through weightlifting and finding strength.
This episode explores the Metropolitan Community Church in San Francisco, a Christian church serving the LGBTQ community since the 1970s.
This episode of How To!
Julie Rovner says the enhanced ACA credits are set to expire, and “people are going to see their costs go up.”
Dr. Paul Offit says the CDC’s autism language exploits the fact that “you can never prove a negative.”
Slate's What Next focuses on the November 1 SNAP cutoff, a USDA.gov message that blames Senate Democrats and says no benefits will be issued.
Slate's What Next talks with Dr.
Slate's What Next TBD focuses on Donald Trump and Robert F.