MrBallen’s Medical Mysteries Podcast: When Science Doesn’t Have All The Answers

MrBallen’s Medical Mysteries podcast has a clever premise, creates a creepy, strange world, and has a host who could scare people at campfires by telling lurid ghost stories.

It’s like the podcast version of The X Files and Fringe, two TV shows where facts, truth, natural laws, and logical explanations have been excluded from our universe.

In effect, modern medicine has few, if any, answers for the phenomena detailed in the podcast episodes.

Consider the TV show The Resident. Through the Spring, I watched all six seasons of that medical drama based at Chastain Park Hospital in Atlanta. Almost every episode had a scene where resident Dr. Conrad Hawkins would be treating a patient with some illness impossible for any other physician to diagnose. Then Hawkins would say to the patient, “Were you ever in Borneo and stung by a greenish-blue bug?”

The patient was astonished by this question and replied, “Yes, but how could you know that?”

Dr. Hawkins, trying his best not to gloat, would answer: “I think the pernicious vengeful boll weevil bit you and need antibiotics.”

Case solved, and almost every episode had a main or minor narrative about a patient with a condition so rare that the odds…