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They thought they were holding their loved one one last time, then they learned the urn held concrete. We’re walking through the Return to Nature Funeral Home scandal in Colorado, where investigators say nearly 190 bodies were left to decompose in a Penrose building while grieving families were told cremations and burials were complete. It’s one of those true crime stories that doesn’t just horrify you, it makes you re-check what you assume is regulated, inspected, and safe in the funeral industry.
Resources:

https://www.livenowfox.com/news/former-funeral-home-owner-sentenced-18-years-prison-giving-families-fake-ashe​​

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/colorado-ex-funeral-home-owner-sentenced-to-18-years-in-prison-after-pleading-guilty-to-fraud

https://people.com/funeral-home-owner-sentenced-after-defrauding-grieving-families-with-fake-ashes-11927805

https://www.clickondetroit.com/news/national/2026/03/16/ex-funeral-home-owner-faces-20-in-prison-after-giving-families-fake-ashes/

https://www.cnn.com/2026/03/16/us/colorado-funeral-home-owner-sentenced

https://www.usnews.com/news/us/articles/2026-03-16/ex-funeral-home-owner-faces-20-in-prison-after-giving-families-fake-ashes

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/ex

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The scariest part of modern medicine isn’t always the unknown, it’s the moment you realize the system can build momentum before certainty feels complete. We’re talking about organ donation disasters and near misses that force one brutal question: how do we know someone is truly dead when organ procurement is on the clock? Using the reported case of TJ Hoover in Kentucky, we trace how a single story can crack public trust, especially when families say they saw signs of life and later reporting suggests professionals inside the process had concerns too.

If this raises questions for you, we want to hear them. Subscribe, share the episode with a friend, and leave a review so more listeners can find Doctoring the Truth.

Resources:

LEX 18, “KY man wakes during organ harvesting procedure, prompting federal investigation.”

U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, “HHS Finds Systemic Disregard for Sanctity of Life in Organ Transplant System; Announces Major Initiative for Reform.”

UNOS, “Understanding Donation after Circulatory Death (DCD).”

UNOS, “U.S. surpassed 48,000 organ transplants in 2024.”

House Energy and Commerce Committee, “Ensuring Patient Safety: Oversight of the U.S. Organ Procurement and Transplant System.”

ABC News, “Patient ‘Wakes Up’ as Doctors Prepare to Remove Organs.”
Oklahoma Gazette, “Oklahoma man who lived through being pronounced dead appears on Today.”

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A cheerful bedside smile is supposed to mean safety. That’s why the case of Jane Toppin, nicknamed “Jolly Jane,” still hits like a gut punch more than a century later. We walk through how a Boston woman born Honora Kelly could become one of America’s earliest notorious female serial killers while working as a nurse, using charm as cover and exploiting the gaps of late-1800s medical oversight.

We trace her early life through poverty, loss, institutionalization, and being indentured as a child in the Toppin home where she’s even given a new name. Then we follow her into nursing, a profession that gave her something she craved: access, authority, and trust. From there, the story turns dark fast, with discussions of morphine and atropine poisoning, her reported fascination with convulsions, and how patients who were elderly or isolated could become targets with few questions asked. We also talk through her arrest, her unnerving candor, and the trial that ends with an insanity verdict that sparks strong reactions.

Subscribe, share with a friend, and leave a review, then tell us: what systems would you want in place to catch the unthinkable sooner?

RESOURCES:

Advanced Science News

ETH zurich

Schecter, Harold. “Fatal: The Poisonous Life of a Female Serial Killer.” HarperCollins, 1992.

McBrayer, Mary Kay. “America’s First Female Serial Killer: Jane Toppan and the Making of a Monster.” Rowman & Littlefield, 2014.

Morbid Podcast, “Jolly Jane” two-part series. https://morbidpodcast.com/

Boston Daily Globe archives, 19th century reporting on Jane Toppan.

Taunton Insane Hospital records, Massachusetts Archives.

Bartleby Criminal History Resources: https://www.bartleby.com/docs/crime/jane-toppan.html

Early 20th-century nursing journals, Massachusetts Historical Society archives.

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A checklist that claims to measure danger. A hospital that tried to manufacture empathy with LSD and isolation. A courtroom that treats a number like destiny. We dive into the strange power of labels by tracing the psychopathy story from Oak Ridge’s “total encounter capsule” to Robert Hare’s PCL-R and the very real ways scores still steer sentencing, parole, and civil commitment.

We unpack the seductive clarity of risk tools—and the trouble that follows when dimensional traits are forced into binary verdicts. Tony’s story from a UK high-security hospital lays bare the diagnostic double bind: calm becomes “shallow,” protest becomes “manipulative,” and every reaction confirms the label. We contrast that with emerging neuroscience that finds differences in fear and emotion processing rather than emotional emptiness, and with longitudinal evidence that context and early intervention can shift traits over time. The point isn’t to deny danger; it’s to question certainty.

Then we pivot to medicine’s own reckoning with bias and overconfidence. In our chart note, pediatric clinicians and engineers use 3D CT and finite element modeling to interpret infant skull fractures, replacing gut feel with measurable patterns. The lesson carries back to courts and clinics alike: a red flag should prompt slower thinking, not shortcut it. We close with a gripping ER story from a listener in recovery whose pain was sidelined by an old label until one doctor listened, ordered the right tests, and changed the trajectory of the night. Across psychiatry, law, and emergency care, the throughline is clear: tools help, but certainty can harm. Let numbers inform judgment, not replace it.

If this sparked thought, share it with a friend, follow Doctoring the Truth, and leave a quick review—what’s one label you think we overtrust?

REFERENCES

The Psychopath Test, by Jon Ronson: panmacmillan.com

www.hare.org

Hare, R. D. (1998). The Hare PCL-R: Some issues concerning its use and misuse. Legal and Criminological Psychology, 3(Part 1), 99–119.

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Stay safe, and stay suspicious...trust, after all, is a delicate thing!

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A bright green room. No clocks. No privacy. And a radical promise: strip away the mask and rebuild empathy from the inside out. We follow that promise from a cryptic book that landed in mailboxes worldwide to the Psychopathy Checklist (PCL-R) and then into Oak Ridge’s notorious Total Encounter Capsule—where encounter therapy, humiliation, and even LSD tried to force transformation. The footage looked convincing; the results, years later, were devastating. When “healing” teaches people to mimic remorse, are we improving safety or upgrading manipulation?

This story isn’t tidy, and that’s the point. Tools help, but they cannot replace judgment, transparency, and safeguards. Press play for a sharp, humane look at psychopathy, the Oak Ridge experiment, and the high stakes of getting certainty wrong. If the episode sparks you, share it with a friend, hit follow, and leave a review—your support helps us bring more evidence-driven stories to your feed.

Resources:

The Psychopath Test, by Jon Ronson

Court decision: Barker v. Barker (2020 ONSC 3746)

Primary-source paper: “The Total Encounter Capsule” (Barker & McLaughlin, 1977)

Outcome study: Rice, Harris & Cormier (1992), Law and Human Behavior
Government/period document: Canadian Penitentiary Service report on visits to the STU (Oak Ridge) (1978)

Mark Bourrie, By Reason of Insanity: The David Michael Krueger Story (1997)

https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/endometriosis

https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/drugsatfda_docs/label/2025/214846s012lbl.pdf?u

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Don't miss a (heart) beat! Check out our Instagram @doctoringthetruthpodcast and email us your Medical Mishaps at doctoringthetruth@gmail.com. Join us on Facebook at Doctoring the Truth, and TikTok @doctoring the truth. Don't forget to download, rate, and review so we can keep bringing you more exciting content each week!

Stay safe, and stay suspicious...trust, after all, is a delicate thing!

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A patient under anesthesia is supposed to be safe. What we uncovered is what happens when that safety is only assumed. We dig into the case of Cody Alan Stolfa, a dental assistant in Stillwater, Oklahoma, who pled guilty to 33 felonies for sexually assaulting sedated patients—crimes revealed not by a complaint, but by a dark‑web video that set off a digital breadcrumb trail. It’s a story about power, access, and how easily abuse hides in the gaps of outpatient care.

From there, we widen the lens. We talk victim psychology when trauma exists without a narrative, why disclosure still matters, and the concrete policies every clinic should adopt: two-person minimums in sedation rooms, auditable monitoring, tighter hiring standards, and transparent patient education. We also press pause on hype with a reality check on the viral “Russian cancer vaccine”—what therapeutic mRNA vaccines can promise, what current evidence can’t, and how to separate hope from headlines without losing either.

If you care about patient safety, medical ethics, true crime in healthcare, and critical thinking in the face of sensational claims, this one will stay with you. Listen, share with someone who books dental surgery, and tell us: what safeguard would you insist on before consenting to sedation? Subscribe, leave a rating and review, and send us your story ideas—we’re listening.

Resources:

https://www.facebook.com/TheDemandProject/posts/sensitive-content-warning-aggravated-sexual-assault-in-stillwatera-position-of-t/1344754514361968/

https://www.newsnationnow.com/crime/former-dental-assistant-pleads-guilty-to-sex-crimes-with-sedated-patients/

Cancer breakthrough

​KOCO

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Don't miss a (heart) beat! Check out our Instagram @doctoringthetruthpodcast and email us your Medical Mishaps at doctoringthetruth@gmail.com. Join us on Facebook at Doctoring the Truth, and TikTok @doctoring the truth. Don't forget to download, rate, and review so we can keep bringing you more exciting content each week!

Stay safe, and stay suspicious...trust, after all, is a delicate thing!

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A phone buzzes, a DNA app refreshes, and a life story tilts. We follow the chain reaction from a single “close relative” match to a web of half-siblings who piece together the sordid truth. What starts as an ancestry curiosity becomes a reckoning with consent, identity, and the limits of the law.

We also zoom out to the legal and medical landscape. Why did prosecutors reach for obstruction instead of charging the underlying deception? How did advocacy push Indiana to create one of the first fertility fraud statutes, with criminal penalties and civil remedies for families and donor-conceived children? And where does healthcare go from here—toward better consent, transparent record-keeping, and an accountability culture that treats trust like the clinical vital it is?

Light banter and listener stories frame the heaviness of the topic, but the heart of this episode is clarity: consent isn’t a technicality, genetic truth matters for health and identity, and technology can pry open what institutions would rather keep closed. If this conversation moved you, subscribe, share the show with a friend, and leave a review telling us what protections you think every state should adopt. Your voice helps push this story—and the laws—forward.

Sources

Our Father (Netflix, 2022)
https://www.netflix.com/title/81347338

CBS News — “Fertility doctor who secretly used his own sperm avoids jail time”
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/donald-cline-fertility-doctor-who-lied-about-using-his-own-sperm-avoids-jail-time/

The Atlantic — “The Fertility Doctor Who Used His Own Sperm”
https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2022/05/fertility-doctor-donald-cline-netflix-our-father/629778/

The New York Times — “Fertility Doctor Used Own Sperm, Prosecutors Say”
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/13/us/fertility-doctor-indiana-sperm.html

ABC News — “How a DNA Test Exposed a Fertility Doctor’s Secret”
https://abcnews.go.com/US/fertility-doctor-used-sperm-patients-children/story?id=41938693

Indiana Senate Bill 174 (2018)
https://iga.in.gov/legislative/2018/bills/senate/174

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Don't miss a (heart) beat! Check out our Instagram @doctoringthetruthpodcast and email us your Medical Mishaps at doctoringthetruth@gmail.com. Join us on Facebook at Doctoring the Truth, and TikTok @doctoring the truth. Don't forget to download, rate, and review so we can keep bringing you more exciting content each week!

Stay safe, and stay suspicious...trust, after all, is a delicate thing!

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A candle crackles, a brown residue appears, and someone swears their sinuses feel clear. It looks convincing—until you test the physics, check the anatomy, and tally the injuries. We pull back the curtain on ear candling with an audiologist’s eye: what the cones are made of, how they’re used, the sweeping claims from “wax removal” to “brain detox,” and the simple reason the residue you see isn’t coming from your ear. We trace the marketing myth of ancient origins, the Hopi tribe’s explicit rejection, and why a modern wellness product was dressed up as tradition to make it feel trustworthy.

We also talk about what does work. Ears are self-cleaning, Q-tips push wax deeper, and safe options include softening drops, professional irrigation, and clinician-performed removal. Plus, a powerful listener story about a child’s head injury reminds us how subtle warning signs can mask serious problems—and why trusting your gut and returning for care can be lifesaving.

If you care about ear health, evidence-based wellness, and spotting medical misinformation before it harms, this conversation equips you with clear answers and safer choices. Subscribe, share with a friend who swears by ear candles, and leave a review to help others find the show. Your hearing—and your safety—deserve more than smoke and mirrors.

Resources:

clinicsinsurgery

https://www.drugs.com/fda-consumer/don-t-get-burned-stay-away-from-ear-candles-125.html

globalscience

https://www.homeopathicpluscentre.com/ear-candling-2/

Livescience

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Don't miss a (heart) beat! Check out our Instagram @doctoringthetruthpodcast and email us your Medical Mishaps at doctoringthetruth@gmail.com. Join us on Facebook at Doctoring the Truth, and TikTok @doctoring the truth. Don't forget to download, rate, and review so we can keep bringing you more exciting content each week!

Stay safe, and stay suspicious...trust, after all, is a delicate thing!

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