Talking about death can be hard, and in some societal settings it's become a taboo. How can we plan for death in a society that tries to avoid it at all costs?

In Episode 8 of Sick Society, Dr Alexis Paton and Sir Andrew “Bod” Goddard are joined by Dr Kathryn Mannix, a palliative care consultant and bestselling author of With the End in Mind and Listen. Kathryn says we've lost sight of the process of dying, and works to help people better understand and prepare for death.

• why medical professionals are not taught the process of dying
• why death is most often peaceful
• the medicalization of death and why fewer people are dying at home
• death avoidance and the concept of death as failure

Sick Society is a Haunted Mouse Productions podcast, hosted by Dr Alexis Paton and Sir Andrew Goddard, exploring how medicine and public life shape health.
https://linktr.ee/hauntedmouseproductions

Climate change is one of the biggest issues facing our world, and the healthcare industry is not immune. Can sustainable healthcare turn the tide and make us healthier at the same time?

In episode 7 of Sick Society, Dr Alexis Paton and Sir Andrew "Bod" Goddard are joined by Dr Hayley Pinto, the Education and Training Lead at the Centre for Sustainable Healthcare. Hayley teaches people how to practice healthcare in a way that’s not damaging people or our future.

In this episode we will discuss:

• The rise of heat-related illness
• The carbon footprint of the NHS
• Why the poorest in our communities will be most deeply affected
• Air pollution and how it’s already affecting children
• Eco distress
• What we can do

Sick Society is a Haunted Mouse Productions podcast, hosted by Dr Alexis Paton and Sir Andrew Goddard, exploring how medicine and public life shape health.

https://linktr.ee/hauntedmouseproductions

We all know we are supposed to "eat healthy" but what does that mean? How does it really affect our health?

In episode 6 of Sick Society, Dr Alexis Paton and Sir Andrew "Bod" Goddard are joined by Dr Duane Mellor, a double award winning registered dietitian and science communicator who says that we've lost touch with what food is.

In this episode we will discuss:

• homogenization of our food supply
• why we eat, where we eat & who we eat with
• the cost of food
• why focusing on obesity is missing the point
• "food noise" & the struggle to navigate the world of nutrition advice
• how we enjoy food

Sick Society is a Haunted Mouse Productions podcast, hosted by Dr Alexis Paton and Sir Andrew Goddard, exploring how medicine and public life shape health.
https://linktr.ee/hauntedmouseproductions

Most people already know exercise is good for them.
The harder question is why so many of us struggle to sustain it, and who actually has the conditions to make it possible.

In Episode 5 of Sick Society, Dr Alexis Paton and Sir Andrew “Bod” Goddard are joined by Dr Jon Houghton, a sports and exercise physician whose work spans military rehabilitation, NHS practice, and elite professional sport. His clinical focus is helping people remain active when age, injury, illness, or circumstance intervene.

Rather than offering a programme to follow, this episode asks a more durable question:

If the goal is to remain capable, not simply alive, decades from now, what does that require today?

Together, they explore:

• Why “just move more” sounds straightforward but often isn’t

• Whether weight loss has become too narrow a measure of health

• The rise of longevity culture, and what it clarifies or distorts

• Why resistance training is having a resurgence, and what the evidence actually supports

• How wearables and performance data shape behaviour, for better and for worse

• The reality that access to movement is structured by income, geography, and policy

• Whether governments can justify investing in prevention when the return may be decades away

• What it would mean to treat exercise as social infrastructure rather than personal virtue

Sick Society is a Haunted Mouse Productions podcast, hosted by Dr Alexis Paton and Sir Andrew Goddard, exploring how medicine and public life shape health.
https://linktr.ee/hauntedmouseproductions

Cold homes don’t just feel uncomfortable — they quietly change how the body works.

In this episode of Sick Society, Dr. Alexis Paton and Sir Andrew Goddard are joined by Hannah Fearn, a social affairs journalist who has reported on housing and health policy for two decades. Together, they examine why the UK’s housing stock produces unusually high health harms and why addressing it is as much a political challenge as a technical one.

Britain isn’t uniquely cold. Yet it does particularly badly on cold- and damp-related health outcomes. Why?

This conversation explores how we arrived at this point and why the solutions are harder than they first appear:

• Why the UK’s housing quality is a health issue, not just a cost-of-living issue
• What EPC ratings do and why they rarely change behaviour
• Why retrofit schemes struggle in practice
• How rental insecurity shapes who can complain and who cannot
• What policy can do quickly (cash support) versus what takes decades (housing supply)
• Why prevention saves money long-term but struggles politically

If housing shapes health outcomes, what responsibility should policy carry?

Sick Society is a series about how modern life shapes health, long before anyone enters a clinic.

🎧 A podcast by Haunted Mouse Productions

Health misinformation crops up in everyday decision-making, and it’s reshaping our trust in medicine.

In Episode 3 of Sick Society, Dr. Alexis Paton and Sir Andrew Goddard are joined by Tim Caulfield, a leading researcher on health misinformation and science communication, to examine why today’s misinformation landscape feels harder to challenge than ever before, and why simply “correcting the facts” no longer works.

As Tim puts it, we’re moving from fact-speaking to belief-speaking, where shared identity and emotion matter more than evidence alone.

In this conversation, you’ll hear:

• Why modern health misinformation isn’t just louder — it’s more resilient
• How medical beliefs become social and political identities
• Why false balance makes scientific consensus look divided
• How wellness, supplements, and optimisation culture evade scrutiny
• What actually reduces harm: pre-bunking, debunking, and slowing emotional sharing
• Where AI accelerates misinformation — and where it might help contain it

Sick Society explores how culture, power, technology, and policy shape health long before anyone enters a clinic.

🎧 A podcast by Haunted Mouse Productions

About our guest
Tim Caulfield is a professor of health law and science policy at the University of Alberta and a leading researcher studying how misinformation shapes public trust, behaviour, and policy. Drawing on decades of research, he explains why today’s misinformation environment is fundamentally different — and how social media, political identity, wellness culture, and now AI accelerate the problem.

Most health scandals aren’t sudden failures. They’re warnings that went unanswered.

In Episode 2 of Sick Society, Dr. Alexis Paton and Sir Andrew Goddard are joined by Shaun Lintern, award-winning health journalist, to examine how medical scandals emerge, escalate, and repeat.

The conversation draws on major NHS case studies, including Mid Staffordshire. It also examines failures in private and commercial healthcare. Together, these examples show how culture, authority, and political pressure influence decisions long before problems become public.

In the podcast, Alexis, Andrew, and Shaun talk about:

• How families and journalists surface early warning signs when formal systems fail
• What major NHS scandals reveal about targets, staffing, and the erosion of patient focus
• The role — and limits — of regulation and inspection
• Why whistleblowing remains risky despite official protections
• How social media, private healthcare, and commercial incentives may shape future failures

A sober discussion about accountability, patient safety, and why learning from failure in healthcare is so difficult — and so necessary.

🎧 A podcast by Haunted Mouse Productions
🔔 Follow the show to hear what’s coming next

Dr. Alexis Paton and Sir Andrew Goddard start with a simple question that turns out to be anything but:

What is health?

Our premiere episode sets the season’s foundation: exploring how society and the world we live in quietly shapes our health — long before a doctor or hospital visit.

You’ll hear why:

• misinformation and “wellness culture” are impossible to ignore
• health means different things to different people
• prevention is always underfunded — and why
• inequality, housing, food, and policy matter more than we admit

This is a big-picture conversation about how health actually works, and why fixing it requires more than medicine.

Upcoming episodes explore housing, food, climate change, misinformation, and patient safety.

🔔 Follow the show so you don’t miss what’s next.

🎧 A podcast by Haunted Mouse Productions