This Week at TEDMED
When life refuses to offer a reason, the pressure to find one can become another burden. This week, TEDMED explores what happens when easy explanations fall away and care begins with something harder: staying present with uncertainty, grief, and what cannot be fixed.
The brain is built to seek control, predict what comes next, and turn experience into a coherent story. But what happens when illness makes certainty impossible? In a new episode of TEDMED Now, Kelly Thomas revisits Kate Bowler’s story to explore the science of uncertainty, the limits of positive thinking, and how releasing the demand for an explanation can create room for beauty, love, and life as it is.
Kate Bowler spent years studying the belief that good things happen to good people. Then, at 35, a stage four cancer diagnosis called that promise into question. With honesty, humor, and hard-won clarity, she challenges the comforting myths we use to explain suffering and asks what becomes possible when we stop insisting that everything happens for a reason.
Care is not only an intervention. It is also how we listen, stay present, and help one another live with illness, grief, memory loss, aging, and uncertainty. This TEDMED playlist brings together seven Talks that reimagine care as a practice of attention, connection, honesty, and dignity across the full arc of life. Together, they ask what care can become when fixing is no longer the only measure of what helps.
Explore how music, sound, color, and technology help us express emotion, connect with others, and experience the world anew.
West Australian instrumentalist and drummer Sam Maher performs on the handpan, exploring the ability for this instrument to transcend language and medicine.
Kaitlyn Hova is not only a professional violinist, composer, full stack web developer, designer, neuroscientist, and core team member of Women Who Code, but she is also a…
From the beep of cardiac monitors to the blare of alarms, hospitals are often jarring places to be from an auditory perspective. And for patients, the combined dissonant…
Kristin Neidlinger, founder of Sensoree, explores how what we wear on the outside of our bodies can help us express emotions and feelings from the inside, and how…
In both presentations and grant writing, I’ve referenced Dr. Nadine Burke Harris’ TEDMED Talk to support the need for our work. These talks are so helpful, always well received and have led to really meaningful discussions.
Adam Carley, Executive, Director Reach Western CT
I enjoy the science breakthroughs, the compelling stories and all the diverse speakers.
TEDMED Community Member
The most awesome thing about TEDMED talks is that they ignite our imagination, spark new ideas, and lead to innovations that enhance science and health care.
TEDMED Community Member
TEDMED offers valuable insights I bring back to my work in post-acute care within the home setting. The talks are thought-provoking and inspiring, with lessons that will stay with me for a lifetime – motivating me to improve my work and impact in healthcare.
Theresa Santoro, President and CEO, RVNAhealth
Looking for your next big idea? Tap “Surprise Me” to discover a TEDMED Talk that challenges assumptions, sparks curiosity, or reframes how you see health and care.
Start with what moves you. Browse Talks and Podcasts by theme, specialty, or speaker, and follow the ideas shaping medicine, science, and the future of human health.
Thematic collections inspired by our TEDMED stage. Explore curated Talks organized around the ideas and breakthroughs shaping health and medicine.
TEDMED is where medical breakthroughs and the latest learnings are shared in interest and understandable ways. Learn about what is happening in health and medicine from the leaders that are shaping its future.
Diagnosis Detective
Death Thought Leader
Investigative Journalist
Personality Psychologist
Divinity Professor
Inventor, Scientist, Engineer, Entrepreneur, and Author
Big ideas, delivered from the TEDMED stage.
Watch Talks from physicians, scientists, artists, and innovators shaping the future of health.
Conversations beyond the stage. Listen as leaders in health and science explore ideas, tensions, and possibilities driving change.
Stay with the idea longer. Explore curated collections that examine a single topic through multiple perspectives in health and medicine.
Current topics in health and medicine that stimulate ideas, connection and creativity will arrive periodically in your mailbox via the TEDMED Newsletter.
