M⁴: Medicine, Mystery, Mayhem... and Sometimes Murder

A private jet crosses the Midwest at 46,000 feet, perfectly on autopilot, while fighter pilots pull alongside and see frosted windows and no movement inside. Nobody aboard will ever answer the radio. This week, Andrea and Crystal look at some of the most famous plane crashes in history: Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper, Patsy Cline, Jim Croce, Lynyrd Skynyrd, John Denver, Payne Stewart, Aaliyah, and JFK Jr. But we’re not telling these stories in order. We’re sorting them by what a

On the night of August 21, 1986, the villages around Lake Nyos in northwestern Cameroon went quiet. There was no fire, no flood, and no sign of a struggle. By morning, more than 1,700 people and thousands of animals were dead, some of them miles from the water. The few who woke up found that their neighbors, their families, and even the insects were gone. This week, Andrea takes us to a remote crater lake that had been keeping a deadly secret for centuries. What rolled through those valleys in

A podcast climbed to the top of Spotify's charts with a claim that stopped us cold: that some non-speaking autistic children can read minds — and that dozens of them gather on a shared, non-physical plane they call "the Hill." As two RNs, we wanted to believe it. So we pulled the research. What we found traces straight back to a technique with a body count of false accusations, broken families, and at least one criminal conviction — and a well-documented psychological effect that explains why l

People who've survived a near-death experience often describe the same things: a tunnel, a bright light, a sense of peace, even a "life review." But what if some of these experiences aren't happening at the edge of death at all, and instead are happening in the brain during a seizure? This week Andrea dives into the eerie overlap between post-ictal states and near-death experiences, tracing the neuroscience of what happens in the brain right after a seizure and asking a genuinely unsettling que

He turned a childhood beach accident into the most bizarre stage career in French history — and became the highest-paid entertainer in Paris doing it. In this episode, Crystal takes Andrea through the strange, true story of Joseph Pujol, the 19th-century performer who discovered he had absolute voluntary control over a part of his anatomy most people never think about twice. From his early days as a baker in Marseille to his sold-out shows at the Moulin Rouge — where he reportedly out-earned Sa

Dr. Thomas Neill Cream trained as a doctor, and he used every bit of that training to hurt the people who trusted him most. As nurses, we've seen what it means to hold someone's life in your hands. Cream held that same trust and used it as a weapon, poisoning patients across two continents while the medical establishment looked the other way. In this episode, Andrea walks us through how he got away with it for so long, the string of victims most people have never heard of, and the twisted claim