Dr. Sydnee McElroy

Dr. Sydnee McElroy is an American family medicine physician, assistant professor, and podcast host who co-hosts Sawbones: A Marital Tour of Misguided Medicine with her husband, podcaster Justin McElroy. Produced by the Maximum Fun network since 2013, Sawbones explores the history of medicine's strangest, most dangerous, and most confidently wrong treatments — bloodletting, mercury cures, lobotomies, patent medicines — as a way of illuminating how the scientific method has progressively replaced guesswork in medical practice.

The show operates on the premise that understanding past medical failures makes you a more informed patient and a better evaluator of present-day health claims. McElroy brings genuine clinical expertise and a deep interest in medical history to each episode, while her husband Justin provides comedic energy. The podcast was described in a 2018 interview as the most downloaded medical podcast in the world, with over 300 episodes produced as of the mid-2020s. In 2018, the couple expanded the project into a book, The Sawbones Book: The Hilarious, Horrifying Road to Modern Medicine, updated in 2020.

McElroy is a member of the broader McElroy family media network, which includes several podcasts with large and devoted audiences. Her combination of clinical credibility, enthusiasm for history, and comic timing makes Sawbones one of the most effective long-form science communication projects in the podcast space. The show implicitly argues, episode after episode, that medicine's history of getting things badly wrong is precisely why modern standards of evidence, peer review, and clinical trials matter.