Tag: health

Diagnosed with breast cancer, Anne Boyer discusses the treatment that is poisoning her body.

Anne Boyer encounters a familiar system — that grand and easy-to-mistake-for-everything system — at the cancer pavilion.

Amy Scheiner reflects on her mother’s sudden death and what it means to be a woman in a world that is set up to bury them.

Steven Bedard, a former field biologist, travels around Bangladesh with a team of public health investigators studying Nipah, a bat-borne virus with the potential to become the next pandemic.

Nic and his father David Sheff’s memoirs about grappling with Nic’s addiction are the basis for the new movie ‘Beautiful Boy.’ It was important to them that the movie communicate what addiction really is — an illness.

Kovalenko’s choice? Facing mortars on a daily basis or exposing your children to the after-effects of Chernobyl.

Is it the black mold causing your headaches, or is it all in your head? Don’t turn to science. It has no answers.

Goop, Gwyneth Paltrow’s health and wellness empire, is being forced to address accusations of deceptive advertising.

Patients do ask for help with their mental health. And then they wait.

A new father with early-stage MS sets out to understand the interiors of his daughter’s mind, and his own.

Workers at Momentive Performance Materials had given their lives to the chemical plant. The strike was supposed to save what little they had left.

When life’s greatest pleasure is the one you have to quit.

In his late twenties, John Sherman finds a new fondness for cigarettes, despite everything he was ever taught about them.

Sixteen percent of women suffer from a condition you’ve probably never heard of.

Los Algodones is a popular destination for people in search of cheap dental care — many of whom voted for Trump.

Rich patient or poor patient? The New York Times and the Washington Post have dedicated a series to each.

Gillian Anderson and Jennifer Nadel speak frankly about perimenopause and menopause to destigmatize the flow and ebb of the female reproductive cycle.

Beth Kowitt, in Fortune, explores food manufacturers’ race to find a better sugar stand-in. But if sugar is a known health hazard, why don’t we just put less of it in food?

Why beer is better for some of us than abstinence.

In her essay “This Imaginary Half-Nothing: Time” (#10 on this list), poet Anne Boyer quotes another poet, John Donne: “We study health, and we deliberate upon our meats, and drink, and air, and exercises, and we hew, and we polish every stone that goes to that building; and so our health is a long and a […]

The Laidlers’ story is a microcosm of the changing debate over so-called alternative medicine and its cousin, integrative medicine. In 2007, Americans spent $2.9 billion on homeopathic medicine, a treatment based on the belief that minuscule amounts of what causes symptoms in a healthy person will alleviate symptoms in someone who is ill. From nutritional supplements […]

The world’s first experiments with blood transfusion occurred in the mid-1660s in England. The procedure, which was first carried out between dogs, was gruesome: the dogs were tied down, the arteries and veins in their necks opened, and blood transferred from one to another through quills (most likely made from goose feathers) inserted into the […]

For three days, she was in pain. Then, she wasn’t. “I had been living in this… I call it a brown-out because it’s like you’re walking around in a half-coma all the time with the inflammation of your brain from the Lyme. My brain just came right out of that fog. I thought: I can […]

The human lapses that occurred after the computerized ordering system and pill-dispensing robots did their jobs perfectly well is a textbook case of English psychologist James Reason’s “Swiss cheese model” of error. Reason’s model holds that all complex organizations harbor many “latent errors,” unsafe conditions that are, in essence, mistakes waiting to happen. They’re like a forest […]

The emerging popularity of testosterone has opened up whole new business models for entrepreneurial doctors. Chains of shops that provide the hormone have exploded all over the United States, especially across the South. How many millions more men might be willing to try testosterone if it was easy to acquire, and a clinic happened to […]

Time for me is double-edged: Every day brings me further from the low of my last cancer relapse, but every day also brings me closer to the next cancer recurrence — and eventually, death. Perhaps later than I think, but certainly sooner than I desire. There are, I imagine, two responses to that realization. The […]

What might a more-efficient trial system look like? One collaboration in Chicago offers a possible way forward. Working together, several of the city’s academic medical centers have established a joint network for conducting clinical trials. Participating institutions now routinely interview all of their hospitalized patients, regardless of diagnosis, to keep detailed records on their health […]

Mark Leibovich, in the New York Times, gets a rare look inside the life of New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady, who’s now 37 in a league where few play past the age of 40. The result is some obsessive habits about caring for his body and the food he eats: Every morning in the […]

Yesterday I saw my appendix. It was pink and tiny, quite hard to see, but how interesting to be introduced to it for the first time. In for a routine colonoscopy (my fourth, on account of a family history), I refused sedation as I always do, and I had the enormous thrill of witnessing parts […]

Lost too often in the discussion about a cure has been a much more basic, more immediate, and in many ways more important question: How can we better care for those who suffer from the disease? Dementia comes with staggering economic consequences, but it’s not the drugs or medical interventions that have the biggest price […]