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Just because death is inevitable doesn’t make it easy or natural to talk about. In a new study, researchers wondered if hospice workers—experts in end-of-life care—had lessons to teach the rest of us when it came to speaking with patients and families about death.Daniel Menchik, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Arizona who studies the use of language in different fields of medicine, spent eight months sitting in on team meetings at a hospice care facility that were also open to patients’ families. His goal was to study how both groups talked to each other about the impending death of the patient. His findings, which will be published in the journal Social Science & Medicine, reinforce the importance of framing death as a process rather than an outcome when carin...

At the height of the pandemic, Meg McNamara’s employer sent her home with symptoms that looked a lot like Covid, but she knew better.A negative Covid test proved that the 37-year-old’s coughs and red eyes were just her usual allergies. Determined to not be wrongly accused again, the New York-based physician’s assistant turned to over-the-counter medication. She started popping Benadryl every morning to mask her symptoms, but that caused other problems.“It was a nasty experience,” said McNamara who often suffered from drowsiness — a side effect of Benadryl. “I’m always tired. For me to have a little bit more fatigue in my life is not acceptable.”As the pandemic has receded, McNamara is emblematic of the dilemma facing Americans. They’re under pressure to show up for work and social gatherin...

Though there are guidelines for when a convicted criminal merits the death penalty (in states that still have capital punishment), ultimately, the jury makes the decision. A new study finds that the facts of the case are not the sole determinant of whether or not a jury will issue a death sentence—based on the research, certain “untrustworthy” facial features appear to play a significant role in capital-punishment sentencing. According to the study, published Dec. 14 in the journal Psychology Science, people associate certain facial features such as down-turned lips and heavy brows with being untrustworthy. It’s one of the earliest forms of stereotype bias humans learn—even babies prefer those without these traits—and scientists have found it affects outcomes such as who we select as leade...

Despite significant strides in research and treatments–from liquid biopsy to vaccines, from precision medicine to CAR T-cell therapy–cancer remains the leading cause of death across the globe, taking some 10 million lives annually. And beyond just the devastating human toll, cancer’s economic burden on patients and their families exceeds $21 billion each year, a number estimated to reach $25 trillion between now and 2050.  Recognizing that there is still much to do if we hope to ever beat this insidious disease, the White House announced recently a $240 million investment in the reinvigorated Cancer Moonshot initiative, which aims to cut the cancer death rate by half in the next 25 years.   Yet funding and policy, while c...