Health

Every day dozens of people come to Jennifer Witherspoon—a former dental office manager with zero medical training—for help managing nausea, headaches, and other side effects that can come with taking weight-loss shots. She even crafted a template response to help her quickly get through the messages. “People have offered to pay me, begged me to start a podcast, asked me to call their sisters-in-law, wanted me to call their doctor,” she said. “One lady even invited me to her wedding.” Even Oprah’s production company reached out to feature one of her videos in a prime time special. What makes Witherspoon’s advice so appealing? It’s filling a void. As a Mounjaro user herself, Witherspoon figured out ways to minimize her own side effects, absent guidance from the doctor who prescribed her the ...

The obesity drug Wegovy can now claim to lower the risk of heart attack, stroke, and other cardiovascular issues in people who are overweight or who have obesity, and also have cardiovascular disease. It's the first weight-loss drug to carry an indication for heart benefits. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the addition to the label on March 8 based on a study from Wegovy’s manufacturer, Novo Nordisk, showing that the drug lowered the risk of heart attack, stroke, or dying of heart-related issues in this population by 20% compared to people receiving placebo.When the results of the study were first released at the American Heart Association meeting last November, the findings were greeted with a round of applause from the heart experts in attendance. Obesity is a major ...

March 8, 2024 1:33 PM ESTMarch 8 is your last day to order free rapid COVID-19 tests, as the U.S. government prepares to suspend its at-home test program. Households in the U.S. can receive at least four rapid antigen tests, free of charge, simply by entering a name and address.The federal government has been shipping free tests since early 2022. The program was suspended for a few months in 2023, after the U.S. government stopped considering COVID-19 a public-health emergency, but was reinstated this past fall, as new variants began to spread and cause upticks in infections and hospitalizations. Now, the free testing initiative is again coming to an end.Today is the last day the U.S. Postal Service will accept orders, here. Households that have not ordered any tests since the program was ...

On Sunday, March 10 at 2 a.m., the U.S. and about a third of the world’s other countries will set their clocks forward by one hour, which will make the sun seem to rise later in the morning and hang in the sky longer in the evening. I am not alone in dreading it. Plenty of people want nothing to do with the whole hoary practice.It’s bad for health, bad for safety, bad for your mood, and just plain unpopular. But that doesn’t stop us from changing the clocks, pointlessly, twice a year.The ridiculous history of Daylight Saving TimeThe first push for changing the clocks took place in 1907, when British builder William Willett penned a pamphlet titled “A Waste of Daylight,” in which he proposed setting clocks forward one hour. “The sun shines upon the land for several hours each day while we a...

More adults are using melatonin to get to sleep at night. Unfortunately, that means more young children are finding their parents' tablets and gummies and taking them by accident.A new analysis in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, which is published by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, finds that melatonin was responsible for a surprisingly large share of emergency-department visits—7%—among infants and young kids who accidentally ingested a medication from 2019 to 2022. During that time span, melatonin caused about 11,000 such incidents.Past research shows that from 2009 to 2020, emergency department visits of this type spiked by 420% among this age group. In 2022, other research found a 530% increase in accidental melatonin poisonings from 2012 to 2021 among p...

Hand sanitizers were tainted by benzene. Sunscreens and dry shampoos too. Now acne treatments are joining the list of widely used consumer products found to contain high levels of the chemical linked to cancer.Acne products from brands including Proactiv, Target Corp.’s Up & Up and Clinique have elevated levels of the carcinogen, an independent testing laboratory said in a petition filed with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration late Tuesday. The lab asked the FDA to recall the affected treatments—all of which contain the active ingredient benzoyl peroxide—while regulators investigate. Benzene is a natural component of gasoline and tobacco smoke and can cause leukemia in high amounts, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Over the past three years it’s been...

With loneliness at epidemic levels in the U.S., many people could use a few more friends to lean on. Survey data suggest that many U.S. adults want to make new friends—perhaps because strong relationships are one of the best predictors of happiness and well-being—but struggle to do so. About 8% of U.S. adults say they don’t have any close friends at all.Enter the apps. Bumble for Friends, Hey! VINA, Wink, and plenty more promise to help people make friends online. Many work just like dating apps: you build a profile that includes photos and a bio, then swipe through other people’s profiles until you find someone who seems like a potential match. If you pick each other, you can start chatting.Despite their similarities, friendship apps haven’t taken off in quite the way dating apps have. On...

Brain experts have a pretty good handle on some of the major risk factors that contribute to Alzheimer’s—from a person's genes to their physical activity levels, how much formal education they've received, and how socially engaged they are. But one promise of AI in medicine is that it can spot less obvious links that humans can't always see. Could AI help uncover conditions linked to Alzheimer's that have so far been overlooked? To find out, Marina Sirota and her team at University of California San Francisco (UCSF) ran a machine-learning program on a database of anonymous electronic health records from patients. The AI algorithm was trained to pull out any common features shared by people who were ultimately diagnosed with Alzheimer’s over a period of seven years. The database includes cl...

Not so long ago, Juul was seen as the new Marlboro. Smoking wasn’t that cool anymore—rates had plummeted among U.S. adults and teens—but then came Juul, a sleek, addictive product with flashy advertising tactics that took off like wildfire. It soon became clear that e-cigarettes were hooking teens who otherwise wouldn’t have gone near nicotine.Now, Juul is out and Zyn is in. It’s even more discreet than Juul, with no plumes of vapor. A user simply tucks a small pouch of nicotine, additives, and flavorings under their lip for up to an hour. Over that time, it releases a steady hit of nicotine—more than that in a cigarette, but delivered much more slowly. Like Juul, it contains no tobacco.You're not alone if you're just hearing of Zyn, but it's been for sale in the U.S. since 2014. Like othe...

The first birth control pill that people can buy without a prescription, called Opill, is shipping to stores this week.Perrigo, the Ireland-based company that makes Opill, said the pills should be available to purchase at retail pharmacies and online by the end of March. The pills are designed to be taken daily at about the same time each day, and they will be sold in one-month packs for $19.99 and three-month packs for $49.99.A spokesperson for CVS, one pharmacy that will be stocking the pill, said the pills will be in more than 7,500 of its stores nationwide and will be available to order on the store's app. People can opt for same-day delivery or pick-up in store to preserve their privacy.The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the over-the-counter use of the oral contraceptive l...