Health

Michelle Pickens’ symptoms escalated in college. At the time, she was throwing up at least once a day, and experiencing frequent nausea, abdominal pain, diarrhea, and constipation. Juggling classes with work at a design studio became an extreme exercise in perseverance. She knew in her gut that something was wrong. Yet three different doctors “wrote it off as stress,” says Pickens, now 32, who lives in Annapolis, Md. Lab work and procedures to see inside her gastrointestinal tract showed nothing abnormal. “No one wanted to dig deeper,” she recalls. In a final act of desperation, Pickens saw yet another doctor, and this one gave her a different kind of test: a pill-sized camera to swallow. It revealed an angry area of inflammation deep within her bowel—a “blind spot” that the colonoscopy an...

As health reporters and editors, we know what's good for us. But that doesn't mean we always do it. This year, each of us took at least one thing we've learned covering health and applied it to our own lives. Here's what stuck.Collecting houseplants Last year at this time, I had a modest couple of shelves of houseplants. Now, I live in a jungle. I started collecting rare aroids—a family of plants that includes philodendrons, monsteras, and alocasias—and my new hobby transformed the trajectory of my year. Tending to my plants keeps me busy, so I have less time to scroll social media or get lost in my thoughts, and being surrounded by lush green is calming. I've traveled to new cities to attend plant events, and I’m constantly researching and learning how to be a better plant parent. Plus, t...

Ten years ago, the idea of tracking your footsteps or your heartbeat was weird. Those dedicated to the pursuit of quantified self knowledge proselytized in TED Talks, while journalists attended conferences and reported on the strange new trend. Today, over 40% of households in the U.S. own a wearable device, according to statistics service Statista. It is not uncommon to hear retirees comparing or boasting about their step count for the day. The quantified self is ascendant. Now, as artificial intelligence’s relentless advance continues, researchers and technologists are looking for ways to take the next step—to build AI health coaches that sift through health data and tell users how to stay fighting fit.The triumph of the quantified selfThere’s a lot of evidence to suggest that wearables ...

After Iowa lawmakers passed a ban on gender-affirming care for minors in March, managers of an LGBTQ+ health clinic located just across the state line in Moline, Illinois, decided to start offering that care.The added services would provide care to patients who live in largely rural eastern Iowa, including some of the hundreds previously treated at a University of Iowa clinic, saving them half-day drives to clinics in larger cities like Chicago and Minneapolis.By June, The Project of the Quad Cities, as the Illinois clinic is called, had hired a provider who specializes in transgender health care. So, Andy Rowe, The Project’s health care operations director, called the clinic’s insurance broker to see about getting the new provider added to the nonprofit’s malpractice policy.“I didn’t anti...

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...

A new study adds to evidence that severe obesity is becoming more common in young U.S. children. There was some hope that children in a government food program might be bucking a trend in obesity rates — earlier research found rates were dropping a little about a decade ago for those kids. But an update released Monday in the journal Pediatrics the rate bounced back up a bit by 2020. The increase echoes other national data, which suggests around 2.5% of all preschool-aged children were severely obese during the same period. "We were doing well and now we see this upward trend,” said one of the study’s authors, Heidi Blanck of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “We are dismayed at seeing these findings.” ...

A new variant of the virus that causes COVID-19 is rising to prominence in the U.S. as winter illness season approaches its peak: JN.1, yet another descendent of Omicron. JN.1 was first detected in the U.S. in September but spread slowly at first. In recent weeks, however, it has accounted for a growing percentage of test samples sequenced by labs affiliated with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), surpassing 20% during the two-week period ending Dec. 9. By some projections, it will be responsible for at least half of new infections in the U.S. before December ends. Here’s what to know about JN.1. Is JN.1 more infectious or severe than other SARS-CoV-2 variants? JN...