Health

Whether you feel reborn—or even just a little bit reset—at the start of a new year, consider making your mental health a priority in 2024. Why? “Because that’s the gateway to everything else,” says Guy Winch, a clinical psychologist, author of Emotional First Aid, and co-host of the Dear Therapists podcast. “It’s the linchpin that allows you to succeed or to fail.”With that in mind, we asked Winch and other experts to share the New Year’s resolutions they wish people would make in the name of mental health.1. Rethink your social-media useSpend some time reflecting on whether you’d like to continue with the same online habits in 2024, says Nedra Glover Tawwab, a therapist and author of Set Boundaries, Find Peace: A Guide to Reclaiming Yourself. (If it’s hard to stop scrolling long enough to...

The case study involved just one patient: a 20-year-old woman with severe systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE). But the study’s results were so dramatic that they appeared in 2021 in the New England Journal of Medicine. The woman received a type of cell therapy called CAR-T, which in the past has been used primarily to treat cancer. CAR-T cell therapy involves altering a patient’s immune cells so that they identify and attack problems or pathogens. In people with cancer, that attack is aimed at the diseased cells. But in the NEJM case study, the therapy was directed at the woman’s own B cells, which are thought to be a primary cause of inflammation and damage in patients with lupus. The results were astonishing. “Within one month, nearly all of her symptoms had calmed down,” says Dr. Michell...

Doctors and parents celebrated the major advances that came in 2023 to treat respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), which sends up to 80,000 children under age five to the hospital each year in the U.S. This year, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved two critical ways to reduce the risk of RSV in young kids: a vaccine for pregnant mothers that can protect newborns, and a drug treatment for babies under one year.In a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, researchers report encouraging real-world data that show how effective the drug treatment, nirsevimab (brand name: Beyfortus), can be. The study, which was funded by the drug's makers Sanofi and AstraZeneca, included more than 8,000 infants in France, Germany, and the U.K. who were one year old or younger and enterin...

The science is clear: from a health perspective, the less you drink, the better. But alcohol is a cornerstone of nearly every personal and professional gathering, so you may not always want to abstain.Nor do you always have to. Most people can make drinking in moderation part of a healthy lifestyle in a variety of ways, experts say.Here’s how to do it.Take inventory of your habits.Becoming a healthier drinker starts with getting real with yourself. Have you had a problem with alcohol in the past, or do you now? “Reflecting earnestly and honestly is an important first step,” says Dr. Aakash Shah, chief of addiction medicine at Hackensack Meridian Health in New Jersey. Those with alcohol addiction issues are usually advised to abstain from drinking. Not sure if that’s you? Consider whether y...

As in most years, much of the media focus in 2023 was on the myriad crises people all over the world faced, from horrific wars in Eastern Europe and the Middle East to devastating natural disasters (many climate-change-related) in Turkey, Southeast Africa, Hawaii, Canada, and more. At the end of this long year, though, it's worth taking a step back and considering some of the ways things improved. Here are some examples, gathered together by TIME's climate and health journalists:COVID-19 death numbers plummeted…Since the pandemic began, COVID-19 has been a leading cause of death both in the U.S. and around the world. That began to change this year, thanks in part to widespread access to updated vaccines and treatments that prevent the worst of disease. According to data from the U.S. Cente...

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...