Doctors have long taken for granted a devil’s bargain: Relieving intense pain, such as that caused by surgery and traumatic injury, risks inducing the sort of pleasure that could leave patients addicted. Opioids are among the most powerful, if not the most powerful, pain medications ever known, but for many years they have been a … Read more
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is wrong about a lot of things in public health. Vaccines don’t cause autism. Raw milk is more dangerous than pasteurized milk. And cellphones haven’t been shown to cause brain cancer. But the basic idea behind his effort to “Make America Healthy Again” is correct: America is not healthy, and our … Read more
This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here. On Christmas Eve of 2020, my father was admitted to the hospital with sudden weakness. My mother was not allowed to join him. She pleaded with the staff—my dad needed help making medical decisions, she said—but there were … Read more
Sign up for Being Human, a newsletter that explores wellness culture, mortality and disease, and other mysteries of the body and the mind. When Mary-Claire King discovered the first gene linked to hereditary breast cancer in 1990, she also got to decide its name. She settled on the four letters BRCA, which had three distinct … Read more
Sign up for Being Human, a newsletter that explores wellness culture, mortality and disease, and other mysteries of the body and the mind. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nominee to be the next secretary of Health and Human Services, is America’s most prominent vaccine skeptic. An advocacy organization that he founded and chaired has called … Read more
Sign up for Being Human, a newsletter that explores wellness culture, mortality and disease, and other mysteries of the body and the mind. When I was teaching indoor cycling every week, an unexpected benefit of the gig was free ice cream. One of the class regulars had an ice-cream machine at home and sometimes brought … Read more
Sign up for Being Human, a newsletter that explores wellness culture, mortality and disease, and other mysteries of the body and the mind. The last time I sweated through my shirt, I vowed that it would never happen again. Sweat shame had dogged me for too many years. No longer would armpit puddles dictate the … Read more