Reading Time: 6 minutes Lonnie was in her twenties. She had a rare disease that frequently flared up. I guessed her overnight bag was always packed in a closet by the front door.
“I have a question for you,” she said. Something in her tone made my nerves stand on end. “Have you ever seen this disease before?”
“Not often, but…yes.”
Lonnie seemed to sense my hesitation. “Am I too complicated for you, Doctor?”
Reading Time: 11 minutes It’s been a rough few days for anyone following flu season data. While China has eased zero-COVID restrictions in the face of protests, despite currently experiencing a surge in case count (along with Japan), North American hospitals face what the American Medical Association is openly calling a “tripledemic”: a wave of flu, Respiratory Syncytial Virus […]
Reading Time: 3 minutes On Friday, October 14, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released weekly COVID-19 data with a new breakdown of dominant strains for infections. These included the “sudden” emergence of BQ.1 and BQ.1.1, which had been recorded under BA.5 in earlier data, and were now prominent and rising strains when recorded separately. Together with […]
Reading Time: 2 minutes We’re in a complicated season of the COVID-19 pandemic. While health officials struggle with messaging around prevention, and politicians are eager to call an end to the era, new data has been surging around the long term impacts of COVID-19. All year, we’ve been seeing reports about the uptick in type-1 diabetes among children who […]
Reading Time: 8 minutes The California state investigation into racial bias in healthcare only scratches the surface of a deeply-ingrained system.
Reading Time: 6 minutes July 1995. It was my first night of internship, the next step after medical school. I’d already admitted a half dozen patients to the Cardiac Intensive Care Unit from the emergency room under the watch of a third-year resident. The CCU was the scariest first-night internship assignment there was. Even some patients joked about avoiding heart attacks in […]
Reading Time: < 1 minute On Wednesday, the World Health Organization encouraged men engaging in same-sex intercourse to limit their number of partners, in order to curb the monkeypox outbreak. Monkeypox is not spread solely through sexual intercourse; it can be spread through close physical contact in any capacity. Nonetheless, at least 95% of those infected have been men who […]
Reading Time: 2 minutes Three major reports this month highlight the fragility of ongoing health sciences research, and challenges for broader scientific literacy. Earlier in July, the World Health Organization recommended against the use of non-sugar sweeteners, in a blow to many conventional weight-loss strategies. On July 20, Joanna Moncrieff and Mark Horowitz shared a research review that undermines […]
Reading Time: 3 minutes The side effects of the recent overturning of Roe v. Wade are causing a ripple of issues that could cost people their lives. And I’m not talking about attempting a self-induced abortion, despite the popular clothes-hanger imagery, or about how an untreated ectopic pregnancy basically means death. No, I mean women who are being denied […]
Reading Time: 3 minutes Chances are good that you know someone who suffers from intense menstrual distress: cramping, headaches, nausea, and diarrhea, just to name a few. You might even be that person. I’ve been lucky in that, despite having a uterus, it rarely acts up too badly. But I see it all around me: in family members, in […]
