Author: paige laevy

A middle-aged Army veteran is talking about his phone habits in a therapist’s office in a mid-sized American city. He began searching for guitar lessons and watching music videos on social media. It’s fairly easy. But gradually, almost unnoticed, his feed changed; night after night, street fights, security altercations, and police body-cam footage filled the screen. He was unable to stop observing. And over several months, he underwent a transformation. His emotional reactions became flat. He began using a coldness that had never been present before when describing strangers in news clips. This is no longer an uncommon tale. It…

When someone tells you to “just stay positive” when your world is collapsing, a certain kind of fatigue sets in. It’s more akin to a silent deflation, the sensation of reaching out and grabbing air, than anger. The majority of people have at some point been on both sides of that conversation, either giving or receiving hollow assurances while nodding while something inside sinks a little deeper. There is now a name for what is going on in those moments. From fringe psychology into popular discourse, toxic positivity—the unrelenting, mindless attempt to reframe every traumatic event as an opportunity, a…

The moment a patient sees again has a peculiarly ordinary quality. No dramatic gasp, no tears fit for the camera. There is only a brief silence in the clinic while the patient slowly reads a line of text that hasn’t been readable in years, tilts their head, and adjusts a pair of augmented-reality glasses. Physicians who have witnessed it talk more about the quiet than the festivity. It’s the quiet of something that no one in the room thought would work. The bionic eye was a promise that never materialized for decades. American, Australian, and German researchers made an attempt.…

In a contemporary operating room in Seoul, there’s a certain silence. It was more mechanical than the gentle, cautious silence of older hospitals. a slight hum. A keyboard tap. The surgeon watches a screen that displays a real-time human heartbeat while seated at a console, sometimes in the same building and other times in a different city. A few inches are moved by their hands. Fractions of a millimeter are moved by a robotic arm inside the patient. Even for those who work there on a daily basis, the scene still seems a little unreal. More than most nations, South…

In an Athens supermarket, the first thing you notice is how little room the olive oil actually takes up. It’s not a specialty item hidden behind a glass counter. Like milk or eggs in an American aisle, it sits there, bottle after bottle, next to bread and tomatoes. The Mediterranean diet used to include that ordinariness. Food is woven into a location rather than taken out and marketed as a brand. That ordinariness was lost somewhere along the line. The Mediterranean diet turned into a ranking, a product, and a magazine cover. It consistently ranks at the top of U.S.…

A peculiar notion has gained traction in America somewhere between the quiet hum of a hospital transfusion room and the louder hum of a Facebook feed. An increasing number of patients are asking their doctors if the blood that will soon enter their veins came from a person who received a COVID-19 vaccination. Some of them want another bag if the response is in the affirmative. an alternative donor. As the online communities like to say, a “pure” one. It sounds like something you might hear on the periphery of a late-night podcast. However, the request is appearing in actual…

In a glass-walled conference room in Uptown Dallas, a group of health system executives convened on a warm afternoon in late March to discuss collaboration, startup incubation, and whether North Texas could eventually transcend its status as a regional market. Dallas has been quietly and unevenly having this conversation for at least ten years. People no longer act as though Nashville isn’t the benchmark they’re pursuing. The rise of Nashville is one of those tales that, only in retrospect, seems inevitable. HCA’s “family tree”—a published chain of executives and spin-offs—has produced generations of founders, investors, and operators who still communicate…

It started with a handshake and a ten-year contract. In September 2019, Google announced that Mayo Clinic had agreed to hand over a decade’s worth of medical, genetic, and financial data to live inside Google’s cloud. Within weeks, Providence had signed with Microsoft. Cerner, one of the largest electronic health record companies in the country, picked Amazon. The pattern was obvious even then, though most patients had no idea any of it was happening. America’s hospitals were quietly becoming tech customers. Walk into a big teaching hospital today and you can almost feel the shift, even if you can’t see…

When the World Health Assembly concludes and delegates leave the Palais des Nations with heavy binders and courteous exhaustion, a certain silence descends upon Geneva in late spring. They departed with something heavier than normal in May of last year. The text of a Pandemic Agreement, which, on paper, commits the world to doing what it failed to do in late 2019, was finally agreed upon by 194 countries after three years of negotiations. The question of whether it truly works is quite different. The goal is fairly simple. Create a common early warning system. Distribute pathogen samples more quickly.…

The majority of the nation hasn’t fully embraced the strange development that is taking place in American psychiatry. President Trump signed an executive order on a Saturday afternoon in mid-April instructing federal agencies to expedite research on psilocybin, MDMA, and ibogaine—drugs that, until recently, were only mentioned in passing by medical professionals at conferences. The order has a blatant political bias in favor of veterans’ mental health and $50 million in federal funding. However, the fact that this is occurring is not surprising to anyone who has been monitoring the clinical trial data for the last ten years. It’s the…