Author: paige laevy

Crackers, protein bars, powdered drink mixes, collagen packets, and other items bearing the term “anti-inflammatory” abound when you stroll down the health food section of any large supermarket, the one with the slightly higher ceilings and ambient lighting intended to make kale look glamorous. Each one subtly but purposefully implies that managing a chronic illness is essentially just one purchase away. The atmosphere is persuasive. Additionally, it is deceptive in important ways. Anti-inflammatory eating has a scientific basis. There is no question about that part. It is now known that some of the most prevalent illnesses, such as heart disease,…

Being ill and impoverished at the same time can lead to a certain kind of exhaustion. When Rebecca Holland, a resident of Maine, received the denial letter from her insurance company, she likely experienced some form of that. Wegovy was prescribed to her after her doctor determined that she was obese. Her doctor prescribed a medication that cost more than $1,000 per month. None of it was covered by her employer’s Anthem plan. So she filed a lawsuit. She was also told she had no case by a federal appeals court last week. Days after confirming the earlier dismissal of…

The way it occurs has an almost imperceptible quality. In the middle of a lengthy shift, a doctor pulls up an AI assistant to double-check a diagnosis they are already fairly certain of. The system reacts in a validating, affirming, and agreeable manner. The physician nods and continues. There doesn’t seem to be anything wrong. And that is exactly the issue, according to a wave of recent studies. Eleven of the top AI systems currently on the market, including tools from OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Meta, and Chinese firms like DeepSeek and Alibaba, were tested in a study published in the…

The light in a hospital pathology lab is consistently cool and somewhat institutional, the kind of fluorescent brightness that makes no one feel good. Trays hold glass slides. Leaning over microscopes, pathologists exhibit the unique focused stillness of individuals performing tasks that demand total focus. For over 150 years, that image—the skilled specialist, the glass slide, the lens—has served as the essential component of illness diagnosis. The hematoxylin and eosin stain, which was created in 1865 and is still the gold standard today, gives tissue samples a pink and purple hue while revealing cell nuclei. This setup is the starting…

For many years, intermittent fasting occupied a specific cultural space. It was a quasi-scientific movement and a wellness trend that was promoted by wellness influencers on Instagram and chronicled in lengthy TikTok videos in which the creators described their “no breakfast” practices with the gravity of someone discussing a new religion. Millions of people followed the 5:2 diet, the 16:8 window, and alternate-day fasting because they provided something that traditional calorie counting did not: a rule you could adhere to without keeping track of every gram of food you consumed. Forego breakfast. Have lunch at noon. At eight, stop. Easy.…

Two men in Hartford lost their lives during police encounters that started as requests for mental health assistance in the early months of 2026. Walker, Everard, was fifty-three. Steven Jones was fifty-five. Families and communities have been grieving in their own unique ways, and each case has unique details. However, the pattern they stand for is completely indistinguishable. It is the same pattern that emergency physicians, psychiatrists, and mental health advocates have been pointing out to Connecticut legislators for years: a system that breaks down right when the people it is meant to protect are most in need. In early…

Anyone who has witnessed a loved one go through antidepressant therapy understands the unique frustration of the process. When a psychiatrist prescribes a medication, the patient waits four to six weeks to see if it works. If not, they try another medication, wait another month, change the dosage, and so on. This cycle, which can last for years, is more a reflection of how little is currently known about which patients will react to which medications and why than it is a medical failure. There might be an alternative beginning point, one that resides, of all places, in a stool…

Shebani Sethi talks about a moment that altered the course of her career. She was treating patients with psychiatric conditions that were resistant to treatment, such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or depression, and she kept observing the same thing. They had metabolic issues as well. resistance to insulin. pre-diabetes. high cholesterol. obesity. This overlap continued to occur so frequently that it started to resemble a message the data was attempting to convey rather than a coincidence. Sethi first used the term “metabolic psychiatry” in 2015 to describe what she was starting to do. By that time, she was at Stanford,…

Dermatologists discuss a study that was published in Nature with a mixture of professional deference and something more difficult to identify. Nearly 130,000 clinical photos of skin lesions were used to train a deep learning algorithm. The algorithm outperformed a panel of 21 board-certified dermatologists when asked to categorize images as benign or melanoma. Not a little bit better. significantly improved, as determined by sensitivity and specificity over thousands of diagnostic choices. 2017 saw the publication of the study. The systems performing this work are significantly more capable now, almost ten years later, and the discussion in clinical medicine has…

Imagine a Tuesday morning when you’re running late, the coffee maker is slow, you have a work email that needs a complex response, and you decide to stop at a drive-through on the way in between the front door and the car. One sandwich for breakfast. A hash brown, perhaps. It’s not catastrophic; almost everyone experiences it. However, when Tuesday, Wednesday, and most Thursdays follow the same routine, something else is going on underneath the surface. Convenience is not the only factor in the decision. Cortisol is speaking. The adrenal glands, which are located directly above the kidneys, produce the…