Author: paige laevy

Over the years, a dentist in Needham, Massachusetts, has noticed something that she finds difficult to ignore. The cavity rates vary among the towns where her practice is located. Patients in Needham typically have fewer cavities because the city’s water is fluoridated. The rates are higher in Franklin, a nearby town where the local water supply contains less fluoride. The study is not controlled. It’s the kind of thing you see when you’ve spent enough time examining teeth in various communities to notice a pattern. Additionally, that pattern is consistent with public health data spanning about eight decades. The oldest…

When the announcement was made on April 1, 2026, some people thought it was a joke for a few hours. It wasn’t. Foundayo, a once-daily oral GLP-1 medication for weight loss that Eli Lilly recently received FDA approval for, is the first medication that can be taken at any time of day without being restricted by food or water and the second to hit the US market in 2026. Those who had ordered it through Lilly’s direct pharmacy were already receiving it by April 6. It was accessible through telehealth providers and retail pharmacies by the next week. The rollout…

If you walk through any busy intensive care unit on a weeknight, you’ll see a system built to detect deterioration as it occurs: rows of beds divided by curtains, monitors cycling through numbers, nurses moving between patients carrying IV bags and tablets. Sepsis presents a problem because it doesn’t always work with that design. For hours, the infection that sets off the body’s cascading immune response can appear to be many different things. fever. bewilderment. a heart rate that is marginally higher. It is simple to identify the underlying illness that caused the patient’s admission. An hour or two has…

In medicine, there’s a certain type of situation that doesn’t get discussed enough: when a machine flags something that a doctor didn’t see and the doctor has to make a real-time decision about whether to trust it. It’s not as dramatic as medicine on television. Compared to that, it is quieter. There’s a notification. A number is not within the anticipated range. And a clinician must balance that warning against everything their own training instructs them to look for, having been trained through years of education and pattern recognition developed from thousands of patient encounters. They take action on it…

Leaders of the Milwaukee County Department of Health and Human Services called Mike Lappen in on March 30, 2026, and requested that he resign from his position as administrator of the county’s Behavioral Health Services division. He had been in charge of a $216 million operation that helps some of the county’s most vulnerable citizens, including those dealing with mental illness, drug addiction, and psychiatric crises, for almost ten years. The department did not respond to Lappen’s question about why. Simply put, it had chosen to take “another direction.” In this story, the phrase “another direction” is very effective. Typically,…

On a busy weekday afternoon, the outpatient pharmacy at National University Hospital’s Kent Ridge Wing has a familiar atmosphere: long lines, patients holding paper slips, and pharmacists rushing between counters and shelves. Every day, NUH pharmacies dispense about 2,500 prescriptions. The duration of each counseling session ranges from three to twenty minutes. That adds up quickly and in a way that makes waiting uncomfortable. A small AI-powered terminal called MedBot, a virtual pharmacy assistant that uses generative AI to walk patients through their medication before they even reach the counter, is what’s different now, at least at the Kent Ridge…

A U.S. Customs and Border Protection officer opened a package on a loading dock at Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport. The package’s manifest stated that it was a “cosmetic weight loss product.” There were injectable pens containing tirzepatide (Mounjaro) in doses of 2.5 mg, 5 mg, and 7 mg. The package was addressed to a private home in Ohio and had come from a pharmacy in the United Kingdom. It’s highly likely that the person who was waiting for that package thought they were getting a genuine prescription drug at a cost they could afford. What they were getting was a…

In Dr. Nir Barzilai’s lectures, a woman makes sporadic appearances. Even though she is no longer living, she continues to appear because her story is truly hard to describe. She was one of his first centenarians, living in her own apartment at the age of 100 and continuing to smoke after 95 years of nonstop smoking. She gave a clear response when asked if anyone had ever advised her to quit smoking: all four of the doctors who had advised her to do so had since passed away. She started smoking again. She lived to be 110 years old. For…

The majority of Ozempic or Wegovy users are concerned about their blood sugar, waist size, and possibly their heart. Their optic nerve is not on their minds. And that makes perfect sense for the great majority of users; according to European regulators, up to 1 in 10,000 patients may be affected by the ocular risks associated with GLP-1 medications. However, one in ten thousand is a figure worth considering in a nation where about 6% of adults currently take these drugs and where adoption is growing at a rate that has shocked even the pharmaceutical companies making them. Non-arteritic anterior…

Chemotherapy was administered at home to a cancer patient in the Florida Panhandle on January 9, 2026. There is no waiting area. A four-hour drive to a treatment facility is not necessary. No making plans for someone to accompany them while a bag leaked into their arm in a hospital hallway. A nurse approached them. The same course of action was taken. The place was completely different. By all standards, it was a minor issue. Additionally, it was the first delivery under a program that has the potential to transform cancer care for rural patients throughout a whole state.The Mayo…