Author: paige laevy

The discussion of treating severe obesity followed a relatively narrow path for decades. The conventional first recommendation, diet and exercise, worked for some people occasionally and not at all for many others. The results of bariatric surgery, such as duodenal switch, gastric sleeve, and bypass, were truly remarkable, but they came with significant risks, necessitated long-term behavioral adjustments, and were not available to the great majority of those who could have benefited. The earlier obesity drugs had a problematic past: they had poor outcomes, serious adverse effects, and several were taken off the market due to safety concerns. The field…

The same items can be found in a hundred shopping baskets in any large supermarket on a weekday morning: orange juice cartons, sliced white bread, cereal boxes with eye-catching health claims printed across the front, and perhaps a packet of granola bars that claims to keep you “energised till lunch.” Seldom does it. The hunger returns by 10:30 or 11, sometimes even more intense than before eating. The slump in the middle of the morning, the impatient grab for a biscuit or a second cup of coffee, and the feeling that one’s willpower is eroding before the workday has officially…

The United States Supreme Court issued a decision on the morning of March 31, 2026, which coincided with the worldwide Transgender Day of Visibility. This decision will be debated for years in medical schools, legal publications, and family living rooms. Kaley Chiles, a counselor in Colorado Springs, claimed that the state’s limitations on her talk therapy practice violated her First Amendment right to free speech, and the court overturned Colorado’s ban on conversion therapy by an 8-1 vote. Protesters and supporters had gathered outside the Washington court building, waiting in the cold with signs. When the decision was made, it…

Imagine a Tuesday afternoon therapy session at Johns Hopkins University. A table covered with graph paper maps, tiny painted figurines, and polyhedral dice is occupied by six students. Behind a folding cardboard screen, a psychologist describes a dimly lit tavern, a suspicious innkeeper, and a missing merchant whose disappearance may or may not be related to a cult that operates out of the eastern docks. No one directly discusses their anxiety for the next ninety minutes. No one is forced to recount a painful memory or explain their worst fear. They bargain, debate tactics, roll dice, and sometimes make awful…

The term “slow-motion tsunami” frequently appears in the formal language of global health policy, and the fact that it has been used for years without yielding anything close to the urgency it suggests says something unsettling about how the world reacts to threats it cannot quite see or touch. It was used by the World Bank. The WHO has made numerous trips around the same area. For the past 20 years, researchers, economists, and experts in infectious diseases have been writing the same crucial warning, updating the numbers as they deteriorate, watching the projections rise, and hoping that eventually someone…

Consider the most recent movie you saw that had a character with schizophrenia. There’s a good chance that the character was either a tortured genius, their illness packaged as some strange, tragic byproduct of exceptional intelligence, or they were menacing, stalking through dark corridors and hearing voices telling them to do terrible things. Both versions have been portrayed on screen so frequently that they have become second nature. In thirty seconds, most people would choose one of those two templates to describe schizophrenia. Additionally, the majority of people would be mistaken in ways that are very important to the approximately…

A seven-year-old girl in China first heard her mother’s voice clearly four months after receiving a single injection into her inner ear. Not with a cochlear implant. Not through any gadget that needed to be turned on, adjusted, or changed. The round window membrane at the base of her cochlea, a structure smaller than a pea and situated in one of the most surgically delicate areas of the human body, was used to rewire just her own ears. The girl turned around when her mother called to her across the room, so the researchers discovered that it had worked the…

When you walk into almost any American office on a weekday morning, you’ll notice the large water bottles that are placed on desks next to laptops and cold brew coffee. Some of these bottles have time markers and inspirational phrases like “drink up!” stamped next to the 10 a.m. line. They are available in 40-ounce, 64-ounce, and occasionally larger sizes. Almost a small status symbol. It’s obvious what the implicit message is: you should be drinking more, you’re probably dehydrated, and carrying this vessel shows that you care about your health. It is a very powerful cultural persuasion tool. Additionally,…

A hospital’s billing department is home to a unique type of frustration that is quiet, persistent, and nearly impossible for anyone who hasn’t worked there to fully comprehend. Piles of paper claim forms that ought to have been digital ten years ago. Insurance adjusters are in phone lines. denial letters with codes that need to be interpreted using a separate glossary. Behind all of this, actual patients—some of whom are still recuperating from surgery—wait months to learn what they truly owe and to whom. By all measures, it is among the most dysfunctional administrative systems in American society. The fact…

When employees at Brno University Hospital, one of the main COVID-19 testing facilities in the Czech Republic, arrived on a Tuesday morning in March 2020, they discovered that their entire IT network was locked. screens are dark. Systems are not responding. On that particular day, all planned surgeries were canceled. Patients were transferred to different hospitals in the city. There was not a single door that the attackers had to enter. Their faces were never revealed. This occurred while the same hospital was rushing to process coronavirus tests for a nation in the early stages of a pandemic, which was…