Author: paige laevy

Right now, you can find two entirely different perspectives on health vying for the same shopping cart in any American grocery store. On one side is the beef section, which is stocked with cuts that are actively encouraged to be purchased by a particular strain of government messaging and is fuller than it has been in years. Conversely, the American Heart Association recently invested a significant amount of institutional energy in promoting the legume aisle, nuts, and seeds as the better option for your cardiovascular system. The store is the same, but you might think you’re in a different nation…

Reading the early reports of an unidentified disease spreading through a city that most people can’t locate on a map evokes a certain kind of dread. Most of us recall that feeling from late 2019: wondering if a cluster of pneumonia cases in Wuhan, China, was important as we scrolled past short, almost dismissive news articles about it. It already did, according to a small Toronto business. On December 31, 2019, BlueDot’s algorithm detected the Wuhan outbreak. It would take the World Health Organization nine more days to issue a public warning. The gap was actually a speed issue rather…

Gerald Crabtree is a developmental biologist, the kind of scientist who has spent decades thinking carefully about how cells live and die — and specifically about apoptosis, the biological process by which the body systematically eliminates cells it no longer needs. Every day, roughly 60 billion cells in the human body execute a kind of controlled self-demolition, a process so orderly and so essential that without it, tissue balance would collapse. Cancer, in its most fundamental character, is what happens when certain cells learn to ignore that instruction. They stop dying. They keep dividing. And the longer they do it,…

After a service member returns home, there is a certain silence. It’s not that there isn’t any sound—the return to civilian life is frequently loud enough and confusing in its everydayness—but rather that the systems meant to catch people when they land are silent. It takes weeks to schedule the VA appointment. The closest mental health clinic is an hour away from this rural address. The health assessment form hardly captures what a veteran is truly going through in the present tense because it is based on data that is so old. As a Marine veteran and congressman from Maine’s…

As a polymer chemist, Theo Dingemans spends his professional life contemplating the molecular structure of cutting-edge materials, such as those utilized in water filtration systems and aircraft. He has never had kidney disease and is not a clinician. However, his perspective on the issue changed when a coworker advised him to visit a UNC-Chapel Hill dialysis clinic to gain a better understanding of the patients his engineering work might eventually assist. He entered a room filled with people waiting for four-hour sessions that would keep them alive until their next appointment three days later while seated in chairs and hooked…

In Vermont, the woods undergo a transformation each spring. The mud season gives way to green, the trails around Burlington begin to fill with hikers once more, and the blacklegged tick is waiting somewhere in the underbrush, patiently and almost undetectable, on a blade of tall grass or a low-hanging leaf at ankle height. The arrival of tick season is not an abstract concept for people living in this state. It is a ritual anxiety, a reason to run lint rollers over kids’ clothes and check behind knees before bed, a reason to second-guess every backyard get-together and trail walk.…

Sometime in 2021, a nurse in a Massachusetts hospital hallway sobbed while sitting in a break room in between shifts. The patients lost, the lack of personal protective equipment (PPE), and the periods of 12-hour days that turned into weeks without enough sleep were all contributing factors. It was the build-up. the burden of a system that had few mechanisms in place to support its employees and had been asking them to absorb more than any system should reasonably ask. The experience of that nurse was not out of the ordinary. It was the experience of a sizable portion of…

Picture a radiology department on a Wednesday afternoon — monitors glowing, scans loading, a physician leaning toward a screen with coffee going cold beside the keyboard. Somewhere in that workflow, embedded quietly in the software, an AI algorithm has already flagged three anomalies in the past hour. The radiologist reviews them. Two are legitimate concerns. One is a false positive generated by a model trained predominantly on data from a demographic that does not resemble this patient. Nobody in the room, at that moment, is entirely sure which one is which. And the person whose job it is to catch…

The tightening in the stomach before something scary, the loose uneasiness that comes before a challenging conversation, and the way dread seems to settle somewhere below the ribs instead of inside the head, where we assume emotions are supposed to reside, are all experiences that most people have had at least once. Science used these feelings as metaphors for decades. They turned out to be closer to anatomy than anyone had imagined. A network of over 100 million nerve cells is concealed within the walls of your digestive tract, extending from the esophagus to the rectum. Johns Hopkins and other…

After a baby is born, a certain kind of silence descends upon a hospital room. The monitors become silent. The employees thin out. Within a day or two, a woman who has just gone through one of the most emotionally and physically violent experiences of her life is sent home with a pamphlet and a swaddled baby after the flowers arrive and the pictures are uploaded. The American healthcare system has largely chosen to ignore what goes on inside her head in the weeks that follow. Between 10 and 20 percent of American women suffer from postpartum depression; however, according…