Author: paige laevy

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…

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…