Author: paige laevy

Imagine a man in his fifties running for the final carriage of a commuter train outside of London while carrying a briefcase. He barely makes it, and for a full thirty seconds he stands on the platform, panting heavily. It’s the type of incident that most people dismiss as embarrassing—a minor setback in the day-to-day operations of adulthood. However, a significant study that was published in the European Heart Journal at the end of March suggests that the man may have just made a truly significant contribution to his heart, brain, and long-term chances of survival. The study, which used…

In a Caltech lab, scientists are performing a procedure that seems almost too straightforward to be revolutionary: applying a bandage to an injury. However, this specific bandage has the ability to read the chemistry of a wound in real time, transmit that information to a smartphone, anticipate the onset of an infection days before the patient experiences any symptoms, and accelerate the healing process of the tissue. The thing is barely thicker than a strip of tape. The persistent ulcers and non-healing cuts that affect about 2% of the world’s population are known as chronic wounds, and they have been…

Imagine an old man in his mid-seventies sitting in the living room of a home he knows as well as most people know their own heartbeat, in an armchair he has owned for twenty years. A tablet device rests on the small table next to him. He has a monitoring cuff around his wrist. A nurse is watching his blood pressure, oxygen levels, heart rate, and general movement on a dashboard somewhere in a hospital building several miles away. The dashboard updates automatically every three minutes, and the patient only needs to be present in his own home. The same…

Over the past year, the waiting room at a Long Island plastic surgery office has been filling up in different ways. The rhinoplasties, eye lifts, and standard menu of cosmetic corrections that have defined the industry for decades are no longer the main reasons that patients come in. An increasing number of people are reporting specific complaints that were unnamed two years ago. They shed the pounds. They’re feeling better. They may have gone down four sizes. Then they noticed something unexpected when they looked in the mirror: a face that appeared older than they had remembered, with hollowed-out cheeks…

Kris Boesen picked up a smartphone and texted someone four days following the procedure. He hadn’t been able to send one in months. It occurred as a result of a surgical team at USC’s Keck Medical Center opening the back of a young man’s neck in early April 2016, making a tiny incision in the membrane encircling his spinal cord, and gradually injecting 10 million stem cells—thick, according to the surgeon, like toothpaste—through a syringe into the injury site. After that, they shut him up and bided their time. On March 6, 2016, just before he turned 21, Boesen had…

While the patient is still putting on their shoes, a doctor somewhere in a primary care clinic completes a patient visit, opens the electronic health record on a wall-mounted monitor, and begins typing—reconstructing the conversation, the examination results, the plan, the prescriptions, and the follow-up instructions. The AI scribe industry was designed to do away with this ritual, which is performed hundreds of thousands of times a day during clinical encounters in America. or at least to make it much less uncomfortable. The argument was persuasive: let the machine listen, let it write the note, let the doctor check and…

Something seems a little different from a few years ago when you walk into a McDonald’s on a weekday afternoon. In some places, the lines are a bit shorter. Once an automatic upgrade for a significant portion of the lunch crowd, the enormous combo orders now seem a little less automatic. Inflation might be the cause. It might be changing preferences. It might be the general economic strain that has been reducing discretionary spending for the past two years. Alternatively, it might be a completely different condition that begins with a weekly injection and ends with a person not being…

Imagine a middle-American hospital waiting room, complete with faded chairs, a muted TV in the corner, and the distinct fluorescent silence of a place where people are afraid and trying not to show it. Emergency surgery is required for a patient. There is a genuine risk of blood loss. The surgical team is ready. A family member then approaches a nurse in the hallway and asks, quite seriously, if they can ensure that COVID vaccines haven’t tainted the blood supply. This isn’t speculative. Since 2021, when a conspiracy theory that originated in the shadowy corners of vaccine-skeptic social media began…

American healthcare has a tendency to create a specific type of organization that grows in size, becomes opaque, and eventually becomes so ingrained in the system’s plumbing that no one really expects it to change. These days, pharmacy benefit managers—the businesses that stand between insurers, drug manufacturers, and employers who cover their employees’ prescription costs—are precisely that kind of organization. The three biggest PBMs have operated with a studied opacity for the majority of their existence, collecting rebates from pharmaceutical companies, keeping a portion, and passing along savings that employers were unable to fully verify because they were never shown…

Near the counter, you’ll find a pamphlet, a laminated card, or a staff member who is happy to explain which strain helps with nightmares in practically every medical cannabis dispensary in a state where PTSD is recognized as a condition. There is typically complete faith in these suggestions. They are supported by far less scientific evidence. A study that was published in the Lancet Psychiatry in March 2026 had the kind of subdued authority that tends to upend a calm discussion. Researchers were unable to find any solid proof that cannabis is an effective treatment for depression, anxiety, or PTSD.…