Author: paige laevy

Imagine a late 1990s hospital room. A young Black girl witnesses her father’s body becoming more and more absent from the room as it disappears behind a maze of wires and machinery, his kidneys failing. Long after her father’s passing, Daphna Fertil continued to think about that picture. Her mother, a recent immigrant who had sacrificed her health in order to work and support the family, eventually lost significant vision due to glaucoma and required injections to treat early-onset osteoarthritis. These conditions could have been detected earlier and treated more effectively if access had not been such a stubborn barrier.…

There’s a part of the study that stops you cold, right between the statistical averages and the clinical data. A single injection is given to the inner ear of a seven-year-old girl who was born deaf. She is speaking with her mother on a daily basis four months later. Not by means of sign language. Not by means of a cochlear implant that converts electrical pulses into roughly audible sounds. Hearing her mother’s voice in real time is something that most of us would never consider being thankful for. It sounds like a scene from an early 2000s science fiction…

The actual science of what cannabis does to the human brain has been having difficulty finding a voice somewhere between the political talking point about legalization and the corner dispensary. The policy was implemented quickly. More than a dozen states permit recreational use, more than thirty have legalized medical use, and the cultural normalization of marijuana has advanced at a rate that researchers examining its neurological effects have quietly lamented as policy outpacing science. This disparity is beginning to narrow, and the data shows a picture that is far more nuanced than either the pro-cannabis wellness movement or the anti-drug…

Counting calories can lead to a specific type of fatigue. Not physical tiredness, but mental tiredness. The kind that shows up around week three and involves keeping track of every meal, weighing almonds on a kitchen scale, and examining the nutrition label of a chickpea can to see if lunch still fits within the daily budget. Many people who have attempted calorie restriction are familiar with the experience, and many of them eventually give up. The daily math of it wears people down in ways that a clear, straightforward rule does not, not because they lack willpower. This contributes to…

Something strange kept showing up in the slide shows at a significant cardiovascular conference in São Paulo, Brazil, in 1984. Photographs of a snake, the Brazilian pit viper, Bothrops jararaca, with its characteristic zigzag markings and tongue that appeared to be made for maximum alarm, were repeatedly displayed by researchers between the graphs and the clinical data. The pictures weren’t ornamental. They were the story of origin. Captopril, the medication under discussion, was derived from a peptide present in the venom of that snake, and the researchers presenting it seemed unable to help but remind their audience of the improbable…

Imagine a fourteen-year-old sitting by herself in her bedroom at eleven o’clock at night. She is certain that something is wrong but isn’t quite ready to tell her parents. She picks up her phone. It feels too vulnerable to text a friend. It feels too serious to call a hotline. She launches a chat program. It reacts right away. It pays attention. It concurs. It lets her know that she makes sense. For a brief moment, she feels truly heard. And as 2026 approaches, mental health professionals nationwide are extremely uneasy about that moment, real as it is. Early in…

When you walk into the right kind of wellness clinic in Charleston, South Carolina, you’ll find something that initially appears to be a very high-end hospital. fluffy pillow recliners. The background music is soft rock. Like specials at a local diner, a dry-erase board listing the IV drips that are available. Serum and stem cell brochures were spread out on tables in the waiting area. There was also a doctor with a 6,000-person waiting list who provided peptide injections in personalized “stacks” to athletes, celebrities, and anybody else willing to pay up to $15,000 annually. The state of biohacking in…

Anyone who has dealt with multiple sclerosis—as a patient, a family member, or a clinician—understands why it has been dubbed the “disease of a thousand faces.” It exhibits distinct behaviors in nearly every individual it comes into contact with. Some people have it for decades, going through long stretches of relative normalcy interspersed with sporadic relapses. Others see their neurological function gradually deteriorate without interruption or remission, and there is currently little that medicine can do to slow the decline. A research team from Irvine, California, and Berlin, Germany, believes that a surprisingly simple molecule may eventually make a real…

The 2 AM phone call is one aspect of heart failure treatment that is not often discussed. A patient at home discovers a problem. fluid construction. breathing in different ways. They give the hospital a call. An on-call doctor, probably not a cardiologist, answers the phone, fumbles to retrieve records they have never seen before, and attempts to make a sound clinical decision while exhausted and lacking the complete picture. It is a system that has never been ideal and is only maintained by institutional habit and goodwill. A Cincinnati research team made the decision to take action. Located in…

Usually, it begins in an unremarkable place. A leg cramp that wakes you up at two in the morning. a mild form of anxiety that persists throughout the day without a clear cause. No matter what you try, including melatonin, chamomile tea, screen time limits, and everything else, your mind won’t shut down at night. You visit your physician. Blood work returns to normal. You are informed that everything appears to be in order. But obviously something isn’t. There’s a good chance that it’s magnesium. Magnesium deficiency is genuinely common, genuinely consequential, and genuinely missed by the standard testing that…