Author: paige laevy

Imagine a small clinic in the Kentucky hills, complete with a wood-paneled waiting area, two exam tables, and a single nurse who handles everything from wound care to blood pressure checks to conversations that don’t require a billing code. Lexington is home to the closest cardiologist. The closest neurologist may be farther away. The previous response was a referral slip, a lengthy drive, and a wait that occasionally lasted months when a patient arrived with symptoms that defied easy explanation. Millions of Americans who live in rural Appalachia still have to deal with that situation, and it hasn’t changed as…

When a research team receives results that don’t resemble anything they’ve ever seen, there’s a certain silence that descends upon them. Scientists at the Mayo Clinic who are researching tirzepatide in postmenopausal women are likely familiar with that emotion. Nobody set out to prove what they discovered, which was that combining the popular obesity medication with menopausal hormone therapy resulted in about 35% more weight loss than the medication alone. It almost coincidentally surfaced from the data and is now posing questions that the field of obesity medicine is unsure of how to respond to. It’s worth taking a moment…

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…