The debate about drug costs can be hard to follow because it is both broad and deep. Between patients not being able to afford their medication, the role of “middlemen” (pharmacy benefit managers), and lawyers filing class-action lawsuits, the topic is complex and can...
He’s a professor at Harvard Medical School, but in many ways, Dr. Victor Gurewich is an outsider. His research is funded by a small family foundation, and he hasn’t tried for a federal grant in decades. He’s a primary care doctor whose work tramples on the terrain of...
The younger Peshkin, 48, studies the biology of aging at Harvard Medical School in Boston. A broad-shouldered man with a twinkle always lurking in his brown eyes, Peshkin has been obsessed with aging since childhood because he worried that his father — then as old as...
Doctors are warning about vitamin D again, and it’s not the “we need more” news you might expect. Instead, they say there’s too much needless testing and too many people taking too many pills for a problem that few people truly have. The nutrient is crucial for strong...
HASKELL COUNTY, Texas - To get to the house where Shawn Jordan wants to die, you drive a hypnotic road along miles of furrowed cotton fields, gnarly mesquite trees, low-to-the-ground cactus, and cattle perpetually in search of food. This iconic land of open spaces and...
Americans believe in experts. We look to CPAs to complete our tax returns, lawyers to handle our disputes, plumbers to fix our pipes. So it baffles me that an astounding number of us turn to movie stars and other celebrities for health advice. Take a recent article in...
In a given week at the height of the AIDS crisis in San Francisco, Frank Ostaseski, the founding director of the Zen Hospice Project, would help as many as 30 people through their final hours. At a recent conference, Ostaseski recalled how he metabolized his grief...
We need to encourage them to do so In medicine, we talk a lot about advance directives, mainly in the context of end-of-life treatment. But, recently, while treating a patient with schizophrenia, I realized how powerful and important that same document could be in...
"It would feel like murder to pull her life support," a young woman tells the doctor. The woman sits by a hospital bed where her mother, Selena, lies unresponsive, hooked up to a breathing tube. The daughter has already made one attempt to save her mother's life; she...
From the infant's first moments, his mother thought something seemed off. And she soon learned that the newborn's doctors thought so, too. "The doctors immediately took him away," said Ms. O. Although the newborn boy was born four days overdue, he weighed a mere 5...
Here, they find support their schools can't provide BOSTON - Evan Jones was excited when he signed up for a contemporary art class at community college. Then the professor announced the course would focus heavily on class participation. "That was the first class that...
Roughly half of all adults in the U.S. have one or more chronic illnesses, with 25 percent suffering from two or more such conditions. These people navigate a medical system of widely variable quality, an ever-shifting insurance landscape, and real-world...
The economy may be growing and the stock market booming, but Americans are dying younger - living shorter lives than previous generations and dying earlier than their counterparts around the world. It is easy to place the blame squarely on our nation's opioid...
The World Health Organization report released this week showing that that 1 in 10 medications in low- and middle-income countries are either substandard or falsified is alarming. The international trade in fake medicines, which rakes in billions of dollars a year, is...
BERKELEY, Calif. - She's a physicist who trained in the storied lab where Watson and Crick worked out the structure of DNA. In her years in industry, she made sharper displays for e-readers, more efficient solar panels, and sensor tape that soldiers could wear on the...
The province of Ontario recently took a historic step for Canada by introducing legislation that would shine a light on interactions between drug companies and prescribers. The use of the term "historic" here is not hyperbole, since the extent of payments towards...
ELLIJAY, Ga. - Louise Lowman Lee remembers stories about her great-grandmother being put in a fenced area in the backyard, so she could wander safely. She watched her mother patiently care for her grandmother, who lost her reason, inhibitions, and ability to care for...
During the 11 months when my husband, Ahmad, was dying of bladder cancer, few people wanted to hear how he was truly doing. They wanted to hear about hope, courage, and positivity, not about how Ahmad was unlikely to survive or his ruminations on how to live well...
She only wanted to be home. The woman, who was around 40, had terminal cancer, and she wanted to go back to Brazil, where she was born and raised. She would first need to pack her belongings; settle her affairs in New York; endure the flight. But her disease took a...
Medicine is grappling with rising levels of physician burnout, one of the factors driving high rates of depression and suicide in the profession. But physicians who suffer from mood disorders are often reluctant to seek treatment - in part because it might jeopardize...
RICHMOND, Va. - On an unseasonably warm Friday morning in October, Dr. Omar Abubaker paced in front of a small lecture hall at Virginia Commonwealth University's dental school. The 64-year-old oral surgeon, whose sharp gray suit matched his wavy hair, quipped about...
I was first diagnosed with cancer when I was a senior in college, preparing to get a job and begin paying off my student loans. I was fortunate to have school administrators who advocated for me, and my loans were quickly deferred. But many of the 70,000 young adults...
Garnishing wages. Turning over accounts to collection agents. Withholding services until an individual's ability to pay is proven. These might seem like the practices of a big bank in the news for financial scandals. Instead, these tactics have surfaced at unexpected...
It was June of 2016 and they'd soon leave Hyde School for good, and so they gathered in the old mansion on a rainy night with their classmates and teachers for a tradition known as "the cards are dealt." One by one their time came and they stood and spoke of their...