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On this week's The Readout LOUD podcast from STAT, International researchers got a reprieve in the courts this week. But many are still considering leaving the states for opportunities elsewhere. What does that mean for the future of American medical research? We discuss that, plus the latest news in the life…
The medical journalism world was rocked recently when the mavens behind the Associated Press Stylebook announced a seismic change: It was embracing "healthcare" as one word, after decades of styling it as two. When the change was debuted at ACES, a conference of editors, “people cheered, there was a commotion. It…
Every time Dawn Zuidgeest-Craft intended to apply to medical school, life got in the way. But after 45 years as a neonatal nurse practitioner, she finally did it, beginning medical school at the age of 69 in 2022. She hadn’t originally intended to practice after graduating, but soon, a week before she turns 73…
Back in September, at what would prove to be an infamous press conference, President Trump repeated a claim popular among vaccine critics: Autism “doesn’t exist with the Amish community, and they don’t take all of this junk,” he said, referring to vaccines. That’s not true, according to Braxton Mitchell, a professor…
If you’ve ever donated blood, you know about the screening process: Have you traveled to certain countries? Engaged in risky sexual activities? One question that they don’t ask is: Have you been vaccinated against Covid-19? But some patients and their families, worried by misinformation around Covid-19 vaccines, are…
In recent years, people are increasingly blaming perimenopause for a constellation of symptoms: weight gain, hair loss, brain fog. But does the evidence support this point of view? Who’s profiting from it? And what does it mean for perimenopause to be such a hot topic? On this episode of the “First Opinion Podcast,”…
In 2023, Netflix released a documentary titled “Live to 100: Secrets of the Blue Zones,” which looked at some small, geographically isolated places around the world in which, reportedly, residents regularly lived to 100 or beyond. It was just the most recent installment to a longevity franchise that began roughly 25…
His real name is Will Flanary, but you probably know him as Dr. Glaucomflecken — the internet’s go-to doctor/comedian. On this episode of the “First Opinion Podcast,” we talked about how he mixes humor with some of the most pressing issues facing health care, from misinformation on social media to the corporate…
One of health secretary Robert F. Kennedy’s refrains has focused on medical education: Doctors don’t know enough about nutrition and preventive medicine, he likes to say. He has encouraged medical schools to beef up (tallow up?) their education on healthy eating and its connection to chronic disease. What do medical…
Have you ever wondered how many drugs are behind the counter at your local pharmacy? According to Thomas Goetz — a journalist, entrepreneur, and host of the new podcast “Drug Story” — “there are over 3,000 drugs behind a typical pharmacist counter.” And behind each drug is a story. On “Drug Story,” which debuted in…
The deep distrust between public health and the Make America Healthy Again movement may seem impossible to heal. But the podcast “Why Should I Trust You?” is trying to do just that by facilitating conversation between people who often view each others as enemies. Brinda Adhikari and Tom W. Johnson launched “Why Should…
Ahead of Monday’s NCAA men’s basketball final, much of the news coverage focused on two overlapping dynamics: 1) what bets to make and 2) how the rise of sports betting is causing damage. According to Isaac Rose-Berman, a fellow at the American Institute for Boys and Men, the skyrocketing popularity of sports betting…
Religion and science can often seem in opposition, at least culturally. But they don’t have to be, say Marc Siegel and Francis Collins. Siegel, who is a physician and a senior medical analyst at Fox News, has recently published a new book, “The Miracles Among Us: How God's Grace Plays a Role in Healing,” in which he…
When Jason Karlawish started working with dementia patients in the late ’90s, there often wasn’t much he could offer them. “I gave them a diagnosis,” he told me on this week’s episode of the “First Opinion Podcast,” but had limited medications to prescribe. Now Karlawish — who is STAT’s Neurotransmissions columnist; a…
Celena Lozano's son Benny, who turned 5 in November, loves trains, trucks — anything that goes. He also has a rare disease, PURA syndrome. Earlier this year, when headlines announced that a child with a different rare disease, known as Baby KJ, had been treated using CRISPR in a major breakthrough, Celena, a…
As science journalist Melanie D.G. Kaplan describes in her new book, “Lab Dog,” tens of thousands of beagles are used in the U.S. for medical research, testing chemical safety, and more. In “Lab Dog,” Melanie goes on a journey with her beloved adopted beagles, Hammy, a retired research dog, to find out where he came…
In the wake of the pandemic, North Dakota, like many states, suddenly saw a splintering of opinion around vaccines. “Not only was I concerned about the decline of vaccinations, but I was even more concerned about the fabric of communities,” Sandy Tibke, executive director of the Foundation for a Healthy North Dakota…
James Watson, who won the Nobel Prize for co-discovering the structure of DNA, died last week at the age of 97. He was a scientific giant, but in the final two decades of his life, he falsely stated that women and Black people are, as populations, not as smart as white men. Nancy Hopkins knew Watson better than most…
On TV, CPR looks like a miracle: a few light pushes on the chest, a couple of assisted breaths, and the person sputters back to life. “CPR has been represented in the media and TV shows and all of these other places as a relatively innocuous intervention with high rates of success from which people recover with little…
Vaccine hesitancy isn’t new, Seth Berkley points out. “The first vaccine was smallpox vaccine,” he said on this week’s episode of the “First Opinion Podcast,” “and right after they were first used, there were wood cuttings of people with cows’ horns growing out of their heads because the virus was isolated from cows.”…
One night, an ad on Reddit caught Jake Eberts’ eye. Using graphics from the classic video game “The Oregon Trail,” it said something like, “You have died of dysentery. Help us prevent dysentery by joining this vaccine study.” Eberts was intrigued. For $7,300 (and out of a sense of altruism), he joined a study on a…
When podcast host Torie Bosch asked Richard Besser — the president and CEO of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and former acting CDC director — how he feels about the CDC under the Trump administration, he was frank. “It’s absolutely heartbreaking,” he said. On this episode of the “First Opinion Podcast,” Besser…
When Joy Lisi Rankin’s mother was diagnosed with breast cancer, she made a decision many people, especially her doctors, did not understand: She decided to forgo treatment. On this episode of the “First Opinion Podcast,” Rankin, oncologist Samyukta Mullangi, and host Torie Bosch discuss difficult choices around cancer…
When Morgan McSweeney first started doing science communication on social media during Covid, he sometimes felt a little embarrassed by it. Now, as he wrote recently for STAT, he has found that “a casual one-minute video about immunology racks up orders of magnitude more views in an hour than my published research…
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