Bennett Braun, a Chicago psychiatrist whose diagnoses of repressed memories involving horrific abuse by devil worshipers helped to fuel what became known as the “satanic panic” of the 1980s and ’90s, died on March 20 in Lauderhill, Fla., north of Miami. He was 83. Jane Braun, one of his ex-wives, said the death, in a…
The National Academy of Sciences is asking a court to allow it to repurpose about $30 million in donations from the wealthy Sackler family, who controlled the company at the center of the opioid epidemic, and to remove the family name from the endowment funds. The petition filed by the Academy in Superior Court in…
For decades, Dr. J. Steve Bynon Jr., a transplant surgeon in Texas, gained accolades and national prominence for his work, including by helping to enforce professional standards in the country’s sprawling organ transplant system. But officials are now investigating allegations that Dr. Bynon was secretly manipulating a government database to make some of his own…
Evan Stark, who studied domestic violence with his wife and then pioneered a concept called “coercive control,” which describes the psychological and physical domination that abusers use to punish their partners, died on March 18 at his home in Woodbridge, Conn. He was 82. His wife, Dr. Anne Flitcraft, said the cause was most likely…
Doses of cholera vaccine are being given to patients as fast as they are produced and the global stockpile has run completely dry, as deadly outbreaks of the disease continue to spread. This does not shock anyone in the field of emergency epidemic response because the vaccine stockpile has been precariously low for years. The…
The outbreak of dengue fever that has unfolded in Latin America over the past three months is staggering in its scale — a million cases in Brazil in a matter of weeks, a huge spike in Argentina, a state of emergency declared in Peru, and now another, in Puerto Rico. It forewarns of a changing…
It was 1:53 a.m., and Peter Fink was on a barren mountain plateau near Campo, Calif., passing out blankets to people from four continents who had arrived there under the cover of night. This was a nocturnal ritual for the 22-year-old, dressed in a ball cap and a wool overshirt, whose perch — just over…
Yuxin Sun, a psychologist in Seattle, sees a lot of clients at her group practice who insist they aren’t perfectionists. “‘Oh, I’m not perfect. I’m far from perfect,’” they tell her. But perfectionism isn’t about being the best at any given pursuit, Dr. Sun said, “it’s the feeling of never arriving to that place, never…
The 160-year-old Arizona abortion ban that was upheld on Tuesday by the state’s highest court was among a wave of anti-abortion laws propelled by some historical twists and turns that might seem surprising. For decades after the United States became a nation, abortion was legal until fetal movement could be felt, usually well into the…
The National Health Service in England started restricting gender treatments for children this month, making it the fifth European country to limit the medications because of a lack of evidence of their benefits and concern about long-term harms. England’s change resulted from a four-year review released Tuesday evening by Dr. Hilary Cass, an independent pediatrician….
