Immunotherapy has transformed cancer treatment. It tinkers with the immune system to attack malignancies that have evaded the body’s natural defenses. This advance offers an alternative to treating cancer with surgery or chemotherapy and radiation, which can attack healthy tissue and cause extreme side effects. The treatment is not only scientifically complex but also expensive….
If you’ve ever had trouble getting a prescription drug, chances are you’ve run into a pharmacy benefit manager. These companies, known as P.B.M.s, play a crucial but often hidden role in deciding which drugs you can get and how much you will personally have to pay. They are middlemen in the maddeningly complex American health…
In July 2016, a heat wave hit Boston, with daytime temperatures averaging 92 degrees for five days in a row. Some local university students who were staying in town for the summer got lucky and were living in dorms with central air-conditioning. Other students, not so much — they were stuck in older dorms without…
Snap. Crack. Pop. These sounds, once used to sell a popular breakfast cereal, are now enticing people to visit the doctor thanks to a wave of chiropractic videos sweeping social media. The most popular videos follow a familiar template: A patient enters with a debilitating condition. A chiropractor maneuvers the patient’s limbs and joints in…
South Africa’s public health care system has run out of the human insulin pens that it provides to people with diabetes, as the pharmaceutical industry shifts production priorities to blockbuster weight-loss drugs that use a similar device for delivery. Novo Nordisk, the company that has supplied South Africa with human insulin in pens for a…
On a busy day at the Kwapong Health Centre in rural Ghana, Beatrice Nyamekye put contraceptive implants into the arms of a half-dozen women, and gave eight or nine more a three-month hormonal injection to prevent pregnancy. A few sought condoms or birth control pills, but most wanted something longer lasting. “They like the implants…
The United States Surgeon General, Dr. Vivek Murthy, announced on Monday that he would push for a warning label on social media platforms advising parents that using the platforms might damage adolescents’ mental health. Warning labels — like those that appear on tobacco and alcohol products — are one of the most powerful tools available…
The bird flu outbreak in dairy cattle has so far spilled over to just three farmworkers in the United States, as far as public health authorities know. All of them have had mostly mild symptoms. But that does not guarantee that the virus, called H5N1, will remain benign if it begins to spread among people….
Drinking increased during the pandemic, which may be why news of any kind about alcohol seems to have found a receptive audience in recent years. In 2022, an episode of the podcast “Huberman Lab” that was devoted to elaborating alcohol’s various risks to body and brain was one of the show’s most popular of that…
Catherine, the Princess of Wales, said on Friday that she planned to take part in a parade on Saturday marking the birthday of King Charles III, a tentative return to the public stage after confirming in March that she was being treated for cancer. The news, which Catherine released in a highly personal six-paragraph statement,…
