The first law: Nothing is lost
“I used to be smart, now I can’t think. I used to solve puzzles pretty easily, but now I don’t have any logic whatsoever. Sometimes I don’t even remember the days I had a week ago. I don’t know why my brain doesn’t work anymore.”
I kept seeing the same grief in different words: people who were not simply sad, but bewildered by the disappearance of …
The thermodynamics of depression brain fog
For years, we have told women to get their mammograms. We have wrapped buildings in pink lights. We have filled October with ribbons, walks, campaigns, commercials, survivor stories, and reminders. We have created an entire cultural season around breast cancer awareness. And still, millions of women do not get screened on time.
At some point, we have to ask a more uncomfortable question: What if awareness was never the real problem?
As …
Why women miss mammograms has nothing to do with awareness
Not long ago, a woman came into my office with breast implants that were forty-one years old. The implants were older than I am.
As a plastic surgeon who specializes in breast and body procedures, that is the longest I have personally seen implants last. And honestly, my first reaction was probably the same reaction most people would have: disbelief. Forty-one years is an incredibly long time for any medical device …
How to rethink old breast implants as your body ages
Life’s most meaningful memories are often built around shared experiences. Whether it’s a wedding toast, a graduation ceremony, a holiday dinner, or a grandchild’s soccer game, these are the moments families remember for years, not because of where they happened, but because of the conversations, laughter, and connections that took place along the way. Unfortunately, hearing loss can create invisible barriers that prevent people from fully experiencing those moments.
As an …
When hearing loss in older adults steals connection
Imagine a cancer therapy that literally poked holes in cancer cells, destroying them. Imagine that this therapy was approved by the federal Food and Drug Administration and was available to patients and their oncologists, and that it could cure your cancer. We imagine you would expect patients to clamor for this treatment, but this is where the imagination falls short, because this therapy exists and is approved, but it is …
CAR-T therapy can cure cancer. Why is it so underused?
You have witnessed it, probably this week. A stranger correcting another stranger’s behavior. A comment on someone’s parenting, posted for an audience of thousands. A heated exchange over a parking spot that somehow becomes a referendum on someone’s character. The neighbor who reports another neighbor’s hedge height to the township. The pile-on that turns a stranger’s bad day into a national referendum, complete with their employer tagged in the replies.
Correcting …
What public shaming reveals about a loss of trust
Cosmetic surgery is no longer a fringe conversation in Ghana. From rhinoplasty to liposuction and body contouring, aesthetic procedures are increasingly normalized, and this is mostly shaped by social media, global beauty standards, and a growing private health care market.
But beneath this rising demand lies a quieter, more complex question: What if the problem is not the body, but the mind’s perception of the body?
To be fair, many experienced cosmetic …
Psychological screening for cosmetic surgery is overdue
Unlike my earlier pieces, which often stitched together studies and data to build an argument, this one grew straight out of ordinary mornings. Pulling up to the same stop sign on my commute, waiting for the light to turn green, easing over to let an ambulance through with its urgent lights flashing. Touched by a reality check, one of my friends who lost his significant other of long years has …
Red lights, green lights, and the art of resilience
Ethylene is one of the simplest organic molecules, yet it has remarkably different meanings in plants and animals. I first became interested in ethylene during my predoctoral years because of its familiar role in fruit ripening. My interest took a different direction during my early research years at Louisiana State University and later at Southern University, when I began examining how ethylene may arise through oxidative chemistry and its possible …
Ethylene in plants and animals: one molecule, two stories
There is a quiet accumulation that happens in caring professions. It rarely arrives all at once. More often, it builds gradually through repeated exposure to grief, crisis, trauma, fear, loss, and emotional responsibility. Over time, many health care workers begin carrying far more than their job descriptions ever acknowledge.
We call it compassion fatigue, burnout, stress, or emotional exhaustion. Different words, same reality. And yet many clinicians still quietly believe it …
Compassion fatigue is evidence of caring, not failing
For many years, anti-Müllerian hormone (AMH) was viewed primarily as an ovarian marker. Clinicians used it to estimate ovarian reserve, assess follicular activity, and counsel patients regarding reproductive aging and fertility treatment response. In polycystic ovary syndrome, now increasingly reframed as polyendocrine metabolic ovarian syndrome (PMOS), AMH levels were often recognized as elevated, largely because of the increased number of small arrested follicles characteristic of the condition.
But emerging evidence suggests …
The brain signal that drives polycystic ovary syndrome
As a medical student, I see every day how uncontrolled blood sugar quietly destroys organs. Most of my classmates file this away for exam day, while I’m glued to my CGM app because these sequelae are not hypotheticals for me.
A continuous glucose monitor (CGM) has been the backbone of my daily management since my type 1 diabetes (T1D) diagnosis five years ago. On July 1, 2026, my longtime sensor will …
Continuous glucose monitor accuracy and patient trust
Offshore online gambling companies, operating from jurisdictions with lax oversight, have built a business model that thrives on easy access for minors while evading meaningful U.S. regulations. These platforms often rely on superficial age verification that fails to protect vulnerable youth, leading to widespread underage participation, addiction, and profound suffering for victims and their families.
Inadequate age verification: a sham that enables harm
Underage gambling thrives on offshore betting sites
ADVERTISEMENT
For years, food allergy families like mine were told the same thing: “Avoid the allergen and carry epinephrine.” Now, many walk into allergy clinics and hear something entirely different: “There are treatments that can help your child.”
What follows is often overwhelm, not relief.
As a psychologist working with the food allergy community, and as a parent who has sought out those treatments for my son, I have watched families try to …
The emotional weight of choosing food allergy treatment
Most applied behavior analysis (ABA) practices are not lacking data. If anything, they have too much of it. The challenge is pulling it together to get a complete picture of client care, determining next steps, and maintaining compliance. Information lives in different, siloed systems. Getting the information you need often means exporting reports, manually reconciling numbers, and trying to connect the dots. By the time that work is done, the …
How AI is reshaping applied behavior analysis care
For decades, millions of women have walked into clinics, described a complex web of physical and emotional symptoms, and walked out with a diagnosis of polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS). This condition affects an estimated 170 million women globally during their reproductive years. It is one of the most common endocrine disorders in women, affecting one in eight globally. Yet, the name we have used for it is fundamentally flawed.
The term …
What the polycystic ovary syndrome name change means
My friend Barry has money galore that makes people assume he shouldn’t have any problems at all. He runs a thriving real estate business, owns multiple homes, collects cars, spends weekends on his boat, comes from a family most people would envy, has friends, and can buy expensive tchotchkes, little throwaway things he could replace without a second thought. On paper, he has everything. But every time I saw him, …
Loneliness in successful men hides behind abundance
3 a.m. was the time I witnessed a case that changed the way I think.
He came in complaining of epigastric pain. He had eaten a whole chicken that night, a heavy meal, a simple explanation. The residents in the emergency department, exhausted at the end of a 15-hour shift and overwhelmed by the crowd of patients around them, gave him an IV H2 blocker and left him for monitoring. He …
How anchoring bias in medicine missed a heart attack
Food allergy has long been one of the few life-threatening medical conditions that society still treats as entertainment. For years, it has been the punchline in comedies. More recently, it has appeared as a convenient murder weapon in television dramas and thrillers. Now, in a recent comedy series, viewers are presented with something arguably just as dangerous: a storyline built around nearly every major misconception the public holds about food …
Why a Hulu comedy’s food allergy myths are dangerous
I was never suicidal.
I said the words because I believed I had no other way out.
By then I was restrained, masked, surrounded, and being moved through a medical system I understood too well. I am a physician. I have spent my career in pulmonary, critical care, and sleep medicine. I have managed patients on ventilators, spoken with families at the edge of death, treated sleep and breathing disorders, and taught …
A physician’s involuntary psychiatric hold, from inside
Get free updates delivered free to your inbox.
