Health and Science

"Being a racial minority is usually equated with being poor, and so it’s assumed that black middle-class women should be fine because they’re not poor. But they’re not fine. They face substantial health challenges and differences in health outcomes. My work points to the persistence of racial discrimination across class, resulting in lower life expectancy and higher rates of infant mortality, and also highlights the unique challenges women in general and black women in particular face trying to be taken seriously and get their needs met by their doctors." Author Tina Sacks more »

"Foreign doctors have all kinds of different forms of training. But many are united by one common factor that seems to be operative especially in the Commonwealth countries — a great emphasis on the bedside exam and on clinical skills. In part, [this approach] was driven by the lack of ready access to all the kinds of sophisticated testing that we have now. But I think that kind of clinical training still serves me very well. It’s almost embarrassing to see how little emphasis we put on that here where the most glaring finding, one that could have been discovered by either a good history or by a discerning exam, instead requires this $2,000 MRI and interpretation to discover something that was really there for everyone to see and recognize had they only learned how to do that." more »

In a series of interviews with heroin users in Rhode Island in 2017, Brown University researchers reported that users “described fentanyl as unpleasant, potentially deadly, and to be avoided.” They concluded that demand for the deadly contaminant was low and that its presence in the drug supply was “generating user interest in effective risk mitigation strategies, including treatment.” But in San Francisco’s gritty Tenderloin district, where fentanyl was only rarely seen until last year, drug users tell a starkly different story. For many of them, fentanyl is a high-value drug that, if used carefully, can prevent dope sickness and deliver a strong high for a fraction of the price of heroin. Amber Sheldon, right, greets a frequent client at the harm reduction program at Glide in San Francisco. The program offers clean syringes, drug tes… more »

During the holidays, many in the press write stories aiming to help readers cope with the blues and other seasonal conditions. But some journalists inadvertently support a myth about the holidays and suicide, or quote well-intentioned sources who should know better. Despite the fact that the holiday season has some of the lowest average daily suicide rates, some journalists continue to perpetuate the holiday-suicide myth. In the 2017-18 holiday season, two-thirds of the print news and feature stories that mentioned both the holidays and suicide drew a false connection between them, according to the latest analysis by the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania.    more »