Tag Archives: health

They’re in makeup, dental floss and menstrual products. They’re in nonstick pans and takeout food wrappers. Same with rain jackets and firefighting equipment, as well as pesticides and artificial turf on sports fields. They’re PFAS: a class of man-made chemicals called per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances. They are also called “forever chemicals” because the bonds in […]

Clinics around the country are starting to offer patients a new service: having their mammograms read not just by a radiologist, but also by an artificial intelligence model. The hospitals and companies that provide these tools tout their ability to speed the work of radiologists and detect cancer earlier than standard mammograms alone. Currently, mammograms […]

When Diane Scheig’s father, Bill, came home from work at the Mallinckrodt factory in St. Louis, he would strip down in their garage and hand his clothes to her mother to immediately wash, not daring to contaminate the house with the residue of his labors. Mr. Scheig, an ironworker who helped build the city’s famous […]

Patti Sietz-Honig, a video editor at Fox 5 in New York, filed a complaint in 2022. The cost of seeing a specialist for chronic back pain had spiked, and she faced roughly $60,000 in bills. Ms. Sietz-Honig pressed for updates about her complaint and sent articles critical of MultiPlan from Capitol Forum, a site focused […]

Large health insurers are working with a little-known data company to boost their profits, often at the expense of patients and doctors, a New York Times investigation found. A private-equity-backed firm called MultiPlan has helped drive down payments to medical providers and drive up patients’ bills, while earning billions of dollars in fees for itself […]

The pianist Alice Sara Ott, barefoot and wearing a silver bracelet, was smiling and singing to herself the other day as she practiced a jazzy passage of Ravel at Steinway Hall in Midtown Manhattan. A Nintendo Switch, which she uses to warm up her hands, was by her side (another favored tool is a Rubik’s […]

A new article in the New England Journal of Medicine, one of the oldest and most esteemed publications for medical research, criticizes the journal for paying only “superficial and idiosyncratic attention” to the atrocities perpetrated in the name of medical science by the Nazis. The journal was “an outlier in its sporadic coverage of the […]

Historically speaking, it’s not a bad time to be the liver of a teenager. Or the lungs. Regular use of alcohol, tobacco and drugs among high school students has been on a long downward trend. In 2023, 46 percent of seniors said that they’d had a drink in the year before being interviewed; that is […]

Bird flu outbreaks among dairy cows in multiple states, and at least one infection in farmworker in Texas, have incited fears that the virus may be the next infectious threat to people. The influenza virus, called H5N1, is highly pathogenic, meaning it has the ability to cause severe disease and death. But while its spread […]

The maker of the newest treatment approved for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis said Thursday that it would withdraw the drug from the market because a large clinical trial did not produce evidence that the treatment worked. The company, Amylyx Pharmaceuticals, said in a statement that it had started the process of withdrawing the drug in the […]