June 2, 2022
(New York Review of Books) – Systematic attacks on hospitals amplify the harm of war and increase suffering. The effects reverberate widely, spreading terror and driving people to flee. This exemplifies the weaponization of health care—the use of people’s need … Read More
May 31, 2022
(Nature) – As a medical student in Pakistan, Haider Warraich loved to go to the gym. One day, while bench pressing, he dropped a 90-kilogram weight on himself. His back injury ended his plans to become a surgeon and almost … Read More
April 21, 2022
(Wired) – Finding a diagnosis for chronic pain is the only way to get one’s sentence cut short. While a diagnosis might help with treatment, to the person in distress it can provide something even more coveted: meaning. And yet … Read More
April 15, 2022
(Undark) – In the mid-1980s, as he was launching his academic career, psychiatrist Thomas Insel decided to research the neural pathways for social attachment. His work ended up documenting the important roles that the hormones oxytocin and vasopressin play in … Read More
March 24, 2022
(Undark) – According to John Abramson, a health care policy lecturer at Harvard Medical School, the sap of this poisoned tree is so-called Big Pharma, the coalition of drug companies that have structured American health care into a money-generating machine. … Read More
March 3, 2022
(The Atlantic) – Even in this context, some people have stood out for their selflessness. In early 2020, being myself deluged with grim headlines and aching for hope, I set out to find some of them and tell their stories. … Read More
March 1, 2022
(NPR) – For over a decade, psychiatrist and neuroscientist Dr. Thomas Insel headed the National Institute of Mental Health and directed billions of dollars into research on neuroscience and the genetic underpinnings of mental illnesses. “Our efforts were largely to … Read More
February 21, 2022
(Nature) – German historian of culture and science Bernd Brunner, in his book Extreme North, weaves a darker tapestry, layering legends over the science and history of the north to describe a place that is real, remote, inscrutable and cold. … Read More
February 14, 2022
(NPR) – Until the emergence of COVID-19, tuberculosis was the deadliest infectious disease in the world. How did it evolve from a terrible disease to a largely controlled one to the horrific plague it is now? That’s the question that … Read More
October 21, 2021
(New York Review of Books) – Though Ishiguro has said in more than one interview that working with the homeless influenced his fiction, he has also been careful not to write about his social work directly. This is in part … Read More
