Pacific Standard July-August 2013 Cover

Health channel

 

Do Children Make Us Happy?

June 19, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
parenting-happy

Several months ago, the novelist Zadie Smith wrote an essay for the New York Review of Books on joy, a complicated emotion that lies at the heart of parenting she argued. In the essay, Smith captured the paradox of parenting: Children, so-called “bundles of joy,” can make parents profoundly unhappy. “Occasionally, the child, too, is a pleasure,” she wrote, “though mostly she is a joy, which means in fact she gives us not much pleasure at all, but rather that strange admixture of terror, pain, and delight that I have come to recognize a joy, and now must find some way to live with ... Read More

Bath Salts, Zombies, and Crossbows: An Update

June 18, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
hannibal-poster

It’s been about a year since the dangerous new synthetic drug, packaged and disguised as “bath salts,” entered America’s mainstream consciousness. Last summer the drug was blamed for a series of bizarre, violent, and seemingly random attacks of cannibalism; it felt, for a few weeks there, like the beginning of a zombie apocalypse. It should be noted that the drugged-out perpetrator of the first and most well known of these attacks, on a homeless man on a Miami highway overpass, later turned out to not actually have been on bath salts. But still: local news sites across the country ... Read More

Treating Mental Illness Prevents Crime and Saves Us Money

June 14, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
early-mental-health

How much are we willing to pay, as a society, toward preventing crime and easing the burdens on our prison systems? How much are we willing to pay to provide help to people struggling with serious mental illness, the kind of illness that makes it hard for them to cope with daily life? The results of a study out last month in Psychiatric Services might give some insight into how to think about the intersection of both of those difficult questions. A research team at North Carolina State University looked at the impact of routine outpatient treatment for adults with serious mental illness on ... Read More

In Praise of Younger Men

June 13, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
fertility-flower

Attention ladies: Want to be more of a woman? Act more like a man. Date and mate with younger partners—and remain fertile for a lifetime. OK, we may not yet be able to pull off the latter, but the findings of biologists at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada, just published in PLOS Computational Biology, suggest it might be possible. Led by evolutionary geneticist Rama Singh, the team concluded that menopause—in nature a phenomenon unique to humans and two whale species, the function of which has long stumped scientists—has little if anything to do with natural selection. Rather, ... Read More

Supreme Court Rules Unanimously That Human Genes Cannot Be Patented

June 13, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
dna2

Today the U.S. Supreme Court issued a unan­imous decision on the Myriad Patent case, having to do with the company’s own­ership of BRCA-​​1 and BRCA-​​2 gene sequences. The main opinion, authored by Justice Thomas, says this: A nat­u­rally occurring DNA segment is a product of nature and not patent eli­gible merely because it has been iso­lated, but cDNA is patent eli­gible because it is not nat­u­rally occurring. At first glance, this is ter­rific news for patients worldwide. It means that no company, uni­versity, other entity or indi­vidual can patent human ... Read More

Sarah Gets Her Lung

June 12, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
sarah-murnaghan

Sarah Murnaghan, the 10-year old Pennsylvania girl with end-stage cystic fibrosis—whose need for a lung transplant has touched off a health-care policy debate in Congress over the fairness of transplant rules for children under age 12—may have found a lung donor. The family’s Facebook posts don’t make it clear where the donor lung came from. But it is that information that has been at the crux of the family’s campaign and legal battle to exempt her from transplant rules. The U.S. District Court of eastern Pennsylvania, where the Murnaghan family filed suit, ruled in their favor ... Read More

Making Baby Autopsies More Acceptable

June 10, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
mri-machine

Bereaved parents who do not want to see their dead babies go through a conventional autopsy could in future be offered a less invasive option which uses magnetic resonance imaging and blood tests to establish the cause of death. Scientists who investigated using a combination of full body scans and sample tests found this so-called minimally invasive autopsy (MIA) was as effective in determining the cause of death as a conventional procedure, which involves an open dissection of the baby's body to examine the organs. "In a state of shock and grief, parents are asked if they will consent, ... Read More

Personal Finance Tip: Don’t Get Sick, Injured, or Hurt in America

June 10, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
america-doctor

"The United States spends more money on health care than any other country in the world." That is not up for debate. "The United States provides the best health care in the world." That is very much up for debate. So, if the U.S. clearly spends the most money on health care, but does not clearly provide the world's best health care ... what the hell, U.S.A? This is why we have The New York Times. Today, Elisabeth Rosenthal published the first of a multi-part investigation into this country's crazy-high health care spending. There are charts and maps and infographics—along with some great ... Read More

Sarah Versus the Data

June 6, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
murnaghan

Ten-year-old Sarah Murnaghan is in the end stages of a lifelong battle against cystic fibrosis. Her family says that she has only weeks to live if she doesn’t receive a partial lung transplant. If successful, the transplant could effectively cure her condition, speculated one lung doctor (not involved in Sarah’s care) that spoke to ABC News.  But the medical establishment’s rules and legal and ethical standards seem to be delaying, and maybe preventing, the Pennsylvania girl from getting her transplant. Now the case has made its way to Washington, D.C., with a political dynamic ... Read More

Faith-Based Zucchini

June 6, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
zucchini-flower

I can’t help it: I love science. It’s how I make sense of the universe, how I make decisions when there is so much emotion, so much confusion that surround basic things. Does dairy cause asthma? No, no chance, according to a study by Australia’s Monash Medical School. Does juice contribute to obesity in children? Probably not, according to a study by the University of California-San Francisco. So I let my two small kids have cheese, even when they’re wheezy. And I let them drink juice (but not soda—a study out of Children’s Hospital in Boston (PDF) says that does contribute to ... Read More