It’s common to meet the idea of intuition with an eye roll. We tend to value reason over everything else, using expressions like “think before you act,” “think twice,” and “look before you leap.” We don’t trust intuition. In fact, we believe it’s flawed and magical thinking, either vaguely crazy or downright stupid. After all, good decisions should always be reasoned. What we don’t realize, however, is that intuition is a form of cognition that can actually improve our decision-making. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] What is intuition?  You can think of it as an instinct or gut feeling ..read more

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — On a recent morning at a hospital in the heart of gang territory in Haiti’s capital, a woman began convulsing before her body went limp as a doctor and two nurses raced to save her. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] They stuck electrodes to her chest and flipped on an oxygen machine while keeping their eyes on a computer screen that reflected a dangerously low oxygen level of 84%. No one knew what was wrong with her. Even more worrisome, the Doctors Without Borders hospital in the Cite Soleil slum was running low on key medicine to treat convulsions. “The medication sh ..read more

Public health officials are warning about the dangers of counterfeit botox products, which have been circulating and causing individuals to fall ill in several U.S. states. As of Friday, April 18, 22 people across California, Colorado, Florida, Illinois, Kentucky, Nebraska, New Jersey, New York, Tennessee, Texas, and Washington, have reported adverse reactions to a counterfeit version of Botox (botulinum toxin). All of the individuals are female, ranging in age from 25 to 59.  [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] Symptoms of the fake botox include blurred or double vision, difficulty swallo ..read more

(FLINT, Mich.) — Their childhood memories are still vivid: warnings against drinking or cooking with tap water, enduring long lines for cases of water, washing from buckets filled with heated, bottled water. And for some, stomach aches, skin rashes and hair loss. Ten years ago in Flint — April 25, 2014 — city and state environmental officials raised celebratory glasses as the mayor pressed a button to stop the flow of Lake Huron water supplied by Detroit for almost half a century. That set in motion a lead and bacteria public health crisis from which the city has not fully recovered. [time-b ..read more

On April 24, the Supreme Court will hear arguments weighing whether Idaho politicians have the power to block doctors from giving emergency medical care to patients experiencing pregnancy complications—a case that will open the door for other states to prohibit emergency reproductive care and worsen medical infrastructure for people across the board. Once again, politicians have set up a case that could have devastating impacts on the ability of doctors to provide–and for pregnant women to receive–essential reproductive health care. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] I’m a family physician who ..read more

A suggestion for the masses: Now would be a good time to check in on your favorite Taylor Swift fan. After months of feverish anticipation, the superstar delivered her 11th studio album, The Tortured Poets Department, on Friday—and Swifities everywhere are losing their minds. From a neuroscience perspective, the response makes sense. Research suggests that music activates the brain’s reward system, triggering the release of the neurotransmitter dopamine. “We know that music is highly tied to emotion for a variety of reasons,” says Lindsay Halladay, an associate professor in neuroscience and ..read more

Get ready to see cicadas everywhere. More than a trillion of the critters are expected to surface in parts of the United States this year in a rare co-emergence event the likes of which hasn’t been seen in over two centuries. Known for their deafening mating calls, which can be as loud as lawnmowers, cicadas emerge after more than a decade underground, offering a tasty meal to birds—and even the occasional human. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] That’s right, cicadas, like many insects, have been hailed as an eco-friendly and high-protein alternative to poultry and cattle. They’re low in cho ..read more

A Covid-19 patient with a weakened immune system incubated a highly mutated novel strain over 613 days before succumbing to an underlying illness, researchers in the Netherlands found. The patient, a 72-year-old man with a blood disorder, failed to mount a strong immune response to multiple Covid shots before catching the omicron variant in February 2022. Detailed analysis of specimens collected from more than two dozen nose and throat swabs found the coronavirus developed resistance to sotrovimab, a Covid antibody treatment, within a few weeks, scientists at the University of Amst ..read more

Whether fictional or fact-based, Munchausen syndrome by proxy grips the public. Media depictions in The Sixth Sense and Sharp Objects and real-life news coverage of Gypsy Rose Blanchard’s December 2023 release from jail are hard to look away from. The most well-known cases—real or dramatized—are often the starkest ones, but Munchausen by proxy comes in subtler, harder-to-detect forms too. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] “The media are fascinated, but they tend to depict the most extreme cases,” says Dr. Marc D. Feldman, distinguished life fellow of the American Psychiatric Association and a ..read more

Scotland’s only gender clinic for young people has paused prescribing puberty blockers for new patients under 18 years old after the National Health Service (NHS) in England banned children from receiving the gender treatment last month. Puberty blockers are used to delay puberty changes by stopping the body from making sex hormones including testosterone and estrogen. They can be prescribed to treat gender dysphoria, the clinical term for psychological distress that results from an incongruence between one’s sex assigned at birth and one’s gender identity. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] T ..read more