Tag: chronic illness
11 Readers on How to Solve the Opioid Crisis
This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.
Last week I asked, “What should be done about fentanyl? Has it affected your family or community?”
Judy shared a personal tragedy:
… Read moreMy 26-year-old son died of an overdose of heroin doctored with fentanyl. We would learn two weeks later
What the Labels of Mental Illness Obscure
Let me explain something about me: When I was 12, I started having panic attacks, brought on by fears that I couldn’t shake, even though I knew they were irrational. I was terrified, for example, that I’d become depressed—but I’d never been depressed before, and didn’t feel depressed. My junior high school devoted a series of assemblies to warning us budding teenagers that we were entering the most dangerous years of our lives, now ripe targets for cutting, suicide,
Could Paxlovid Treat Long COVID?
Updated at 2:55 p.m. on May 10, 2022
In the two years since she caught the coronavirus, 38-year-old Jessica McGovern has cycled through “well over 100 drugs, supplements, and therapies” to try to keep her long-COVID symptoms at bay. In almost all cases, she told me, the interventions were to no avail: Exhaustion, weakness, and aches still lashed her to the couch; she still felt suffocating chest pain that worsened when she inhaled; her upper body was still haunted by
Vaccine Hesitancy Has Seeped Into Home Health Care
There was the home health attendant who sucked her thumb before touching household items. And the one who brought her unvaccinated 4-year-old into the apartment where Mary and her immunocompromised husband live, near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. And the one who came by after her day shift at a nursing home.
Many of the aides who circulated through Mary’s household were vaccine-hesitant or outright anti-vax; many wore their mask improperly while in the apartment, she told me. A few came in with
The Hair-Loss-Treatment Market Is Full of Hollow Promises
When I first suspected that I was losing my hair, I felt like maybe I was also losing my grip on reality. This was the summer of 2020, and although the previous three months had been difficult for virtually everyone, I had managed to escape relatively unscathed. I hadn’t gotten sick in New York City’s terrifying first wave of the pandemic. My loved ones were safe. I still had a job. I wasn’t okay, necessarily, but I was fine.