Tag: medical conditions
Do You Have Free Will?
Writing a review is an exercise in free will. Not only can I tell you what I want about the book and whether I liked it or not, but I also get to choose how to begin. If I decide to start with a personal anecdote, that’s what you will get. And I have the ability—the freedom—to start in other ways instead. These facts may seem too obvious to mention. But they are denied by Robert Sapolsky, a professor
Long COVID is the emergency that won’t end
In the early spring of 2020, the condition we now call long COVID didn’t have a name, much less a large community of patient advocates. For the most part, clinicians dismissed its symptoms, and researchers focused on SARS-CoV-2 infections’ short-term effects. Now, as the pandemic approaches the end of its third winter in the Northern Hemisphere, the chronic toll of the coronavirus is much more familiar. Long COVID has been acknowledged by prominent experts, national leaders, and the World Health
There Are Many Kinds of Long COVID
As a pulmonary specialist, I spend most of my clinical time in the hospital—which, during pandemic surges, has meant many long days treating critically ill COVID-19 patients in the ICU. But I also work in an outpatient clinic, where I also treat those same sorts of patients after they’re discharged: people who survived weeks-long hospitalizations but have been dealing ever since with lung damage. Such patients often face the same social and economic factors that made them vulnerable
What Reality TV Reveals About Motherhood
Most mothers have never glued lashes to their daughters’ eyelids for pageants. They’ve never, as the moms on Toddlers & Tiaras have, gotten their children’s legs spray-tanned. They haven’t stood in the audience, cuing their kids’ routines with kissy faces and arm sweeps, hollering, “Get it, girl!” and “Sparkle, baby!”
But they may have let their kids sit too long in front of the TV, faces slackened and minds empty. Allowed themselves to get flustered by their children’s obstinacy, throwing
COVID Risk Factors Could Be Hiding In Our Genes
On the surface, the September 24 announcement from the head of the CDC outlining who, exactly, would be eligible for COVID-19 booster shots seemed like a clarifying moment. But even as the agency’s leader, Rochelle Walensky, declared the need to make “concrete recommendations that optimize health,” the new guidance was hard to parse. It said, for instance, that people as young as age 18 who received the Pfizer vaccine may get a third shot as long as they have any
Delta Has Changed the Pandemic Endgame
In September 2020, just before COVID-19 began its wintry surge through the United States, I wrote that the country was trapped in a pandemic spiral, seemingly destined to repeat the same mistakes. But after vaccines arrived in midwinter, cases in the U.S. declined and, by summer’s edge, had reached their lowest levels since the pandemic’s start. Many Americans began to hope that the country had enough escape velocity to exit its cycle of missteps and sickness. And though
Influencers With Tourette’s Find a Niche on TikTok
Halfway through our conversation, Glen Cooney calls me a four-letter word often cited as the most offensive in the English language. But that’s okay. He doesn’t mean it.
Cooney has Tourette’s syndrome, which causes tics, twitches, and—in some people—a symptom called coprolalia, which the Tourette Association of America characterizes as “the involuntary outburst of obscene words or socially inappropriate and derogatory remarks.” Living with the disorder is tiring, because of both the tics themselves and the effort of trying to