Their story contains an entire universe of questions about the lines between life and death, reflex and will, and the confusing tug of war between two basic moral touchstones: doing no harm...and doing everything in our power to help.
The facelift is interesting because the procedure itself is kind of extraordinarily violent. You're severing all these layers of muscle and fat and fascia. Bridget Reid did a piece for New York Magazine where she describes a plastic surgeon lifting the face off of its bones like a Halloween mask and rearranging it. But the results are almost supernatural.
It turned out Amy was not alone. And the answer to her mysterious allergy involved maps, a dancing lone star tick, and a very particular sugar called Alpha Gal.
Physicians themselves have had to grapple with the nature of pain. For much of medical history, pain was seen as a symptom — a signal from the body that something had gone wrong. But researchers have come to see that pain is more than a warning system. It is, in some ways, a construction of the mind.
We practice sick care rather than health care. And even when we practice health care, if you think about it, it's a pretty archaic process. You will travel to a physician's office that really hasn't changed much in the last 40 years.
The feeds on Instagram are often driven by algorithms and what you search. So here I am, I've been a physician for 20-plus years, I know the data on statins, and I'm starting to think maybe I don't need a statin. And then I'm getting more doctors' feeds that are saying you don't need to be on a statin.
For most of human history, hookworms and their parasitic kin were ubiquitous companions to our species, and the immune system evolved in their presence. The provocative idea at the heart of helminth therapy is that without these old enemies to fight, our immune systems grow restless and turn on us instead.
For most of human history, people were infected with helminths — parasitic worms — as a matter of course. It's only in the past century or so, in wealthy industrialized nations, that we've largely eliminated them. And it's in those same places that allergies, asthma, and autoimmune diseases have skyrocketed.
I think that we've enshrined a lot of cultural assumptions about women and their reproductive capacity in the terms for their organs and terms for things happening in pregnancy and their reproductive decisions, I guess. It's like a really messed up form of metonymy where the organ, like the incompetent cervix, the hostile or geriatric uterus, is standing in for how our culture is stereotyping women.
