Megan Hart

Linked media - Associated media As the drugs have grown in popularity, so too has the pressure for public figures to disclose whether they’re using them. Some have made an event out of revealing they take medication — perhaps none more notably than Oprah Winfrey, who announced in People magazine that she was taking a weight loss drug and “done with the shaming.” She later hosted a prime-time special devoted to weight stigma and the new medications. Elon Musk was one of the earliest proponents, writing on Twitter in 2022 after being asked how he had become so “fit, ripped…

Related media - Linked media Top of the Waiting List Last week, Kendric came prepared for the stem cell collection — he has spent many weeks in this hospital being treated for pain so severe that on his last visit, even morphine and oxycodone could not control it. He brought his special pillow with a Snoopy pillowcase that his grandmother gave him and his special Spider-Man blanket. And he had a goal. “I want to be cured,” he said. Bone marrow stem cells, the source of all the body’s red and white blood cells, are normally nestled in a person’s…

Associated media - Related media When Surgeon General Vivek Murthy went on a nationwide college tour last fall, he started to hear the same kind of question time and again: How are we supposed to connect with one another when nobody talks anymore? In an age when participation in community organizations, clubs and religious groups has declined, and more social interaction is happening online instead of in person, some young people are reporting levels of loneliness that, in past decades, were typically associated with older adults. It’s one of the many reasons loneliness has become a problem at both the…

Linked media - Connected media “This reconceptualization that we’re proposing affects not a small minority of people,” said Dr. Juan Fortea, an author of the study and the director of the Sant Pau Memory Unit in Barcelona, Spain. “Sometimes we say that we don’t know the cause of Alzheimer’s disease,” but, he said, this would mean that about 15 to 20 percent of cases “can be tracked back to a cause, and the cause is in the genes.” The idea involves a gene variant called APOE4. Scientists have long known that inheriting one copy of the variant increases the risk…

Related media - Linked media As he lay on his deathbed, his publisher gave him a gift of 12 bottles of wine. By then Beethoven knew he could never drink them. He whispered his last recorded words: “Pity, pity — too late!” For a composer, deafness had been perhaps the worst affliction. At age 30, 26 years before his death, Beethoven wrote: “For almost 2 years I have ceased to attend any social functions, just because I find it impossible to say to people: I am deaf. If I had any other profession, I might be able to cope with…