Despite several sexual misconduct allegations that remain unaddressed, the Senate approved Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination for Justice of the Supreme Court on October 6 in a 50-48 majority vote. After Kavanaugh’s swearing-in, Chief Justice John Roberts filed for an ethics investigation of twelve…
With the disproportionate rates of chronic and infectious diseases affecting Black Americans, one would think that this subpopulation would regularly and willingly seek medical care. Research says otherwise. According to a study analyzing the racial and ethnic differences in physician…
According to a survey from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the percentage of smokers over 18 for January-September 2017 was 14.1%–the lowest it’s ever been. In recent decades, smoking cigarettes has become less popular than alternatives like electronic cigarettes, which…
Imagine walking a mile or so home from the bus stop with your hands full of groceries. Imagine walking a mile or so to the bus stop when you are ill so that you can go to the doctor. This…
Hurricane Florence has created havoc in North Carolina, wreaking damage on homes, flooding whole towns, dismantling beaches and businesses, and killing at least thirty people. Yet as the floodwaters begin to recede, they are revealing the watermarks of a phenomenon…
Imagine a bank that accepts not money, but human saliva. This is a biobank– a type of biorepository or ‘library’ that collects and stores human biological samples and their associated data for use in current or future research. Biobanks can…
Maternal mortality, or death that occurs during pregnancy or shortly after, is used by the World Health Organization as an indicator of how healthy one country is compared to others. A common misconception is that maternal mortality is a public health…
While preparing for major surgery a few years ago, my surgeon, learning that I was a graduate student in English, responded, “Women love their novels!” (Which seemed like a great time to tell him that my sub-specialty was actually medical…
To say that transgender people face large amounts of discrimination in American society and globally would be an understatement. However, according to the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), there is a trend of improving favorability toward transgender people in the United…
As always, he American Healthcare system is always changing. This is an update of some of the policy changes that have occurred in healthcare in the past month and what they mean for you. As we all may know, the…