Physicians are 40% more likely than workers in other fields to report suicidal ideation – 7.1% versus 4.3% according to a 2021 study by Dr. Tait Shanafelt and colleagues. Our nation’s caregivers do not enter the profession to have it end prematurely by suicide. As we move further away from the COVID pandemic, licensed healthcare personnel are still facing the same issues they were prior: One meta-analysis from researchers at Harvard estimated the depression rate among doctors in training at 29% compared to 8% of non-physicians.
The number of people living with Parkinson’s disease globally has doubled in the past 25 years. Yet the treatment and monitoring of the neurological disease seems many decades behind. Now, Stanford Medicine researchers have developed a simple, portable device to help patients track their symptoms at home.
A top Senate Democrat is pressing hospitals in states with abortion bans about how they are complying with a federal emergency care law, following reports about women who need emergency reproductive care being turned away. Senate Finance Committee Chair Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) sent letters Monday to eight hospitals in Georgia, Texas, Missouri, Florida, Louisiana and North Carolina asking about specific policies and procedures to enforce the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA). The letters were sent to hospitals where women have reportedly been turned away or experienced delayed care. Georgia and Florida ban abortion after about six weeks of pregnancy. Texas law prohibits all abortion except to save the life of the mother. Louisiana and Missouri similarly ban almost all abortions, with some narrow medical exceptions. North Carolina bans abortion after 12 weeks.
Men and women don’t experience pain the same way. Give someone an electric shock; bind a tourniquet tighter and tighter around their leg; submerge their hand in icy water; prick them with a pin: Researchers have done it all, and they’ve found — across years and hundreds of studies — that the same stimuli provoke greater pain responses in women. Women, in other words, are more sensitive to pain than men. They report feeling it more in just about every way: more intensely, more often, for a longer time. They grapple with more headaches, more painful gut conditions, more pain in their backs and pelvises and bones and, research suggests, virtually every other part of their bodies. Of the hundreds of millions of chronic pain patients around the world, they comprise roughly 70 percent. And underlying those striking disparities, studies are finding, is a still more extensive web of differences connected to both gender and biological sex that help shape how pain manifests, and how badly it hurts. Distinct types of cells appear to be involved in processing pain in each sex. Sex hormones have been shown to exacerbate or dampen it. Disparate stress levels, gender roles and even the ways men and women tend to think about their own pain all seem to influence how hard it hits. The list goes on — and likely keeps going on far beyond what research has so far uncovered.
Obesity is high and holding steady in the U.S., but the proportion of those with severe obesity — especially women — has climbed since a decade ago, according to new government research. The U.S. obesity rate is about 40%, according to a 2021-2023 survey of about 6,000 people. Nearly 1 in 10 of those surveyed reported severe obesity, the CDC found. Women were nearly twice as likely as men to report severe obesity. The overall obesity rate appeared to tick down vs. the 2017-2020 survey, but the change wasn't considered statistically significant; the numbers are small enough that there's mathematical chance they didn't truly decline. That means it's too soon to know whether new treatments for obesity, including blockbuster weight-loss drugs such as Wegovy and Zepbound, can help ease the epidemic of the chronic disease linked to a host of health problems, according to Dr. Samuel Emmerich, the CDC public health officer who led the latest study.