Supplements are a daily wellness habit for many Americans — but experts warn more isn’t always better.
Some common nutritional supplements include zinc for immune function, ashwagandha for stress relief, fish oil for improving heart health and magnesium for better sleep, among others that have gained popularity on social media.
In an interview with Fox News Digital, Jim LaValle, a clinical pharmacist and metabolic medicine expert based in Texas, said that supplements should be balanced with other medications and medical conditions.
AMERICANS ARE GIVING UP MULTIVITAMINS FOR A DIFFERENT DAILY HEALTH HABIT, STUDY FINDS
"I've never met a supplement I didn't like under the right circumstances," he said. "There's some evidence around what it's doing in the body."
While supplementing certain nutrients can be beneficial, the health expert warned that overdoing it can be "problematic."
"A lot of people take one of everything and then stack peptides on top of it — and then they're going and doing 18 different things," he said.
It's important to first assess what the body needs from an individualized approach, according to LaValle.
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For example, low magnesium has been associated with the development of metabolic syndrome. In that case, he said, taking a magnesium supplement could help to balance out levels.
"We assume that if you eat healthy, you're going to get those nutrients. But are the foods we're selecting actually rich in those nutrients?" he questioned.
LaValle recommends using supplements to address specific needs, starting with a blood test to pinpoint any deficiencies, rather than blindly treating symptoms.
Low iron and ferritin are common among people complaining of fatigue, LaValle said, yet some may instead turn to supplements like ashwagandha or rhodiola in an effort to boost their energy.
TAKING DAILY SUPPLEMENT MAY HELP PRESERVE MUSCLE AS YOU AGE — EVEN WITHOUT EXERCISE
"They’re buying some kind of stimulant adaptogen to try to get their energy up," he said. "That’s pretty basic — you’re low in iron, and you never got a blood test."
LaValle noted that the number of biomarkers measured is less important than how well the results are interpreted.
After appropriate blood testing, the results can be used to identify "functional highs and lows" and help establish specific health goals, he said.
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"If you're somebody who has a goal to get out there and get after it and do a Hyrox or an LT Games or a Tough Mudder, there could be supplements that would help improve your performance [or] reduce your risk of injury," LaValle said.
"It doesn't mean you [have to] take them all the time."
The expert reiterated that it’s easy to "overdo it," particularly with the influence of online health and wellness advice.
"When people are getting barraged with marketing between social media and friends telling them, 'I did this and it worked,' they'll lean in and go, 'Hey, if two is good, four is better, and why not do 10?'"
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In one example, having low levels of certain nutrients, such as zinc, can disrupt key functions in the body, as zinc plays an important role in immune health, cell growth and metabolism.
But supplementing with too much zinc can cause digestive distress and even copper deficiency, which can lead to anemia and other neurological problems, according to the NIH.
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"So having low zinc is not good, but you can overdo zinc," LaValle said. "You can overdo vitamin A. You can overdo vitamin D easily, and that could be potentially toxic if you're taking too much of it."
People should talk with a doctor or pharmacist before starting or combining supplements, particularly if they take prescription medications or have underlying health conditions. Blood testing may also be appropriate before supplementing certain nutrients, experts advise.
The NFL made multiple officials available to reporters Tuesday during its fall league meeting to say that it was satisfied with how the Philadelphia Eagles handled quarterback Jalen Hurts' care related to his blood clots and to criticize reports that drew incorrect conclusions about what happened.
And, ready for this?
Then the NFL Players Association released a statement on the matter on Tuesday evening saying something quite different.
That NFLPA statement criticized the league for drawing conclusions about how the situation was handled and added that the union was told by the league it would not review the care Hurts received.
NFL CLEARS PHILADELPHIA EAGLES OF WRONGDOING IN HANDLING OF JALEN HURTS BLOOD CLOT SITUATION
That last part calls into question how the NFL can defend how the Eagles handled the matter, because how could that assessment be made lacking a thorough review?
So, rather than allaying concerns and moving on from the Jalen Hurts blood clot matter, we actually have a new mystery and more questions.
"I'll just sum it up by saying that I have complete confidence in the Eagles medical staff and their handling of this situation and what characterize their work as very conservative, very patient-focused and appropriately guarded at every step," said Dr. Allen Sills, the NFL's chief medical officer.
Sills said that in a typical season, the league has been "in the low single digits" of players that suffered deep vein thrombosis like Hurts did over the course of the past decade and this:
"Every case gets reviewed and looked at," he said.
Sills later added that in the Hurts case, "everyone was incredibly conservative and incredibly vigilant and was very quick to make diagnoses of these conditions that might not have been diagnosed in a non-athlete.
"Quite frankly, you or I might have walked around with this condition without a diagnosis."
Sills said that all the timing and decision-making on when tests were performed and conclusions reached came with "state-of-the-art imaging that was done in London and as far as the timing and the decision-making ...
"I have great confidence in that and believe everyone acted with an abundance of caution and with a tremendous high degree of suspicion to try to identify and take care of these things as quickly as possible."
Sills then repeated that the NFL has a committee that looks at all these cases and does so with the Players Association to see what can be learned.
There's more: Jeff Miller, the NFL executive vice president of communications, public affairs and policy, was asked if there was an investigation into what the Eagles did or whether the league simply trusted what the Eagles said happened.
"Both talking to the Eagles staff and making sure from people on the ground, tracking the case, talking to the independent hospital and doctors involved that we have, I think, a complete understanding of the course of events," Miller said.
Taken in total, this represents a full-throated defense of the Philadelphia Eagles, their medical staff, and the doctors in London that treated Hurts.
And that sounded convincing until the NFLPA released its statement.
"The NFLPA is not aware of any NFL investigation into the medical care provided to Jalen Hurts," the statement provided to OutKick and Fox News Digital reads. "In fact, the league previously informed the union that it did not plan to review the care he received."
Wait, what?
That contradicts what an NFL vice president and the league's top doctor said. Because, how could the NFL be so confident about the care Hurts received and the decisions that were made without a review or investigation into the facts?
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But the NFLPA was not finished blowing up the league. The NFL has apparently come to a conclusion that Hurts received great, professional care and called reporting suggesting something else "considerable and uninformed speculation."
But the second part of the NFLPA's statement suggests the NFL is engaging in speculation.
"Before conclusions are drawn about how this situation was handled, there must be a full investigation into what occurred," the union's statement read. "Determining the facts is essential to ensuring players receive the highest level of care and protection going forward."
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The NFL is satisfied with the manner in which the Philadelphia Eagles handled the Jalen Hurts blood clot situation the past two weeks, a league source confirmed on Tuesday.
The matter is closed as far as the league is concerned.
That means the NFL review of the matter will not result in any team punishment for how the Eagles handled the injury designation for Hurts ahead of the Week 5 game between them and the Jacksonville Jaguars in London.
The Eagles did not report Hurts had been discovered to have a superficial blood clot the day before the game.
Hurts played in the game and even practiced multiple days afterward. But late last week further evaluations revealed that Hurts has a deep vein trombosis as well as a bilateral pulmonary emboli – which the Eagles and Hurts' agent announced on Monday.
Hurts is out for the remainder of the season.
The Eagles have made it clear they have been in contact with the league throughout the process. That process included the NFL's chief medical doctor having Hurts seen at the Cleveland Clinic in London on that fateful Saturday before the game against Jacksonville.
The NFL released a statement provided to OutKick and Fox News Digital on the matter:
"The league had been in contact throughout the process with the Eagles medical personnel, and the Cleveland Clinic in London where the tests were conducted.
"The league’s Chief Medical Officer Dr. Allen Sills arranges for medical resources with leading providers in every international market with approval from the NFL Players Association.
"Medical care for players is provided by club medical staff in coordination with independent doctors."
After the superficial blood clot in Hurts’ calf was first discovered, the team, staff, doctors and Hurts made the determination that he could play the following day against the Jaguars.
Aside from their two publicly disseminated statements on the matter, the only person in the Eagles organization to discuss the Hurts matter is coach Nick Sirianni. And he hasn't been forthcoming.
"You know, the health of our players are, is always at the forefront of our mind," Sirianni said. "And leave that up to the medical experts, but we always, always care deeply about our players. And that's when you are completely focused on together and connection. You're always thinking about the well-being of your guys and that's what we were in that situation."
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Beyond that, Sirianni repeated during his press conference on Monday that he is not a medical expert and added, "I trust the people that are involved in helping us all make these decisions."
But the club had no one from the medical staff answer reporters' questions. GM Howie Roseman, who is in charge of the medical staff under the Eagles structure, also did not address the matter.
Roseman typically does not speak with reporters during the season, in deference to the coaching staff's messaging, with the rare exception of trades being made and an NFL-required availability.
The lack of answers from the team has opened the door to more questions. And those will persist even as the team and the league are trying to move forward.
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© Tierney L. Cross/The New York Times
Beijing has proposed banning exports of the technology used to make next-generation solar cells, a move that could complicate United States technology guru Elon Musk’s plan to expand into space solar power. The ban, which covers production technology for perovskite and tandem solar cell modules, is part of a proposal by China’s Ministry of Commerce […]
The post China next-gen solar tech curb to impact SpaceX AI computing plan appeared first on Asia Times.
Today is World Menopause Day – a day to convince women over 40 that yet another aspect of ordinary life needs to medicalised. It's time to stop the grift, says Joanna Gray.
The post Stop the Menopausal Grift appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.
If a treatment can improve your health, does that give the government the right to force it onto you? Should the state compel people with diabetes to take insulin, patients with hypertension to take their medications, or people with obesity to lose weight?
Most Americans would recoil at such proposals. Yet when it comes to people diagnosed with psychiatric disorders, many people seem willing to make an exception.
A physician who administers treatment to a competent adult against the patient's will violates one of medicine's most fundamental ethical principles: informed consent. Why should that principle carry less weight when the doctor is a psychiatrist? Yet in a recent City Journal article, Stephen Eide and Valerie Franchitti of the Manhattan Institute argue that public support for involuntary psychiatric treatment reflects a welcome recognition of its potential benefits.
Strangely, the article entirely avoids the concept of informed consent. Where it acknowledges any limitations to involuntary treatment at all, it considers only the possibility that coercive treatment may increase stigma against mental illness.
But the more fundamental objection is liberty. A psychiatric diagnosis does not extinguish your right to control your body. Competent adults have the right to decide what substances they consume, which medical treatments they accept, and what risks they take, even when others consider their choices unwise or self-destructive. As the psychiatrist Thomas Szasz wrote in 1997, "I oppose involuntary psychiatric interventions not because I believe that they are necessarily 'bad' for patients but because I oppose using the coercive apparatus of the state to impose psychiatric relations on persons against their will."
Eide and Franchitti write, "The public is right to suspect that involuntary treatment can be effective." They cite data from the New York State Office of Mental Health showing substantial reductions in hospitalization, incarceration, homelessness, substance abuse, and suicide attempts following enrollment under Kendra's Law, which mandates outpatient psychiatric treatment. Yet these data do not establish that coercion caused those improvements. Participants also received increased access to psychiatric services, case management, and other support. Without adequately separating the effects of those services from the effects of coercion itself, the reported improvements cannot establish that compulsory treatment was responsible.
The authors also justify involuntary psychiatric treatment by citing subway attacks, mass shootings, and other violent incidents. But there is a fundamental difference between holding people accountable for violating others' rights and confining them because they might become dangerous. Communities can enforce laws against assault, trespassing, and public nuisance without criminalizing homelessness or mental illness.
Moreover, involuntary commitment to a psychiatric hospital or rehabilitation facility—sometimes for prolonged periods—deprives people of their liberty without a criminal conviction. Although civil commitment involves judicial procedures and opportunities for review, continued confinement may depend heavily on mental health professionals' assessments of whether patients meet release criteria. As Szasz warned, coercive psychiatrists can thus function as "judges and jailers not physicians and healers."
Severe mental illness can impair decision-making, sometimes profoundly, but diagnosis and incapacity are not the same. Even among psychiatric inpatients housed for severe mental illness, a meta-review of the research at BMC Psychiatry shows, most retain the capacity to make treatment decisions. Outside of hospitalized patients, decision-making capacity is even higher.
The legal scholar Elyn Saks, who has lived with schizophrenia, brings both personal experience and academic expertise to the debate over involuntary psychiatric treatment. Having experienced involuntary hospitalization, physical restraints, and forced medication, Saks has questioned the assumption that mental illness justifies overriding patients' wishes. In her book Refusing Care she examines the ethical and legal problems posed by involuntary hospitalization, forced medication, and physical restraints. Saks and the psychiatrist Dilip Jeste have also reviewed empirical research on decision-making capacity among people with psychiatric and substance use disorders, analyzing how capacity varies among individuals and how clinicians can assess and enhance patients' ability to make informed decisions.
Though the medical field has developed structured interviews with standardized scores for mental incapacity, doctors can disagree on assessment. Mental capacity is also decision-specific and time-specific, not a permanent status attached to a diagnosis. That same BMC Psychiatry review of the literature describes the impairments seen in psychosis as "temporal, identifiable, and responsive to interventions," such as presenting information in simpler terms.
Even when incapacity can be established, we must adhere to the principle of least restrictive intervention. Any intervention must be justified by the circumstances, limited to what is necessary, and designed to preserve as much individual freedom as possible. Compulsory treatment takes different forms, each imposing distinct restrictions on individual liberty. Assisted outpatient treatment allows people to remain in the community but subjects them to a court order governing treatment. Involuntary inpatient commitment deprives people of their physical liberty through hospitalization, while forced medication goes further by overriding bodily autonomy. So impaired decision-making capacity does not automatically justify confinement, let alone forced medication.
Medication can reduce psychotic symptoms, and some psychiatric patients who initially refuse treatment later believe it helped them. But evidence that medication works is not the same as evidence that compulsion produces better outcomes than voluntary treatment, particularly when a person's decision-making capacity may improve as an acute episode subsides.
In 2024, a scoping review in the journal Psychiatry, Psychology and Law found mixed evidence of benefits and harms from involuntary inpatient treatment. Patients admitted involuntarily often experienced improvements in symptoms and functioning, but they also tended to enter treatment with more severe illness, making it difficult to determine how much of the improvement resulted from compulsory intervention itself. Involuntary admission was also associated with higher financial costs and worse patient experiences, including feelings of coercion, loss of freedom, and lower satisfaction. In 2018, The Canadian Journal of Psychiatry published a systematic review of coercive measures; it found that patient experiences were predominantly negative and frequently involved adverse consequences. Overall, no consistent evidence shows that involuntary treatment itself causally improves outcomes, although it unquestionably restricts patients' freedom and imposes costs on taxpayers.
These concerns are compounded by a health care system that financially incentivizes psychiatric overdiagnosis and overmedication, regardless of whether additional interventions yield commensurate benefits for patients.
The difficult case arises when a person genuinely cannot reason about treatment options or communicate an informed choice, and when delaying intervention creates an immediate risk of harm. In such cases, the ethical principle should be the same as elsewhere in medicine: Temporary treatment may be justified when informed consent cannot be obtained, using an advance directive or surrogate when available, and only to the minimal extent necessary to manage the emergency and restore the patient's ability to decide. A credible, imminent threat to another person presents a separate public-safety justification for state intervention. But even support for those types of emergency interventions is not the same as support for broad, long-term involuntary psychiatric treatment based on supposed mental incapacity.
City Journal frequently advocates free markets, individual liberty, and limits on government intervention. Yet these writers appear willing to grant the state considerable authority over people's medical decisions without adequately distinguishing those who lack decision-making capacity from those who retain it. If we distrust government officials to make economic decisions for us, why should we trust them to make decisions about our bodies and medical care?
The post Mental Illness Doesn't Cancel Your Right to Say No appeared first on Reason Magazine.
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Death rates for Americans between 25 and 44 years old jumped 71.2% in just eleven years, rising from about 140 deaths per 100,000 people in 2010 to 239 per 100,000 by 2021. No other age group came anywhere close to that surge. Overdoses, suicides, car crashes, and chronic diseases appearing at increasingly younger ages are now cutting down people in the prime of their lives.
Steven H. Woolf, a physician and researcher at Virginia Commonwealth University School of Medicine, published the analysis in The Milbank Quarterly. He combined data from the United Nations, the CDC, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, and a U.S. mortality database to show how far American life expectancy has fallen behind the rest of the developed world, and increasingly, much of the developing world too.
By 2023, U.S. life expectancy ranked 38th among countries with populations over 1 million, trailing not just Western Europe, Canada, Japan, and Australia but also Chile, Costa Rica, Slovenia, Israel, South Korea, and several Persian Gulf nations. Sixty countries had a lower risk of a person dying before age 40 than the United States did. That gap didn’t open overnight. It has been widening since the 1990s, and it sped up sharply after 2010.
How Researchers Tracked the Rising Death Rates
Woolf built this analysis by comparing decades of death records rather than running a new clinical trial or survey. He pulled data from the United Nations’ Department of Economic and Social Affairs, the U.S. Mortality Database, the CDC’s death-records database known as WONDER, and OECD data covering 16 other wealthy countries, including Canada, Japan, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom. He tracked age-specific death rates from 1999 through 2023, sorted into five groups: infants, youth ages 1 to 24, young adults 25 to 44, middle-aged adults 45 to 64, and adults 65 and older.
A separate part of the study looked at all 50 states from 1941 onward, matching each year of life expectancy data to the sitting governor’s political party to see whether state policy choices lined up with health outcomes over time.
What’s Driving the Rise in Death Rates Among Young Americans
Drug overdoses top the list. Among adults 25 to 44, the overdose death rate rose sevenfold after 1999, from about 7.7 per 100,000 to more than 54 per 100,000, and surpassed circulatory diseases (such as heart disease and stroke) in 2015 to become the leading cause of death in that age group. Suicide rates for this same group are higher than in any other age bracket and climbed more than 40% between 2000 and 2023. Homicides rose 75.5% between 2014 and 2021, and deaths from car crashes and other transportation accidents rose 43.5% over that same stretch.
What surprised even close followers of these trends is how much of the damage now comes from disease rather than injury. Deaths from diabetes and other metabolic and hormone-related illness rose nearly a quarter between 2010 and 2019 among young adults. Deaths tied to liver damage from drinking more than doubled between 2010 and 2023. Deaths from alcohol-related mental health disorders more than tripled in that same window. Even high blood pressure, historically a problem of later adulthood, saw its death rate more than double among 25- to 44-year-olds between 2000 and 2023.
Middle-aged adults, 45 to 64, saw many of the same patterns: rising deaths from drug overdoses, liver damage from drinking, and diseases of the brain and nervous system, along with a COVID-19 death rate that nearly doubled between 2020 and 2021 even after vaccines became available. Older adults largely avoided these steep increases, though deaths from brain and nerve diseases doubled between 2000 and 2023, and deaths from endocrine disorders and suicide also climbed.
Infographic by StudyFinds
Where U.S. Life Expectancy Has Fallen the Furthest
National averages hide some brutal local realities. Comparing individual states to countries with similar life expectancy, Woolf found that Hawaii, the top-performing state, matched life expectancy in Western European countries like Sweden and Ireland. Mississippi, by contrast, resembled Libya, Venezuela, Belarus, and Syria in 2019. Conditions worsened after the COVID-19 pandemic hit. By 2021, life expectancy in West Virginia and Mississippi matched Bulgaria, Bangladesh, and Iraq, and fell below North Korea and Syria. Life expectancy was higher in Palestine and Iran than in nine U.S. states, including Oklahoma, Tennessee, Kentucky, Alabama, and Mississippi.
Woolf’s review of state data going back to 1941 found that states led by Republican governors tended to see life expectancy stagnate or decline, a pattern that became especially visible after 2010 and turned into what Woolf calls a “natural experiment” during the COVID-19 pandemic. States’ sharply different decisions on masking, business closures, and vaccination, he writes, could be measured in death counts within weeks. Red states, the analysis notes, suffered the largest COVID-era drops in life expectancy, a pattern that held up even after researchers accounted for other factors like poverty rates and existing health conditions.
Other researchers cited in the review, who looked at generational patterns rather than state policy, found that Americans born after 1970 had higher death rates from heart disease, cancer, and injury-related causes than earlier generations. They concluded that the current stall in U.S. life expectancy stems from “multilayered social, biological, and generational forces.”
Why America’s Death Rates Keep Climbing
Woolf’s analysis lays out five broad categories behind America’s health disadvantage: a health care system without universal coverage, riskier individual behaviors like higher calorie consumption and firearm ownership, greater income inequality and poverty, a built environment that favors cars over walking and green space, and public policies that put less emphasis on collective welfare than peer nations do. None of these explanations are new, but the paper argues that treating overdoses, suicides, and chronic disease as separate problems misses the bigger picture: they are symptoms of the same underlying neglect.
That’s the sharpest point in the paper, and probably the one worth sitting with. Other wealthy countries didn’t stumble into longer lives by accident. They built universal health coverage, stronger safety nets, and tighter consumer and environmental protections decades ago, and it shows up in their citizens’ death certificates today. America’s problem was never a shortage of ideas for fixing this. It’s a shortage of political will to act on them, and until that changes, the gap between how long Americans live and how long people in dozens of other countries live looks likely to keep growing.
Original article: studyfinds.com
A 61-year-old doctor has been arrested in the Algarve on suspicion of raping a patient during a consultation at a private clinic in Albufeira. The crime allegedly occurred in June
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Mark Johnson | The Atavist Magazine | September 2026 | 2,048 words (7 minutes)
This is an excerpt from issue no. 180, “The Family Plan.”
At first she told no one. Not her twin sister. Not her mother. Not even her father the scientist.
Six-year-old Jenna Smith knew better than to pee when she was in the bath. But on that night in 1992, in her family’s home in Iowa City, the water felt so comfortable against her skin that she didn’t want to get out of the tub. It seemed like such a small thing. Who would know?
Seconds later the water around her waist turned reddish pink. Blood? It had to be. Jenna wondered if she’d hurt herself. “I was six years old sitting in a bathtub, watching a few seconds of my world stop making sense,” she would recall years later.
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She kept the blood a secret because she didn’t want to admit that she’d peed in the bath. But when it was still in her urine the next time she used the toilet, she went to her mother. Concerned, her mom called her dad, Richard Smith, and he took Jenna to the emergency room.
Richard was an ear, nose, and throat doctor in the University of Iowa’s school of medicine, a researcher who would become one of the world’s authorities on the genetics of hearing loss. His wife, Lynne Lanning, had worked as both a lawyer and a nurse. They had four young children: twins Jenna and Jessica, who were identical, and two boys, Luke and Rion.
At the ER, doctors ran tests on Jenna, but they couldn’t identify the cause of the blood. In the days that followed the bleeding intensified. At her parents’ urging, Jenna collected samples of her urine in Dixie cups for further testing. The doctors remained stumped, however, and after a while Jenna found the whole thing more annoying than worrisome.
The uncertainty was much harder on her parents. It wasn’t that doctors were misdiagnosing their daughter; they were unable to diagnose her at all. “It was horrible,” Richard said. “Imagine seeing your child and you know something is wrong, and you know the doctors treating her have no clue what to do.” Richard called a pediatric nephrologist he knew in Houston, where the family had lived previously. The nephrologist listed several conditions that could be causing the bleeding and said that, to determine which was to blame, Jenna’s parents should take her to Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center.
In July 1992, Richard, Lynne, and Jenna drove nearly 500 miles to get answers. Doctors in Cincinnati diagnosed Jenna with dense deposit disease, a condition in which proteins clog and damage the kidneys, leading to renal failure in many patients. There was no cure.
The hospital couldn’t tell the family much else—no one could. The disease was exceedingly rare, afflicting between one and three people in a million. Back home, Richard and Lynne spent hours inside the University of Iowa’s quiet medical library, poring over papers in search of information about their daughter’s illness. They could find no evidence that anyone was actively studying the condition.
Although many Americans—roughly one in ten—suffer from a rare disease, the experience can be lonely. Friends and relatives don’t understand the unique miseries such illnesses impose on daily life. Few doctors are likely to have encountered them before. And because there aren’t many patients, drug companies usually don’t invest in research for treatments.
Richard and Lynne feared that their daughter’s life might be tragically brief. Sometimes the mention of weddings would sink Lynne into melancholy; she couldn’t bring herself to watch the movie Father of the Bride. Richard agonized over what to do. His training compelled him to seek answers, but he wanted to be Jenna’s father, not the scientist charged with curing her. He kept his research focused on hearing loss. At first, anyway.
Stories of scientific discovery almost always celebrate individual researchers, consigning the contributions of loved ones, communities, and colleagues to footnotes. There are exceptions―the teams that built the first atomic bomb and deciphered the human genome, for instance. Science also has its share of famous families. Marie and Pierre Curie, along with their daughter Irène and her husband, Frédéric, won five Nobel Prizes between them for discoveries related to radioactivity. For the most part, however, the history of scientific progress has been mythologized as a succession of brilliant, driven individuals—often men—who chose the lab over the dinner table and competition over collaboration.
Some scientists have embraced the role of maverick. “You have to worry about your own work and ignore what everyone else is doing,” the physicist and Nobel laureate Richard Feynman is said to have told a colleague. The decades-long pursuit of a treatment for Jenna’s disease followed a very different path. There was no single hero, no lone scientist seeking glory. The biomedical quest required the efforts of a family and their neighbors in Iowa City, and the work of scientists around the globe. Together they changed an obscure area of medicine.
Richard and Lynne met in 1977, when both were working at Memorial Hermann-Texas Medical Center in Houston—she as a nurse, he as a medical intern. He noticed a run in her nylons and was smitten by her smile. She liked his down-to-earth manner and intelligence, his humor and kindness. They were working in the hospital’s burn unit when he asked her out.
The couple married in 1981, and except for two years in England, they remained in Houston until 1990. That December they moved to Iowa City, where Richard had a job waiting for him leading the pediatric otolaryngology division and running a research lab at the University of Iowa’s medical school. They had been there only a year when Jenna got sick.
Richard and Lynne learned that their daughter’s disease was caused by a malfunction in her complement system. Believed to have evolved long before other parts of our immune infrastructure, the complement system sends proteins to battle foreign invaders. Unlike antibodies, these proteins are not tailored to fight a specific virus or bacteria, but they kick into gear faster when a threat is detected. In people with Jenna’s condition, the complement system is like a runaway train: Proteins become overstimulated and then accumulate in the glomeruli, tiny filters the kidneys use to clear waste from blood.
Blood in the urine is one symptom of the disease. Others include swelling, high blood pressure, inflammation, and fatigue. When Jenna was in the first grade, her body struggled to make growth hormones. Her production of red blood cells slowed, and she grew increasingly tired. During rehearsals for The Nutcracker ballet around Christmas 1993, she’d finish her part and then lie down backstage, completely spent.
Doctors put her on a heavy dose of the steroid prednisone and on blood-pressure medication. The prednisone caused her body to retain water. She woke up each morning with her eyes swollen shut, then waited in bed until the swelling receded. She couldn’t fit into her clothes or shoes. She wore flip-flops and roomy jumpers Lynne sewed for her.
As twins, Jenna and Jessica had always been close. They played together, made up songs and dance moves, explored the woods near their home, and enjoyed pranking friends and family members. “She made a lot of things feel not so heavy,” Jenna said of her sister. Still, she sometimes thought that Jessica “got off scot-free” by not having dense deposit disease. Neither girl liked feeling different from the other. (Years later, Jessica would be diagnosed with type-1 diabetes; Jenna would not.)
The changes to Jenna’s appearance meant the girls were no longer identical. Once, according to Lynne, when a boy at school said that Jenna couldn’t be a twin anymore because of how she looked, Jessica slugged him. Lynne recalled sitting in the principal’s office, politely listening to a lecture—this is not the way we resolve things!—but understanding why Jessica had lashed out. Nothing was so frightening to her daughters as the idea that they’d stop being twins.
About half of those afflicted with Jenna’s disease progressed to kidney failure within a decade of diagnosis; it took her less than a year. She made it through the last day of first grade. Then, as other children departed for summer camp, she went to a clinic. While her classmates practiced archery and did arts and crafts, she learned about the catheter doctors would surgically insert in her body. Through that tube, a machine would pump fluid into her abdomen, where her peritoneum—her abdominal lining—would take over the filtering function kidneys usually perform.
She would take the peritoneal dialysis machine home with her and use it every day for the foreseeable future, possibly for the rest of her life. When a nurse tried to take Lynne aside to show her how to operate it, Jenna stopped her. “I’m the patient,” the seven-year-old insisted. “I’m learning how to run the machine.”
In such moments, Lynne was surprised at the strength she drew from her daughter. She needed it. Her grief could leave her feeling drained. One day she found herself crying into the soil as she gardened.
But Lynne and Richard were determined that sadness would not define their lives. For a long time, they didn’t have a TV in their house—they wanted the family to talk when they were together, and for the children to build forts, learn to sew, be creative. They had painting nights, creating portraits of one another. There were cooking contests, too. Richard and Lynne made sure to spend one-on-one time with each kid. Richard traveled with Luke to Japan, with Rion to the Grand Canyon, with Jessica to Italy, and with Jenna to England. Lynne took trips with the children to Brazil, England, and Guatemala. There were themed birthday celebrations: a James Bond party for Richard, where everyone was armed with Nerf guns, and one for Lynne where Richard dressed as the artist Bob Ross and the guests painted “happy little clouds.” Richard coached the kids’ hockey and soccer teams. He built harps and lyres from scratch, and Lynne played them.
Every day, Richard left for work at 5 a.m., while the children were still in bed. He returned around six at night. The family joked that they could hear him coming from half a mile away in his rust-bucket Isuzu Trooper with the bad muffler and a hole in the passenger footwell. When he wasn’t seeing patients or in surgery, Richard was in the lab. On Saturdays, Luke would go there with him. Sometimes the other kids joined. They liked to refill the communal candy jars and visit the mice used in experiments.
It seemed a wonder to the lab’s staff that Richard squeezed so much into a day. When they began using email to communicate, they received messages from him time-stamped three or four in the morning. “Why don’t you sleep sometime?” a colleague replied once. Indeed, Richard slept little. At night his mind kept running through the mysteries of his daughter’s disease.
Richard had read that it took 10,000 hours—the equivalent of working full-time for about five years—to achieve expertise in a subject. He believed it. In 1995, he began flying to conferences about kidney disease, where he talked to the few doctors who cared for patients like Jenna. Medicine was getting no closer to finding a treatment.
That year the owner of a ranch where Richard and Lynne’s children took riding lessons offered to host a fundraiser for kidney disease research. The family organized Dressage in the Heartland, which featured riding events, fiddle music, and bowls of chili. After raising upwards of $10,000 for the National Kidney Foundation, they held the event again the following year. There are hundreds of kidney ailments, however, and the foundation didn’t allow the money the family raised to be earmarked for the research of dense deposit disease. (The foundation said it now allows monetary gifts to be dedicated to specific conditions.)
Richard and Lynne ran into more disappointment during a visit to the University of Minnesota in early 1997. A specialist they consulted was blunt. “Nobody is looking at this disease,” he told them. “And barring something unforeseen, nothing will be done in the next twenty years.”
It was a four-and-a-half-hour drive back to Iowa City. In the car, Lynne brought up what the doctor had said. Maybe they would have to be that unforeseen something.
Contact us: info@strategic-culture.su
They botched another execution in Tennessee.
They stuck the prisoner full of seven different syringes, but she didn’t die. She just experienced extreme suffering, minute after excruciating minute, before eventually losing consciousness.
Her name is Christa Pike. As of this writing, she is still alive.
Pike committed a horrific violent crime as a young woman after a life of nightmarish abuse. She was physically and sexually abused by her mother’s live-in boyfriend, was raped by a neighbor when she was eleven, and attempted suicide at the age of twelve.
And now she is on a respirator in a hospital as doctors fight to save her life, presumably so that the state of Tennessee can try to kill her again.
It’s all so absurd. People are so cruel to each other.
We inflict pain upon our neighbors, and our neighbors pass that pain on to other neighbors, and it just goes on and on like that until one day you’re watching a woman strapped to a gurney flailing around in anguish as panicked executioners plunge needle after needle into her body to stop her outlawed heartbeat.
We are bound to each other so intimately like that. A rapist was abused by his father, who was abused by his uncle, who was abused by his priest, who was abused by his teacher, generation after generation of human trauma stretching back to our evolutionary ancestors frantically struggling to survive predation in the middle of the food chain. A baton passed from hand to hand through the sands of time in a vast relay marathon of suffering.
The course of my life has been directly influenced by my abusers, and by their abusers, and by the people who abused them, and it is only by sheer chance that this ancient stream of samsara carried me to be typing words on a laptop in Melbourne instead of fighting for my life after a botched execution in Tennessee.
You cannot make a deep study of trauma and human dysfunction and still sustain a belief in the death penalty. Once you’ve explored your inner depths enough to understand how many factors have contributed to your life being the way it is and caused your mind to operate the way it operates, you can’t really claim that anyone had sufficient control over the way their life unfolded to justify killing them for their crimes.
You can still form judgements about people regarding who you want to spend time with and form relationships with, but even in the most chaotic and destructive among us you can still see a fundamental innocence. I can keep my distance from wild crocodiles without believing they are evil. We can still immobilize dangerous people to protect our society without assigning ourselves the right to take their life.
As humanity moves more deeply into consciousness, this insight will become more and more brightly illuminated, and we will begin healing our trauma so that the relay baton of suffering stops with us. The vindictive, judgmental scales will fall from our eyes, and there will be a widespread recognition of the fact that, underneath all the savagery and sadism and exploitation and abuse, we were always ultimately just confused and damaged children stumbling through a giant universe that we did not understand.
Original article: caitlinjohnstone.com.au
Overcrowding and corridor care in A&E may be killing around 550 patients in the UK every week, a damning study has revealed.
The post Overcrowding and Corridor Care in A&E “Killing Around 550 Patients in the UK Every Week”, Study Reveals appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.
The European Commission has put forward the European Radioisotope Valley Initiative (C/2026/6132) a new strategic framework to strengthen Europe’s leadership in the production of medical radioisotopes. It aims to reinforce EU security of radioisotope supply, guiding investment in the sector and reducing strategic dependencies on third countries, in particular Russia.
With more than 10 million medical procedures using radioisotopes performed in the EU every year, mainly in oncology and cardiology, an impressive EU-wide production and distribution network has been developed to supply radioisotopes to patients across Europe daily. The EU has become the world’s leading producer of medical radioisotopes, exporting about half of its production overseas. However, critical parts of the European supply chain are exposed to dependencies on foreign suppliers, ageing production facilities, and competition from alternative suppliers, thereby creating the risk of investment displacement and higher costs. Furthermore, the global demand for medical radioisotopes, as well as the pace of innovation in this area, are increasing. Today’s ERVI communication responds to these challenges by defining a coordinated approach to supporting investments in research and development, bringing innovation to market, addressing value chain dependencies, and increasing production capacity. It also provides a direct contribution to the REPowerEU Roadmap towards ending Russian energy imports.
The Communication establishes five strategic priorities and 10 actions.
The Commission will support research and innovation into the next-generation medical radioisotopes, radiopharmaceuticals and production technologies. A Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda (SRIA) - as used in other sectors - will help better connect research with market needs and patients. Instruments such as the emerging IPCEI for innovative nuclear technologies, the European Innovation Council, and new European partnerships can help mobilize public and private investment to accelerate innovation deployment.
The initiative aims to guide and support Member States and industry investments across the medical radioisotope value chain to strengthen the resilience and localisation of EU supply. Priorities include the development of EU-based metallic High Assay Low Enriched Uranium (HALEU) capacity and production of stable isotopes currently imported from Russia, as well as upgrades of existing reactors and construction of new production facilities. Member states should make use of the EU Startup and Scaleup Strategy, the SGEI State aid framework and the recent Critical Medicines Act for which the political agreement was achieved this year to support these efforts, while the Commission will explore ways to better combine public and private financing.
The Commission will act to improve the visibility of supply and demand trends and assess the investment needs of the European market for radioisotopes. This work will build upon the European Observatory on the Supply of Medical Radioisotopes and rely on continuing involvement of Member States and stakeholders, while making full use of the new EU mechanisms for tackling shortages of essential medicines.
ERVI will support cooperation with trusted international partners to diversify supply chains, strengthen resilience and promote scientific and industrial collaboration. In particular, the continuing cooperation with our partners in the UK and US is crucial for developing a resilient supply chain for metallic High Assay Low Enriched Uranium (HALEU).
The Commission will cooperate with the International Atomic Energy Agency to support reliable international transport of medical radioisotopes and explore further measures to facilitate transport between Member States. A further step will be to pursue the streamlining of EU and national procedures for radiation protection and waste management in nuclear medicine to support patients’ access to innovative treatments.
In June 2024, the Council called on the Commission to seek to maintain Europe’s global leadership role in the supply of medical radioisotopes and make tangible and swift progress on developing ambitious ‘building blocks’ for specific actions.
In order to define the objectives and architecture of ERVI, the Commission carried out extensive consultations involving stakeholders and member states and published a feasibility study in March 2026.
The initiative also builds on the Strategic Agenda for Medical Ionising Radiation Applications (SAMIRA), adopted by the Commission in 2021 to strengthen the secure supply of medical radioisotopes, improve quality and safety in radiation medicine, and support innovation in nuclear medicine technologies.
In May 2025, the REPowerEU road map further highlighted the need to increase EU production capacities, reduce dependency on Russia and strengthen the resilience of the European medical radioisotope supply chain. The establishment of ERVI was identified as one of the roadmap’s key actions.
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