If two New Hampshire men aren't a match for the Devil, we might as well give the country back to the Indians. -Stephen Vincent Benet (1898-1943)
Illness is more than just biological – medical sociology shows how social factors get under the skin and cause disease (Jennifer Singh, January 8, 2026 , The Conversation)
Modern medical sociology ultimately considers all societal issues to be health issues. Improving people’s health and well-being requires improving education, employment, housing, transportation and other social, economic and political policies.
Absences at Texas School District Spiked 41 Percent After Measles Outbreak, Says Hoover Scholar (Hoover Education , December 16, 2025)
A West Texas school district that experienced a measles outbreak saw school absences climb by 41 percent and remain high for months afterward, demonstrating immense educational impact of preventable illnesses on communities with low rates of immunization, new research by a Hoover scholar shows.
The research was conducted by Thomas Dee, Robert and Marion Oster Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Barnett Family Professor at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education (GSE), alongside Sofia Wilson, a doctoral student at the GSE.
Republican liberty restricts freedom.
Why Some Doctors Say There Are Cancers That Shouldn’t Be Treated (Gina Kolata, Dec. 8, 2025, NY Times)
The idea that finding a cancer early is not always a good thing is not easy for many patients and their families to accept. And it is true that lives can be saved by treating cancer early.
Autopsy studies repeatedly find that many people die with small cancers they were unaware of. A review of these studies in prostate cancer reported that the cancer can appear in men as young as their 20s. The older the men were, the more likely they were to have undetected prostate cancer. By their 70s, about a third of white men and half of Black men had undetected prostate cancer.
A study of thyroid cancer in Finland found that at least a third of adults had undetected tumors. Less than one percent of people die from thyroid cancerThe problem is that it is impossible to know if someone’s cancer will be deadly or not. And if the cancer is gone after treatment, there is no way to know if it needed to be treated.
But there’s a way to know on a population level if an increase in diagnoses is a false alarm or a danger signal, said Dr. H. Gilbert Welch of Brigham and Women’s Hospital of Harvard Medical School. Look at the number of deaths from that cancer. If more lethal cancers are being found, there should be more deaths. But if the death rate remains steady as the incidence of that cancer spikes, many of those patients did not need to receive diagnoses.
That happened, for example, with thyroid cancer in South Korea. The incidence of thyroid cancer soared with the introduction of widespread ultrasound screening. But deaths did not increase. It was estimated that 90 percent of the cancers that were discovered and treated in women did not need to be found.
Well aware of such incidents, Dr. Vishal R. Patel of Harvard, Dr. Welch and Dr. Adewole S. Adamson of Dell Medical School in Austin, Texas, asked whether the current spike in diagnoses in younger people of those eight cancers is tied to more deaths.
It is not, they reported in a recent paper examining trends over the past three decades.
For all but two of the eight cancers whose incidence has soared in younger people, death rates are flat or declining.
How to Print a Human: We desperately need new organs, and we’re running out of ways to get them (Mary Roach November 28, 2025, Nautilus)
I ask Feinberg when he thinks medical science will arrive at the point of implanting entire functional bioprinted organs in patients. If we use the analogy of airplane flight, he puts things somewhere around the Wright brothers stage. “Of course, we don’t want a plane that goes 30 feet down the field. We want a plane that can fly around all day.”
And how far off is that? A decade plus, Feinberg says.
For medical science, that’s actually a brisk turnaround. (In an earlier phone conversation, Feinberg equated “a decade or two” with “pretty quickly.”) He adds that he thought it could easily happen far sooner. “Because we keep coming up with new things.” Just 20 years ago, he points out, there was no gene editing, no CRISPR. “Plus AI is going to accelerate, and that’s going to change what’s possible.”
I pose the same question now to Jaci Bliley, a senior post-doctoral fellow in the lab. Bliley has just joined us in the microscope room. Two to three decades is her estimate. Like Feinberg, she says she’s surprised at how fast things are moving. She offers the example of some stand-alone beating heart ventricles, little tubular constructs that she printed as part of her Ph.D. research. “That was 2019,” she says. “Now we’re putting them into mice and they’re surviving. After six months they’re still alive and beating.”
Most ‘gluten sensitivity’ is not actually caused by gluten (Bronwyn Thompson, October 24, 2025, New Atlas)
“Across recent studies, people with IBS who believe they’re gluten-sensitive react similarly to gluten, wheat, and placebo,” said Biesiekierski. “This suggests that how people anticipate and interpret gut sensations can strongly influence their symptoms.”
COVID-19 mRNA vaccines could unlock the next revolution in cancer treatment – new research (Adam Grippin & Christiano Marconi, 10/22/25, The Conversation)
[W]e looked at clinical outcomes for more than 1,000 late-stage melanoma and lung cancer patients treated with a type of immunotherapy called immune checkpoint inhibitors. This treatment is a common approach doctors use to train the immune system to kill cancer. It does this by blocking a protein that tumor cells make to turn off immune cells, enabling the immune system to continue killing cancer.
Remarkably, patients who received either the Pfizer or Moderna mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccine within 100 days of starting immunotherapy were more than twice as likely to be alive after three years compared with those who didn’t receive either vaccine. Surprisingly, patients with tumors that don’t typically respond well to immunotherapy also saw very strong benefits, with nearly fivefold improvement in three-year overall survival. This link between improved survival and receiving a COVID-19 mRNA vaccine remained strong even after we controlled for factors like disease severity and co-occurring conditions.
To understand the underlying mechanism, we turned to animal models. We found that COVID-19 mRNA vaccines act like an alarm, triggering the body’s immune system to recognize and kill tumor cells and overcome the cancer’s ability to turn off immune cells. When combined, vaccines and immune checkpoint inhibitors coordinate to unleash the full power of the immune system to kill cancer cells.
Lifetime of Friendships Slows Aging (Tyler Santora October 10, 2025, Nautilus)
For the new study, researchers compared social experiences across the lifespan of more than 2,100 middle-aged adults in the United States to the biological clock embedded in their DNA. The hands of these biological clocks consist of epigenetic changes to DNA—specifically, patterns in the addition of a chemical called a methyl group to certain genes. Such methylation doesn’t cause mutation; rather, the process turns the gene on or off in different cells of the body at different times. Over time, methylation patterns on certain genes change and can be used as markers of biological aging, a measure of how rapidly cells wear down that can be faster or slower than aging by the calendar. An older biological age is a strong predictor of chronic disease and early death.
The researchers measured social connection in a variety of settings over time to show that people with more social activity and sincere, long-lasting relationships aged more slowly. “We found that the depth and consistency of social connection, built across decades and different areas of life, matters profoundly,” says Anthony Ong, a psychologist at Cornell University. “Strong and sustained social networks appear to actually set back a person’s biological clock.”
Pain gets a price tag: New method outshines standard pain assessments (Paul McClure, September 29, 2025, New Atlas)
Alongside these pain assessments using traditional methods, the researchers tested their “monetary equivalence” (ME) method. Participants were repeatedly asked whether they would accept a certain amount of money to experience the same painful stimulus again, or choose a smaller amount to avoid it. Example: “Would you rather get 15 Swiss francs and feel the pain again, or 10 Swiss francs and no pain?” The point where a participant switched from “no pain” to “pain” revealed how much the pain was “worth” to them in monetary terms. Two versions of the ME method were tested: ME1, where questions were listed in increasing order of money (enforcing consistency); and ME2, where the same questions were asked randomly (allowing for some inconsistency).
Across all three experiments, the monetary methods (ME1 and ME2) outperformed the traditional scales at distinguishing between high- and low-pain conditions. Effect sizes – that is, how strongly the measure distinguished between groups – were dramatically larger for ME1 and ME2 (“very large”) compared to standard pain scales (“small to medium”). Even in the analgesic study, where traditional scales often failed or even showed misleading results (for example, participants reporting more pain after receiving an analgesic), the monetary measures correctly and significantly detected differences. This likely happened because participants expected the anesthetic to eliminate the pain completely, and when it didn’t, they rated their pain higher. It’s a psychological effect the monetary method avoids.
U.S. Health Care: The Free-market Myth (Michael F. Cannon, Fall 2025, National Affairs)
Many critiques of U.S. health care begin with the assumption that, as The Economist put it, the United States is “one of the only developed countries where health care is mostly left to the free market.” Dr. David Blumenthal, a former advisor to President Barack Obama, told the New York Times in 2013 that in the United States, “we like to consider health care a free market.” That assumption gets the situation backward: In truth, among wealthy nations, the United States may have one of the least-free health-care markets.
In a free market, government would control 0% of health spending. Yet the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) reports that in the United States, government controls 84% of health spending. In fact, government controls a larger share of health spending in the United States than in 27 out of 38 OECD-member nations, including the United Kingdom (83%) and Canada (73%), each of which has an explicitly socialized health-care system. When it comes to government control of health spending, the United States is closer to communist Cuba (89%) than the average OECD nation (75%).
Either a nationalized scheme or universal HSAs would yield a less expensive system with better outcomes.
Chronic pain worsened by harsh self-criticism, study finds (Bronwyn Thompson, September 10, 2025, New Atlas)
View 1 Images
A new study has found that people living with chronic pain tend to be more perfectionistic, less self-compassionate and – depending on the measure – less confident in their ability to cope.
because they aren’t coping?