No, Lyme disease is not an escaped military bioweapon, despite what conspiracy theorists say - The Washington Post

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/no-lyme-diease-is-not-an-escaped-military-bioweapon-despite-what-conspiracy-theorists-say/2019/08/09/5bbd85fa-afe4-11e9-8e77-03b30bc29f64_story.html

No, Lyme disease is not an escaped military bioweapon, despite what conspiracy theorists say theconversation.com

Reasonable expectations (for a centenarian)

Maria Branyas Morera, World's Oldest Person, Dies at 117

Ms. Morera, who cultivated a following on social media as "Super Catalan Grandma," died peacefully in her sleep, her family said.

...Like many supercentenarians, Ms. Morera became the subject of scientific fascination. Her habits and lifestyle — and genetic makeup — have been studied in the hopes of understanding her longevity.

"What do you expect from life?" a doctor once asked her while retrieving blood samples for study, according to El País.

Ms. Morera, unmoved, answered simply: "Death."

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/20/world/europe/worlds-oldest-person-maria-branyas-dead.html?smid=em-share

We’re Applying Lessons From Covid to Bird Flu. That’s Not Good.

…Undeniably, the country is in a different place regarding the risks from Covid than it was two or three or four years ago, and it is perfectly justifiable that many Americans are less interested in hearing about Covid than they were then. Perhaps it is also natural to not want to hear about public health matters at all — the previous years were difficult and painful, after all. But to believe that means we should pass laws discouraging individuals from taking precautions, or to choose not to pursue surveillance measures to actually track the progress of a new disease threat, is a deeply pathological response to an experience of pandemic trauma, and one that implies it is more problematic to remind those around us of ongoing health risks than to take action to limit them. We seem to have memory-holed not just the suffering of Covid-19 but also the initial burst of inspiring if imperfect solidarity it produced, preferring instead to embrace the "bipartisan" indifference our pandemic tribalism ultimately yielded to. Thankfully, bird flu isn't making us pay for it — yet.

David Wallace-Wells

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/07/opinion/bird-flu-covid.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

A Prescription for Physicians: Listen to the Patient’s Story

In "Telltale Hearts," a new memoir, Dr. Dean-David Schillinger traces the links between narrative and well-being.

...One of the chief complaints about physicians these days is that they don't have enough time and they don't really listen. So Dr. Schillinger, a primary care physician at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center, has written a book about the importance of patients' stories. He writes of the power of narrative to build trust that cuts through the barriers that often separate doctors and patients to ultimately improve care.

"What has increasingly been lost as we advance in our technologies, using electronic health records that make us look at the computer and not at the patient, and becoming more constrained from a time perspective, is the most important and common medical procedure — the medical interview," Dr. Schillinger said told The New York Times.

"A lot of people think that's the doctor peppering the patient with questions, but that's not really how it should go," he added. "It really should be about eliciting the patient's perspective on the experience and their social context."

Science is paramount, he said, but the patient's story is an essential complement. "It's when we separate the two that we get in trouble," Dr. Schillinger said. The book is about what he thinks of as "the alchemy of science and story."
...
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/03/health/schillinger-telltale-heart.html?smid=em-share