Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
Longer Looks: A Runner's Asthma; Choosing The End; Artificial Intelligence; And More
The New York Times: A Runner Suddenly Developed Asthma. It Was Stranger Than It Seemed.
It was chest pain that brought the 34-year-old woman to the emergency room at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx. She’d been coughing for days, but that morning the pain was so bad she was worried that it had turned into pneumonia. She tried to tough it out, but when it was no better by the end of the day, she decided to go to the E.R. It took a few hours, but finally the physician assistant caring for her in the E.R. brought some good news. She didn’t have pneumonia; she didn’t have a clot in her lungs. (Sanders, 12/12)
The Washington Post: My Terminally Ill Mother Wanted To End Her Own Life. What Would It Take To Fulfill Her Last Wish?
On a Sunday evening in July 2018, my 81-year-old mother raised a small red glass to her lips. In it was a mixture of water, grape juice and 10,000 milligrams of Seconal powder, a massively fatal dose of a barbiturate most commonly used for insomnia. She was sitting up in a hospital bed in her Washington, D.C., home, bathed in warm early evening light and wearing a thin white nightgown. She had spent the weekend calling close friends and loved ones to say goodbye, and chatting and passing time with me, my sister and all her grandchildren. A matriarchal figure, always vocal in her opinions, she took the time to dispense some final grandmotherly advice. “Don’t drink too much in your first year of college.” “Stop worrying so much about applying to college.” “No more tattoos.” (Zimmermann, 12/11)
Undark: Medical Advice From A Bot: The Unproven Promise Of Babylon Health
Hamish Fraser first encountered Babylon Health in 2017 when he and a colleague helped test the accuracy of several artificial intelligence-powered symptom checkers, meant to offer medical advice for anyone with a smartphone, for Wired U.K. Among the competitors, Babylon’s symptom checker performed worst in identifying common illnesses, including asthma and shingles. Fraser, then a health informatics expert at the University of Leeds in England, figured that the company would need to vastly improve to stick around. “At that point I had no prejudice or knowledge of any of them, so I had no axe to grind, and I thought ‘Oh that’s not really good,’” says Fraser, now at Brown University. “I thought they would disappear, right? How wrong I was.” (Hsu, 12/9)
The New York Times: When Dad Turns Out To Be The Fertility Doctor
Scores of families, using commercial DNA testing kits, have learned in recent years that, decades ago, their doctors lied to them. The doctors told infertile couples seeking artificial insemination that they would use sperm from a medical student, from someone who resembled the husband or simply from an anonymous donor. Instead, the doctors used their own sperm — a disturbing and profound violation of medical ethics. It’s called fertility fraud. But is it unlawful? (Liptak, 12/11)
The New York Times: The Unexpected Freedom That Comes With Freezing Your Eggs
At first glance, egg-freezing seems like an ideal technological solution to a longstanding human conundrum: What if women could postpone having children to the exact time in their lives that made the most sense for them? And the rising popularity of egg-freezing and the easy-breezy marketing surrounding it — “egg-freezing for the price of a healthy snack,” according to one ad featuring açaí berries and a smiling cartoon egg — make it seem as if the prospects of having a child were essentially a given. (Lampert, 12/11)
