Longer Looks: Interesting Reads You Might Have Missed

St. Louis Public Radio: The Space Force Will Track Troops' Fitness With Wearable Devices. Will It Keep Them Healthier?
Annual physical fitness tests have become a cornerstone of military life. Each service has its own take on the once-a-year assessment required by the Department of Defense. But the country’s newest military branch is ditching that model. (Schmid, 7/11)

Stat: In The Label 'Adult Failure To Thrive,' Medicine Reveals Its Own Failures
The term is official enough to have a code in the American version of the International Classification of Diseases — R62.7 — and common enough for medical coders to know that code by heart. Some physicians say they haven’t heard the phrase in years. But in a dataset from health-records giant Epic, among 65 million U.S. patients seen in 2021, some 126,000 of them had “adult failure to thrive.” Look only at hospitalizations, and the fraction gets larger: 1.5% had been assigned this code. It tends to be written into the medical charts of older adults, sometimes without the patient or family being told. (Boodman, 7/12)

Bloomberg: Podcast: Everything You Know About Calories Just Might Be Wrong
Calorie counts on foods aren’t always accurate, or even a fixed value, no matter what a nutrition label says. But calories are just the start of everything that’s wrong with how we think about food and weight. People have turned to diets for weight loss for centuries, but usually it’s been a waste of time, money and effort. Invariably, the weight just comes back. (Court, 7/12)

The New York Times: The Power Of A Casual Check-In Text 
Calling, texting or emailing a friend just to say “hello” might seem like an insignificant gesture — a chore, even, that isn’t worth the effort. Or maybe you worry an unexpected check-in wouldn’t be welcome, as busy as we all tend to be. But new research suggests that casually reaching out to people in our social circles means more than we realize. (Pearson, 7/11)

The Washington Post: TikTok Doc Makes Physicians Laugh At Themselves
Emergency room doctors savor adrenaline and bike helmets. Orthopedic doctors are bros who love the gym. Neurosurgeons are just a tad confident. And medical students are living in a special kind of hell, from match day to rotations. They have one thing in common — being mocked by Will Flanary, an ophthalmologist known to millions in the medical world as “Dr. Glaucomflecken,” a term for a sign of glaucoma. (Fallik, 7/11)

KVPR: A Father's Grief Inspires A Touching Headstone For His Disabled Son
Matthew Robison, who had cerebral palsy, spent his entire life in a wheelchair. So when he died at age 10 1/2, his parents thought they'd commemorate his life with a unique grave monument showing that he'd been liberated from the device. "I got the idea that he would just be able to rise physically from his wheelchair and go up to heaven," his father, Ernest Robison, told NPR. "And he'd be free from all of the disabilities and limitations that he had here on the Earth," Matthew's mother, Anneke Robison, added in the same phone interview. (Romo, 7/7)

On abortion and reproductive rights —

San Francisco Chronicle: It Was A Secret Roadmap For Breaking The Law To Get An Abortion. Now, ‘The List’ And Its Tactics Are Resurfacing
She flew to San Francisco in June 1968 to meet a friend who knew someone who knew someone. Karen L. was 24 and eight weeks pregnant, arriving from Los Angeles. The woman picked her up at San Francisco International and carefully explained what to do next. There was a phone number; there was a code phrase. From the friend’s apartment, Karen dialed the number and spoke the phrase:“Patricia Maginnis sent me.”A female voice greeted her. (Fagonne and Bordas, 7/10)

The Texas Tribune: Linda Coffee Argued Roe V. Wade. Now, She’s Watching It Unravel. 
Linda Coffee was driving to her office in downtown Dallas when she heard on the radio that she’d just won a U.S. Supreme Court case. Coffee was just 30 years old in January 1973 when seven justices agreed with her argument that the U.S. Constitution protected the right to abortion early in pregnancy. (Klibanoff, 7/12)

Politico: How Abortion Is Sundering Amy Coney Barrett’s Hometown
Like in many American towns, protestors and celebrants poured into the streets and city plazas of this northern Indiana city in the hours and days after the Supreme Court reversed abortion rights. On Friday evening after the Dobbs decision came down, in the John Hunt Plaza in front of the Morris Civic Auditorium, the protesters began hoisting the now-familiar signs: HANDS OFF MY UTERUS. ABORTION IS HEALTHCARE. OUR BODIES OUR CHOICE. KEEP IT LEGAL. KEEP IT SAFE. Unlike in a lot of towns, though, the jeerers and the cheerers happened to have a onetime neighbor and fellow South Bender as a justice on the court: Amy Coney Barrett, who still keeps a presence in the town, having only relatively recently sold her 3,800-square-foot brick home in the leafy and pristine Harter Heights neighborhood near her former employer, the University of Notre Dame Law School. (Wren, 7/10)