In the fall of 2021, Gabriel Arias felt like his body was “rotting from the inside.” He was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia, a form of blood cancer so aggressive that doctors had him hospitalized the day of his biopsy. In cases like his, the ideal treatment is a transplant. Arias’s cancer-prone blood cells needed to be destroyed and replaced with healthy ones taken from the bone marrow or blood of a donor who matched him biologically. Fortunately, doctors found him a match in the volunteer-donor registries—a man in Poland. Unfortunately, Arias’s single match in the entire world was no lo ..read more

After a decade working as an obstetrician-gynecologist, Marci Bowers thought she understood menopause. Whenever she saw a patient in her 40s or 50s, she knew to ask about things such as hot flashes, vaginal dryness, mood swings, and memory problems. And no matter what a patient’s concern was, Bowers almost always ended up prescribing the same thing. “Our answer was always estrogen,” she told me. Then, in the mid-2000s, Bowers took over a gender-affirmation surgical practice in Colorado. In her new role, she began consultations by asking each patient what they wanted from their body—a question ..read more

In December 1921, Leonard Thompson was admitted to Toronto General Hospital so weak and emaciated that his father had to carry him inside. Thompson was barely a teenager, weighing all of 65 pounds, dying of diabetes. With so little to lose, he was an ideal candidate to be patient No. 1 for a trial of the pancreatic extract that would come to be called insulin. The insulin did what today we know it can. “The boy became brighter, more active, looked better and said he felt stronger,” the team of Toronto researchers and physicians reported in March 1922 in The Canadian Medical Association Journal ..read more

Good chocolate, I’ve come to learn, should taste richly of cocoa—a balanced blend of bitter and sweet, with notes of fruit, nuts, and spice. My favorite chocolate treat is nothing like that. It’s the Cadbury Creme Egg, an ovoid milk-chocolate shell enveloping a syrupy fondant center. To this day, I look forward to its yearly return in the weeks leading up to Easter. Most popular chocolate is like this: milky, sugary, and light on actual cocoa. Lots of sugary sweets contain so little of the stuff that they are minimally chocolate. M&M’s, Snickers bars, and Hershey’s Kisses aren’t staples of ..read more

At Hopscotch, Daryl Collins’s bottle shop in Baltimore, he happily sells wine to 18-year-olds. If a customer isn’t sure what variety they like (and who is, at that age?), Collins might even pull a few bottles off the shelves and pop the corks for an impromptu tasting. No Maryland law keeps these teens away from the Tempranillo, because at this shop, none of the drinks contains alcohol. The number and variety of zero- and low-alcohol beverages, a once-lagging category that academics and the World Health Organization refer to as “NoLos,” has exploded in the past five-plus years. The already grow ..read more

The legalization of cannabis in the United States—the biggest change in policy for an illegal substance since Prohibition ended—has been an unqualified success for approximately no one. True, the drug is widely available for commercial purchase, many marijuana-related charges have been dropped, and stoner culture has become more aligned with designer smoking paraphernalia featured on Goop than the bumbling spaciness of Cheech and Chong. But a significant part of the market is still underground, medical research is scant, and the aboveground market is not exactly thriving. Longtime marijuana ac ..read more

This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here. Within the next couple of decades, a new generation of contraceptives could hit the American market. One, a pill that blocks certain cells from accessing vitamin A, might be able to limit fertility without flooding the body with hormones; another is an injection that temporarily blocks up the reproductive plumbing. The method that’s furthest along in trials is a topical gel that promises to induce temporary infertility when smeared daily on the shoulders and upper arms—without affecting mood or libido. “O ..read more

A man comes to Northwell Health’s hospital on Staten Island with a sprained ankle. Any allergies? the doctor asks. How many alcoholic drinks do you have each week? Do you have access to firearms inside or outside the home? When the patient answers yes to that last question, someone from his care team explains that locking up the firearm can make his home safer. She offers him a gun lock and a pamphlet with information on secure storage and firearm-safety classes. And all of this happens during the visit about his ankle. Northwell Health is part of a growing movement of health-care providers th ..read more

When a new RSV vaccine for pregnant people arrived last fall, Sarah Turner, a family-medicine physician at Lutheran Hospital, in Indiana, couldn’t help but expect some pushback. At most, about half of her eligible pregnant patients opt to get a flu vaccine, she told me, and “very few” agree to the COVID shot. But to Turner’s surprise, patients clamored for the RSV shot—some opting in even more eagerly than they did for Tdap, which protects newborns against pertussis and had previously been her easiest sell. For once, expectant parents were the ones starting conversations about immunizations. E ..read more

I first met Daniel Kahneman about 25 years ago. I’d applied to graduate school in neuroscience at Princeton University, where he was on the faculty, and I was sitting in his office for an interview. Kahneman, who died today at the age of 90, must not have thought too highly of the occasion. “Conducting an interview is likely to diminish the accuracy of a selection procedure,” he’d later note in his best-selling book, Thinking, Fast and Slow. That had been the first finding in his long career as a psychologist: As a young recruit in the Israel Defense Forces, he’d assessed and overhauled the po ..read more