Medicine
Diagnosis, treatment, medical systems, end-of-life care, and how healthcare makes decisions under uncertainty.
12 lessons in this category
May 2026
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23 May 5 min
US crime and mortality is declining fast — what can the rest of us learn? - Financial Times
US crime and mortality rates are dropping sharply—a reversal most people haven't noticed because it contradicts the dominant narrative. We can teach what actually drives large-scale social change: not politics or rhetoric, but measurable shifts in public health intervention, policing method, and economic conditions that take years to compound.
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23 May 5 min
Reduced health insurance payments for hospital births had a bigger impact on sterilization rates than correcting an injustice - Bozeman Daily Chronicle
Health insurance payment structures directly affect medical decisions millions of people make. This story surfaces how reimbursement rates — the hidden machinery behind healthcare pricing — shaped sterilization choices, revealing the economic incentives that quietly steer reproductive healthcare.
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19 May 6 min
How Medicine Finds New Uses for Old Drugs
Researchers testing a drug combination for one condition noticed patients' suicide risk dropped within hours. How clinical trials discover unexpected uses and why some drugs work better together than alone.
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19 May 6 min
When the Numbers Say More Kids Are Seeking Mental Health Care
Children's mental health visits have doubled in five years. Healthcare systems track the numbers but can't yet tell whether it's more illness, better detection, or expanded access.
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13 May 6 min
Why PCOS Just Got Renamed After 90 Years
PCOS affects 10% of people who menstruate, but its name pointed doctors toward ovaries when the real problem was metabolic. The rename isn't symbolic—it reroutes where patients go and what treatment they get.
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11 May 7 min
Six diseases, one delivery system
Ticks carry six different diseases using the same transmission system. Understanding how pathogens move between species, why geography matters, and what you actually control when you check for ticks.
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07 May 7 min
Why your heart's unevenness is a feature, not a bug
Healthy hearts don't beat steadily—they vary constantly. What heart rate variability reveals about how your body regulates itself through continuous adjustment.
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03 May 6 min
The Organ We Can't Figure Out
Scientists have studied the appendix for over a century but still can't agree on what it does. This is how research works when you can't run the obvious experiment.
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02 May 5 min
When the Pattern Points to the Wrong Place
When chronic pelvic pain leads to hysterectomy recommendations but the uterus isn't the problem—how diagnostic pattern-matching works under constraint and why removal becomes the fallback.
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01 May 6 min
Three ADHDs
Brain scans reveal three distinct ADHD subtypes with different connectivity patterns. This teaches how medical categories refine through measurement — and what subtyping costs and buys.
April 2026
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30 Apr 6 min
When 'None Detected' Doesn't Mean Zero
A new fertility technique finds sperm that previous tests called 'zero.' The sperm didn't appear—the test's detection floor changed. This is the threshold problem in every diagnostic system: where we stop looking becomes what we call reality.
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27 Apr 7 min
What We Owe the Dying
Former Senator Ben Sasse's public reflection on terminal cancer reveals how societies construct dignity, measure legacy, and decide what care means when death becomes certain.