War is likely to persist. Medicine, however, must remain steadfast, anchored in principles that transcend conflict, ideology, and time. It should not become a weapon but must remain a profession dedicated to the care of each individual, regardless of circumstance.
Official statements that antidepressants are safe to take during pregnancy should be distrusted. No drug is safe. If drugs were safe, they would not be the leading cause of death, ahead of cardiovascular diseases and cancer.
Don’t Use Antidepressants During Pregnancy or for Children Continue Reading
The polarised debate on the World Health Organization (WHO) has been based more on mud-slinging and all-or-nothing dogma than scientific evidence and empirical data. However, with trust plummeting in public health, change is needed.
The core and constant concept: at the request of an eligible individual, the government administers death either by euthanasia through a lethal injection delivered by a clinician or by assisted suicide through self-administered medication that is facilitated by a clinician.
What would a smarter approach look like? Our health systems need to create clear, evidence-based thresholds for when to recommend screening or primary prevention drugs — thresholds based on absolute risk, life expectancy, and patient values.
Let’s Save Our Doctors’ Time for Sick People Continue Reading
An International Health Organization built on sovereignty, subsidiarity, and ethics would integrate universal moral principles (beneficence, non-maleficence, confidentiality, informed consent) and consequently a set of public health principles derived from these including an architecture of accountability and decentralization.
In the end, we cannot stop the circle of life. But we can decide how we meet its final turn. With fear or with clarity. With chaos or with dignity. With denial or with truth. My mother chose dignity.
This latest dispatch from the world of pharmaceutical safety comes from that drug class that is a gift that keeps on giving, the blockbuster weight-loss drugs known as GLP-1’s. These drugs continue to be hailed as modern miracles.
Each year, as our primary means of sewage disposal, millions of tons of toxic sewage sludge, labeled as “biosolids,” are spread as agricultural fertilizer across our nation’s farmland, where rural Americans call home.
President Donald Trump’s executive order invoking the Defense Production Act of 1950 to ensure US glyphosate production and availability is neither necessary nor helpful. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s endorsement of the order has created a firestorm in that health-interested base.
This is a slightly shortened version of a New York Times article where Katrin Bennhold interviews Dani Blum of the Times’ “Well Team” about Ozempic and GLP-1 drugs. The Fifth Doctor snoops in on the conversation and adds his two cents’ worth.
What Does the Fifth Doctor Think about Ozempic? Continue Reading
If policymakers focus on separating normative functions from emergency authority, designing time-bound compacts instead of permanent command structures, and tying funding to measurable outcomes, global health cooperation can be rebuilt without recreating the structural distortions that weakened it.
How to Build a Post-WHO Global Health Architecture Continue Reading
