Discover Magazine
“On a misty autumn morning in Australia’s Royal National Park, just south of Sydney, a peloton of nearly two dozen cyclists tackles a 3,740-foot ascent. When they reach the highest point of the day’s 45-mile ride — the first leg of a weeklong journey — they’re rewarded with cookies and candy from support staff, followed by a downhill glide along a sandstone escarpment. Far below them, waves of the Pacific barrel toward shore and explode in clouds of foam.”
Read MoreCraftsmanship Quarterly Magazine
“Nand Kishore Chaudhary built a runaway success by working closely with India’s poorest citizens, and by developing an apprenticeship system around India’s chronic battles with child labor. How do such difficult pieces fit into India’s puzzle?”
Read MoreCraftsmanship Quarterly Magazine
“In my mini-doc, “India’s New Carpet Weavers,” enjoy a quick visit to the villages where hand-knotted carpets are made for Jaipur Rugs Company.”
Read MoreAeon Magazine
“For patient after patient seeking to cure chronic back pain, the experience is years of frustration. Whether they strive to treat their aching muscles, bones and ligaments through physical therapy, massage or rounds of surgery, relief is often elusive – if the pain has not been made even worse. Now a new working hypothesis explains why: persistent back pain with no obvious mechanical source does not always result from tissue damage. Instead, that pain is generated by the central nervous system (CNS) and lives within the brain itself.”
Read MoreThe New York Times Magazine
“Why, as I edge toward the end of my 40’s, has so much of what I know become impossible to access on demand? Where are the thoughts that spring forth in the shower but evanesce before they can be recorded, the mental lists that shed items on the way to the supermarket? The names of books and movies, actors and authors, le mot juste, the memory of social plans agreed upon in some calendarless situation — what have become of these?”
Read MoreNew York Magazine
“From their front window on Saturday mornings, the couple saw a stream of well-dressed people, the men in yarmulkes, on the sidewalks of West End Avenue. One day, the Goldsteins followed them to Lincoln Square Synagogue; they were astonished to find it was an Orthodox shul. When they’d think of Orthodoxy, they’d think of the diamond district, of 47th Street Photo. Where were the long black coats and black hats? The crowd that gathered in front of the synagogue on Saturday morning was affluent and attractive. These people seemed to having a wonderful time. The Goldsteins signed up for a course called Basic Judaism.”
Read MoreO, The Oprah Magazine
“With antidepressants now being used to treat not only depression but an ever- expanding variety of conditions (shyness, eating disorders, premature ejaculation, sexual addictions, smoking, premenstrual syndrome), they’ve almost gained the status of all-purpose wonder drugs. As Andrew Solomon, the author of The Noon- day Demon, a brutally honest and much-heralded tome on depression, noted in a recent article, there are “people with an inflated idea of how happy we should be, who want to medicate away their personalities.” My question is: At what cost?”
Read MoreThe New York Times Magazine
“Life imitates television. The comparison shoppers of “The Price is Right” meet the impulse shoppers of “Sale of the Century.” A woman wearing a self-satisfied grin loads her cart with six reproduction Louis XIV dining-room chairs with needlepoint seats. “I’ve been looking for these for years,” she gloats, “and here they are, for $125 each.” Another woman says, with a sigh, “I stand in the aisles anticipating turns in my life. I think, ‘I might someday need a snowblower.’”
Read MoreMore Magazine
“Several days later, as I walked through the front door of her freshly renovated suburban office, she greeted me as warmly as if I were entering her home. Dressed in casual cords and a nice sweater, she looked like a college girl, even though she’s 44. Within moments, we were chatting like longtime girlfriends, swapping stories of kids and career paths. Here’s what I noticed right away: There was no professional firewall between us, no ‘You are the patient and I am the doctor, and you will stand in awe of my white coat.’”
Read MoreMore Magazine
“For years, compounding pharmacies were few and far between. But during the early 2000s, the backlash against [hormone therapy] presented an opportunity for compounding pharmacies to greatly expand their business by offering bio-identicals. The bioidentical drugs fit nicely into the zeitgeist, which was characterized by the public’s distrust of big pharmaceutical companies, an urge to go organic and the conviction that natural is better. No wonder women have often been willing to pay more for compounded hormones (about $58 for a month’s supply and rarely reimbursed by insurance) than commercial ones ($80 or more but usually covered by insurance carriers and so ultimately cheaper).”
(Note: In 2013, The Endocrine Society presented me with its award for Excellence in Science and Medical Journalism for my work on “The Hormone Hoax,” a project funded in large part by The Fund for Investigative Journalism.
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Center For Health Journalism
“At More, we wanted to better understand what such compounding pharmacies were offering, since without FDA regulation of their business practices, that remained unclear. We knew that the FDA had dismissed “bioidentical” as a meaningless marketing term. Mexican yams provide the molecules for all bioidentical hormone products, whether they are made commercially or formulated in a pharmacy’s back room. From a pharmacological standpoint – at least at the molecular level – there was no difference. But our main focus of the article was: Would the capsule contents reflect what the doctor had prescribed? We developed a study design to see what was inside the pills and a plan for a story that we hoped would help a lot of women and alter public policy.”
Read MoreNewYorker.com
“Zogenix proposed that Zohydro ER be approved to manage “moderate-to-severe chronic pain in cases in which a continuous, around-the-clock opioid is needed,” for twelve hours a day and months at a time—in other words, to deal with persistent and long-term pain, such as back pain, that shorter-acting opioids don’t cover as well. But given the concerns about abuse of painkillers and evidence of the complications that can result over the course of long-term treatments, how did Zohydro make it through the approval process?”
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