Health

Max Gomez, an award-winning medical and science journalist who delivered informed reports for more than 40 years on TV stations in New York and Philadelphia, most recently during the Covid-19 pandemic, died on Sept. 2 at his home in Manhattan. He was 72.His partner, Amy Levin, said the cause was head and neck cancer, with which he had been diagnosed four years ago.Billed as “Dr. Max,” Mr. Gomez brought an easygoing gravitas to reporting on subjects like vaccinations, knee replacements, prostate cancer, colonoscopies, sickle cell anemia and, when he himself contracted them, Lyme disease and the MRSA infection. One of his reports on Alzheimer’s disease focused on his father, a physician, who was swindled as his memory abandoned him.Dr. Gomez had been chief medical correspondent at WCBS, Chan...

Tucker Marr’s life changed forever last October.He was on his way to a wedding reception when he fell down a steep flight of metal stairs, banging the right side of his head so hard he went into a coma.He’d fractured his skull, and a large blood clot formed on the left side of his head. Surgeons had to remove a large chunk of his skull to relieve pressure on his brain and to remove the clot.“Getting a piece of my skull taken out was crazy to me,” Mr. Marr said. “I almost felt like I’d lost a piece of me.”But what seemed even crazier to him was the way that piece was restored.Mr. Marr, a 27-year-old analyst at Deloitte, became part of a new development in neurosurgery. Instead of remaining without a piece of skull or getting the old bone put back, a procedure that is expensive and has a hig...

Judy Govatos has heard that magical phrase “you’re in remission” twice, in 2015 and again in 2019. She had beaten back Stage 4 lymphoma with such aggressive chemotherapy and other treatments that at one point she grew too weak to stand, and relied on a wheelchair. She endured several hospitalizations, suffered infections and lost nearly 20 pounds. But she prevailed.Ms. Govatos, 79, a retired executive at nonprofit organizations who lives in Wilmington, Del., has been grateful for the extra years. “I feel incredibly fortunate,” she said. She has been able to take and teach lifelong learning courses, to work in her garden, to visit London and Cape Cod with friends. She spends time with her two grandchildren, “an elixir.”But she knows that the cancer may well return, and she doesn’t want to e...

The Food and Drug Administration approved a new round of Covid boosters on Monday, that will arrive alongside the seasonal flu vaccine and shots to protect infants and older adults from R.S.V., a potentially lethal respiratory virus.The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is expected to follow up on Tuesday with an advisory meeting to discuss who should get the new shots, by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna. After a final decision by the C.D.C.’s director, millions of doses will be shipped to pharmacies, clinics and health systems nationwide within days.As Covid cases creep up, the trifecta of prevention measures could portend the first winter of the decade without a crush of patients overwhelming some hospitals. But a healthy winter is far from a lock: In the last year, the updated Covi...

Dr. Leslie Hendeles began prodding the Food and Drug Administration to reject a decongestant in cold medicines when he had a mop of curly red hair and Bill Clinton had just become president.By the time opposition to the drug had coalesced, Dr. Hendeles was appearing, at age 80, as an expert to testify before the agency’s advisers, his hair white and his overview of the ingredient spanning 50 years.His advocacy culminated in the advisory panel’s unanimous vote on Tuesday, when it concluded that the decongestant, a common ingredient in cold and flu remedies, is ineffective.Prompted by the news, consumers threw open their medicine cabinets upon learning that the decongestant, phenylephrine, was listed in more than 250 of their go-to drugs for congestion like some versions of DayQuil, Sudafed,...

BackgroundIn June, Gov. Mike Parson, Republican of Missouri, signed into law the ban on gender-affirming care for new patients under 18, part of a wave of more than 20 laws across the country severely restricting such care.Under the new law, existing patients of Washington University’s youth gender clinic were still allowed to receive the treatments. But the law includes a provision allowing patients to make legal claims against doctors who prescribe hormonal medications to minors. The university said this part of the law made it “untenable” to continue providing this care.Since it opened in 2017, the St. Louis clinic had seen a sharp increase in patient demand, overwhelming its small staff, The New York Times reported last month. Many patients and their families told The Times that the cl...

Early in her pregnancy, Jaci Statton was in her kitchen when she felt like she was going to pass out and saw that her jeans had become soaked with blood. Doctors told her the pregnancy was not viable and that it could threaten her life if an abortion was not performed soon, she said.But Ms. Statton lives in Oklahoma, a state that bans most abortions. Three hospitals declined to provide the procedure, she said. At the third, “they said, ‘We can’t touch you unless you’re like crashing in front of us,’” Ms. Statton, 26, said in an interview. The hospital’s only suggestion, she said, was “we should wait in the parking lot until I was about to die.”On Tuesday, Ms. Statton filed a legal complaint with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services asserting that the third institution, Oklahoma...

Most Americans have had one or more shots of the flu and Covid vaccines. New this year are the first shots to protect older adults and infants from respiratory syncytial virus, a lesser-known threat whose toll in hospitalizations and deaths may rival that of the flu.Federal health officials are hoping that widespread adoption of these immunizations will head off another “tripledemic” of respiratory illnesses, like the one seen last winter. For people with insurance, all of the vaccines should be available at no cost.“This is an embarrassment of riches,” said Dr. Ofer Levy, director of the precision vaccines program at Boston Children’s Hospital and an adviser to the Food and Drug Administration.Here’s what he and other experts say about who should receive which immunizations, and when.What...

MDMA-assisted therapy seems to be effective in reducing symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, according to a study published on Thursday.The research is the final trial conducted by MAPS Public Benefit Corporation, a company that is developing prescription psychedelics. It plans to submit the results to the Food and Drug Administration as part of an application for approval to market MDMA, the psychedelic drug, as a treatment for PTSD, when paired with talk therapy.If approved, “MDMA-assisted therapy would be the first novel treatment for PTSD in over two decades,” said Berra Yazar-Klosinski, the senior author of the study, which was published in Nature Medicine, and the chief scientific officer at the company. “PTSD patients can feel some hope.”PTSD affects about 5 percent of the ad...

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended on Tuesday that all Americans 6 months and older receive at least one dose of the latest Covid shots, the last of a trifecta of vaccines intended to prevent another surge in respiratory infections this fall and winter.The Food and Drug Administration on Monday approved reformulated Covid vaccines by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna. On Tuesday, scientific advisers to the C.D.C. reviewed the data and voted to recommend the shots. Large pharmacies will likely have the new vaccines available later this week.Vaccines against flu and the respiratory syncytial virus are already on the shelves. The flu vaccine is recommended for everyone aged 6 months and older, and the R.S.V. vaccine for everyone 60 and older, in consultation with a health ca...