Health and Wellness | Opinion

It’s time to use warning labels to steer people away from food that’s bad for them.

We live in an age when people can live longer and healthier even with significant health conditions. What does this mean for future presidents?

Democrats should rally around a bill to overhaul the 1873 anti-vice law.

We had a chance to treat sex categories in sports with curiosity and compassion instead of condemnation. We still can.

The U.S. bombings that ended World War II didn’t mark the close of atomic warfare. They were just the beginning.

Glenn Kramon discusses the coincidences that led him to realize how critical immigration was to his recent cancer battle.

Here’s who needs to worry right now.

Hospital outpatient departments, or HOPDs, are encouraging a surprise scourge on medical costs. It’s patients who bear the burden.

It’s time for decisive action to protect our young people.

The experience of living with my father’s dementia ranged from tragic to tragicomic to vaudevillian, often within the span of a few minutes.

A man reflects on his mother’s life with Alzheimer’s and what it has taught him as he faces his own diagnosis with the disease.

How harm reduction can work in a red state.

Norms on attendance have changed, but it’s about more than Covid-era school closings.

The hotter it gets, the more difficult it is for our bodies to cope.

The virus is changing.

Rescheduling the drug is the beginning of the end of marijuana criminalization. Now we need to think about regulation.

The First Amendment looms large in lower court cases that may find their way to the Supreme Court.

We need to be prepared to fight the next war, not the last one.

An interview with America’s top public health official about new challenges and the recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic.

Involuntary treatment too often requires a court order.

The seasonal allergy hill is now an all-year mountain.

We need to rethink the policy of preserving families, seemingly at all costs.

The near-impossible challenge of parenting an adult with severe mental illness.

Now is our chance to rethink the centuries-old stories we’ve told about obesity and weight loss.

Before you decide to speak out about wrongdoing, you have to recognize it for what it is.

The evidence reveals a more complicated reality than the conventional wisdom would have you believe.

We need to start aggressively testing dairy workers for bird flu to safeguard their health as well as ours — now.

The effects of semaglutide drugs won’t be just cosmetic.

Skepticism and distrust of health practitioners is on the rise. How are doctors supposed to restore patient trust?

To reduce the risk PFAS pose, we need far more comprehensive mandates that test, monitor and limit the entire class of chemicals.

A number of new tech companies want to solve the opioid crisis with algorithms. It’s a flawed and potentially harmful proposition.

The return of Trump to the White House would be disastrous for the planet.

A new product for preventing cavities doesn’t have F.D.A. approval or promising clinical trials, but it does have customers.

A simple yet radical approach in Asia is equipping medical patients and their loved ones with the knowledge they need to heal themselves.

Without urgent reforms to how we educate travelers, doctors, nurses and others, we are doomed to miss textbook dengue cases.

The term creates doubt about a biological fact when there shouldn’t be any.

A regulated market for donations could help end the shortage of these organs for transplant.

How does a newly diagnosed patient balance privacy with public honesty?

Our leaders should turn their attention to Americans’ worsening life expectancy.

Restrictions on pain medications are hurting patients who are suffering.

Her special is a harbinger of how the weight-loss industry is rebranding: Obesity is a disease, and — for the first time — it’s not your fault.

Covid is now a permanent part of our lives. Are we finally ready to accept that?

Ozempic threatens to bust the national budget. That may finally force the government to address the problem of overly expensive medical treatments.

Though moral hazard is a powerful concept for thinking about risk in economics, it’s a flawed approach to designing drug policy.

Its decision that embryos are people offers a warning of the future toward which America may be heading.

Gene therapies could transform how we treat rare diseases. But will everyone have access?

Vaccination levels aren’t actually in free fall. But that doesn’t mean we’re safe.

Future generations will see breakthroughs that cure many kinds of diseases. But where does that leave current patients?

The answer, only now coming into view, explains why that awful year still has us in its grip.

No one should be left in agony because of false beliefs that withholding pain treatment protects against addiction.

The justices should leave it to federal agencies to resolve ambiguities Congress creates when it writes laws those agencies enforce.

The child care crisis, which has intensified since pandemic-era funding expired in September, is placing an undue and unhealthy burden on American parents.

Even if the war ends tomorrow, its effects will last a lifetime for new mothers and their children.

This year is a critical moment to make home care accessible to all Americans who need it.

We should seize the moment right now to build a new set of protections against future public health crises.

An A.L.S. drug rejected by the F.D.A. made me rethink how doctors should give hope to patients.

More than 60 years ago, America was confronted with the story of a young woman forced to seek an abortion abroad after unwittingly taking a drug that caused severe birth defects.

Chronic illness has a way of picking apart your mind and breaking your heart.

We have the tools we need to create a world where addiction is just one aspect of people’s lives instead of a dark portal to despair and early death.

No matter how dark the days, we can find light in our own hearts, and we can be one another’s light.

Community hospitals have been caught doing some surprising things, given how they are supposed to serve the public good.

Congress has a chance to eliminate hepatitis C in the United States.

We need to create a gold standard of care to treat patients with peripheral artery disease.

Food scarcity and malnutrition could plunge Gaza into a crisis outlasting the war.

Suppressing your opinions and emotions to keep the peace could come at the expense of your own physical and mental well-being.

Why did it take so long?

Communities don’t have to choose between saving lives and stopping crime. The data is proof.

Looking after a sick family member can mean putting your own life on hold, often with little recognition or outside support.

Tough regulation is needed to combat abusive practices.

For Gaza’s largest hospital, a plea for humanity.

When women say that it is better to be sick and thin than healthy and fat, they are perfectly rational.

If you accept that you know very little, but hope to know a little more, discovering that you were wrong about something feels exciting rather than painful.

The immunologist Michael Mina says even its worst aspects should have been expected from a new pathogen for which there was no immunity.

Americans are less obsessed with adding years to their lives and more focused on making their existing years richer and healthier.

Calling something cancer can lead to aggressive treatment even if the cancer in question is unlikely to cause problems.

America’s prisons are filling up with people who are so old, they don’t remember their crimes.

Too few schools have used Covid relief funds to improve air quality properly.

The hype around personalized medicine is distracting us from alternatives that are better suited to improving health for all.

Do we own our bodies? The answer, according to many legal experts, is no.

Cases of severe black lung disease are back to the highest level in decades. It’s totally preventable.

Undoing hospital monopolies may be a lost cause.

Evolution’s curse of creeping deafness changes how a biologist experiences nature.

Extreme heat is the engine of planetary chaos. We ignore it at our peril.

A year later, the consequences for women have been alarming.

Our biased attention means we’ll always feel we’re living in dark times, and our biased memory means we’ll always think the past was brighter.

Fewer children are starving, fewer moms are dying and terrible diseases are retreating.

Science shows that seesaw relationships can be more damaging than those that are purely negative.

The F.D.A. has an important decision to make.

Honest reflection is essential to ensure that the nation’s response to the next pandemic is better.

We need better data to guide pandemic decisions.