Illustration of a nurse helping an older woman with a cane.
Aging, Palliative Care, Seniors

What is palliative care? How is it different from hospice?

Palliative care was not associated with shortened survival, pushing back against a popular assumption that pursuing palliative care means “giving up” on fighting disease. In fact, one influential study found that patients with advanced lung cancer who receive specialty palliative care in addition to standard oncology care lived almost three months longer than patients who received standard oncology care only.

Ethics, Politics, Sexual Health, Sexuality

The Fractious Evolution of Pediatric Transgender Medicine

Pediatric transgender medicine is a new field with a lot of questions yet to be answered by science. What is the long-term impact of blocking puberty on a young person’s health? Can practitioners correctly determine which youngsters will still identify as trans when they are adults? Do the psychological assessments contribute to children’s suffering by delaying access to puberty blockers and hormones? Why has the number of teens coming forward to receive transgender medical care, particularly those assigned female at birth, risen so dramatically in recent years?