Browsing: First Opinion

In this 2026 midterm election season, health care ranks third on voters’ minds. That’s no surprise: U.S. life expectancy persistently lags those in comparable countries despite substantially greater spending on health care. As health and health care become increasingly political, we asked whether the leading drivers of mortality looked different by political geography in the…

Last fall I attended a meditation retreat in the Santa Cruz Mountains. I had hoped for a respite from a busy ophthalmology practice in Portland, Ore. Instead, I returned to the most difficult challenges I have faced in practice.

Early in my career as a maternal fetal medicine specialist, I met two pregnant women who had ovarian cancer. One of them was expecting twins. They were introduced to be each other’s support network during and after the pregnancy, often meeting for coffee with their newborns and comparing wigs after hair loss from the chemotherapy they…

On my recent travels, I met a healthy, active man in his early 60s who runs a small business.  This year, his family’s monthly premium reached nearly $5,000 — more than a quarter of his pre‑tax income. He made the difficult choice to keep coverage only for his wife and two children, hoping to stay…

In September, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. fired the two vice chairs of the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force. This move was both unsurprising and troubling. The task force is a critical advisory body to HHS, reviewing scientific evidence to provide recommendations on whether private health insurers should be required to…

On Sept. 23, I sat in a small glass reading room at Yale’s medical library, turning the rag-paper pages of the Medical Dissenter, a London journal from the 1830s. At the bottom of one page, under the headline, “Report from Mrs. Butt to Mr. Hudson,” I met Jane Butt. Her letter was dated Sept. 23,…

OpenAI recently announced that it is tracking signs of user distress across sessions, rather than only within them, and using that information to inform model responses. The announcement follows a wave of new safeguards for mental health and well-being conversations with artificial intelligence at OpenAI and elsewhere, such as parental controls for teens, usage limits…

The 43-year-old woman sitting across from me in my exam room is exasperated. “I just don’t feel like I have the energy or stamina I used to,” she tells me. “I could run 5 miles a day no problem when I was 23.”

Since the news about Christina Applegate’s multiple sclerosis misdiagnosis was released, texts from friends in disbelief have been popping up on my phone. “How could this happen?” they asked. “I wonder what else it could be?” they questioned. Because it took so long to receive my multiple sclerosis diagnosis, they assume that I might be…

First Opinion is STAT’s platform for interesting, illuminating, and provocative articles about the life sciences writ large, written by biotech insiders, health care workers, researchers, and others.