Jeff Millman

Health September 5, 2022 0

Aspirin, Heart Disease, and You

Once upon a time, bloodletting and lobotomies were common medical procedures. Cocaine was prescribed for depression, and doctors treated asthma with cigarettes. Conventional medical wisdom – fortunately for us – changes over time. The progress of science is cumulative: as we gather more evidence, we build upon our existing knowledge and abandon those practices for which there is little empirical support. Earlier this year, the United States Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF), a volunteer panel of experts that issues evidence-based […]

Health August 7, 2022 0

World Health Organization Declares Global Emergency as Monkeypox Spreads

It all started in Wisconsin. A three-year-old child was bitten by a prairie dog purchased from a local pet store. Shortly after, the child developed a high fever and a strange rash and had to be hospitalized. The child’s parents also developed the rash, but were otherwise asymptomatic. The Milwaukee Health Department tested the child and the prairie dog and confirmed that the cause of the child’s symptoms was the monkeypox virus, first discovered in crab-eating macaque monkeys in 1958. […]

Health July 25, 2022 0

Childhood Obesity Fueled By Consequences of the Pandemic

Politics, to paraphrase the philosopher John Gray, is nothing more than a series of imperfect remedies for recurring problems. No policy results in unmixed blessings; every decision we make has both good and bad consequences. So it is with the mandates and restrictions that have ruled our social life for the past two years. Lockdowns, school closures, and mask-wearing reduced the transmission of COVID-19 and prevented some serious illnesses and deaths. But two years on, we are vastly more knowledgeable […]

Metro July 16, 2022 0

Opinion: The MBTA Is Ruining My Summer, My Life, Everything

I can still remember the night the MBTA died. It was February of 2015, during one of the worst snowstorms Boston had seen in years. I boarded a Commuter Rail train at South Station at 6:15 PM hoping to beat the storm. I was too late. Just a few minutes after we left, the train stopped. The snow was walloping us from all directions, dropping in heaps from the sky. Then the lights went out. Sitting in the dark, trying […]

Front Page June 27, 2022 0

ON DACA’S 10th ANNIVERSARY, DREAMERS STILL FACE UNCERTAINTY

June 15, 2022 marked the ten-year anniversary of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy, known as DACA. An executive branch memorandum announced by President Barack Obama, DACA allows some individuals who were brought to the country as children and who maintain an unlawful presence in the United States to receive a renewable two-year period of deferred action from deportation and become eligible for a work permit. DACA does not provide a pathway to citizenship for its recipients, leaving somewhere […]

Front Page June 26, 2022 0

OPINION: In Britain and Australia, Gun Control Was the Obvious Choice

In the spring of 1996, two mass shootings occurred within weeks of each other on opposite ends of the world. Dunblane, Scotland and Port Arthur, Tasmania henceforth became linked in the public consciousness as the sites of some of the worst mass shootings in history. The Dunblane massacre is the deadliest mass shooting ever to have occurred in Britain, while the Port Arthur massacre is the worst to have occurred in Australia. Both events were the starting point of sweeping […]

Front Page June 17, 2022 0

As Court Decision Looms, Remembering Boston’s Abortion Rights Legacy

The relationship between medicine and law is complex and contentious. Rulings that have a finality in the public imagination are often put to the test in the real world, their consequences and exceptions worked out in a fashion far from ideal. The closing words of Supreme Court opinions – It is so ordered – suggest a solidity these rulings rarely have. Roe vs. Wade is no different. Just months after the Court released its opinion on the case, it was […]

Features June 17, 2022 0

WHAT WILL WE DO ABOUT GUNS?

Gun control legislation is once again on the table after two mass shootings in a week, one in Uvalde, Texas and another in Tulsa, Oklahoma. In a primetime address on June 2, President Biden called on Congress to take immediate action on gun control. He offered several potential policies, including bringing back the Federal Assault Weapons Ban that expired in 2004. If such a bill could not be passed, Biden said, the age to buy certain weapons could at least […]

Women’s Rights are Threatened; Immigrant Women Especially Vulnerable

Abortion rights in the United States are under threat. At the beginning of this month a draft of a majority opinion written by Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito leaked to Politico. The draft suggests that the Supreme Court will overturn the decisions it made in Roe vs. Wade nearly fifty years ago and in Planned Parenthood vs. Casey thirty years ago. In 1973, the Supreme Court decided that criminal abortion statutes, which excepted from criminality only those procedures that would […]

As Mother’s Day Approaches, U.S. Faces a Fertility Crisis

It’s Mother’s Day, and fewer people than ever are having children. In the United States the birth rate has plummeted by nearly 20% since 2007. The beginning of this decade saw the lowest numbers for average births ever recorded, and the downward trend shows no signs of stopping. While the causes of the initial drop were well-understood – rates began to fall rapidly during the Great Recession in the late 2000s – economists and policy makers are puzzled by the […]

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