An AI reading routine biopsy slides separated rare tumor patients on pembrolizumab into groups whose median survival differed fourfold. That is a scientific advance. It is also a potential new gatekeeper, and almost no cancer center has decided who may overrule it.
A GLP-1 follow-up appointment can produce a clear number without answering the most important question: how is this person doing? Weight remains relevant in obesity care, but a useful review also creates space for symptoms, everyday function and the practical work of...
Healthcare in the United States is facing a structural inflection point. Physician burnout remains high. Administrative burdens consume hours that should be spent with patients. Chronic disease rates continue to rise. At the same time, health systems are under...
Adding Black maternal-health statistics to data on gestational carriers and calling the sum mine doesn't make it so. The numbers don’t work that way. I’ve carried three pregnancies for other families. I’m also a Black woman. Put those facts beside two well-documented...
Last month I published a cost analysis with wrong numbers in it. Not rounded wrong. I had taken the wrong price list and the wrong tariff for cache writes, and when I recomputed, the headline figure moved. I issued a corrected version and stopped citing the first one....
The practical barriers between promising digital therapeutic research and routine care, from validation and safety reporting to staff adoption and patient experience. A digital therapeutic can produce encouraging research results, receive regulatory clearance and...
I spent years formulating low-carbohydrate, low-calorie, high-protein and gluten-free foods. That work taught me a lesson that is easy to miss when a new ingredient has exciting research behind it: an ingredient is not a finished product. A study can tell you that an...
For over a decade, the administrative burden in specialty medicine has quietly worsened. Orthopedic surgeons doing 40 patients a day are spending more time in the EHR than in the room. Ambient AI scribes have changed that equation in ways that are only beginning to...
Healthcare AI is often evaluated where it is easiest to measure: on a dataset. Accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, calibration, retrieval quality, hallucination rates and task-completion scores all matter. But they answer only the first question: can the model perform...
Medicine has become increasingly specialized over the past several decades, driving tremendous advances in our ability to diagnose and treat complex diseases. Specialists now possess deeper expertise than ever before, allowing clinicians to deliver highly targeted...
Healthcare has never really had a technology problem. The greater challenge has been turning technology into better ways of working. Over the past decade, healthcare organizations have invested heavily in electronic health records, digital services, automation,...
Obesity is increasingly recognized as a chronic systemic disease characterized not only by excess adiposity but also by progressive dysfunction of multiple organs. Recent advances have shifted attention from body weight alone toward ectopic fat deposition as a major...
The paradox of modern biomedical research Biomedical research has never generated so much knowledge, and researchers have never struggled so much to keep pace with it. PubMed now indexes more than 40 million references drawn from roughly 26,000 journals[1]....
When treating individuals with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), either Crohn's disease or ulcerative colitis, I’m often asked: "Will this stop me having children?". Given that IBD affects around 180,000 Australians and is typically first diagnosed between the ages of...
Organ digital twins have moved from mathematical curiosity to funded national priority. Imperial College London now sits close to the centre of that shift. Researchers there have built more than 3,800 anatomically accurate virtual hearts. They have also begun an NHS...
Every year, millions of pathology slides are produced in the UK, most still examined manually under a microscope. This century-old process, though reliable, is no longer fit for purpose. Pathology departments face mounting workforce pressures, with 78% pathologists...
The evolving landscape of cosmetic science is increasingly defined by its convergence with clinical research, challenging long-standing distinctions between aesthetic enhancement and therapeutic intervention. Historically, cosmetics have been confined to products...
South Korea and the United States are both wealthy, technologically sophisticated countries with excellent physicians and world-class hospitals. Yet they placed opposite structural bets on what a health system is for. America bet on treating disease as well as it can...