HealthWatch

Have you ever sent your doctor a question through an online patient portal? The type of response you get may differ depending on your race, a recent study suggests. For the study, published in JAMA Network OpenMonday, researchers examined patient portal message responses from more than 39,000 patients at Boston Medical Center in 2021, including the rates at which medical …

When Karla Adkins looked in the rearview mirror of her car one morning nearly 10 years ago, she noticed the whites of her eyes had turned yellow. She was 36 at the time and working as a physician liaison for a hospital system on the South Carolina coast, where she helped build relationships among doctors. Privately, she had struggled with …

Unhappy news for Americans: The United States is no longer among the 20 happiest countries in the world, according to new data from Gallup and its partners. In the newly released2024 World Happiness Report, the U.S. dropped out of the top 20 on the list for the first time in the report’s 12-year history. The U.S. now ranks at No. …

More than six in 10 of the abortions in the U.S. last year were done through medication, up from 53% in 2020, new research shows. The Guttmacher Institute, a research group that supports abortion rights, said about 642,700 medication abortions took place in the first full calendar year after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. Medication abortion accounted …

The rollout is underway for the first over-the-counter birth control pill approved in the United States, with online sales kicking off Monday. It will also soon be available in major retailers like CVS and Walgreens. The pill, known by the brand name Opill, wasapprovedby the U.S. Food and Drug Administrationfor OTC use in July, making it the first daily birth …

The U.S. has now tallied at least 64 confirmed or suspected measles cases investigated so far this year by authorities in 17 states — more than the 58 cases reported nationwide in all of 2023. It comes as health officials are grappling with multiple major outbreaks of the highly contagious virus around the world. Now with spring break travel picking …

Up to 5.8 million young people have long COVID, according to a recent study — and parents like Amanda Goodhart are looking for answers. She says her 6-year old son Logan caught COVID multiple times. But even months later, his symptoms didn’t get better. “To see him struggle to stay awake, or crying and saying he doesn’t feel good, it’s …

Actor Olivia Munn revealed Wednesday she was diagnosed with breast cancer last year, and she credited a risk assessment score that many women may not know about for helping to catch it. Munn, 43, said she’d had both a normal mammogram and a negative test for cancer genes she took in February 2023. Then her doctor calculated her breast cancer …

Cannabis use — whether smoked, eaten or vaporized — is associated with a higher number of adverse cardiovascular outcomes, according to a new study. Published Wednesday in the Journal of the American Heart Association,the research found that risk ofcoronary heart disease, heart attack and stroke increased with any kind of cannabis use, with heavier use associated with higher odds of …

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is urging doctors to conserve shots of a kind of tetanus vaccine, as the agency braces for a potential shortage of those shots this year. Doctors should switch from using the so-called Td vaccine – the immunization that protects against both tetanus and diphtheria infections – to giving the broader Tdap vaccine instead …