The only immovable object on my weekly calendar is a Sunday-night basketball game. We play in a rented gym in Washington, D.C., usually at a high school, because we’re all conserving cartilage and the local middle schools don’t place much cushioning underneath the hardwood. The game has been running for more than 20 years, but it wasn’t always on Sunday...

There’s no such thing as a miracle cure for obesity, but the latest weight-loss drugs seem to come pretty close. People who take Ozempic or other weekly shots belonging to a class known as GLP-1 agonists, after the gut hormone they mimic, can lose a fifth or more of their body weight in a year. Incessant “food noise” fueling the urge to eat suddenly...

Updated at 12:05 p.m. ET on June 7, 2024Our most recent flu pandemic—2009’s H1N1 “swine flu”—was, in absolute terms, a public-health crisis. By scientists’ best estimates, roughly 200,000 to 300,000 people around the world died; countless more fell sick. Kids, younger adults, and pregnant people were hit especially hard.That said, it could have been...

“People will die if doctors misdiagnose patients.” This is true as far as it goes. But the recent news that prompted Elon Musk to share this observation on X was not precisely about medical errors. It was about what he might call the “woke mind virus.” A story by Aaron Sibarium in The Washington Free Beacon had revealed complaints that UCLA’s medical...

Tomorrow, a Food and Drug Administration advisory committee will meet to discuss whether the United States should approve its first psychedelic drug. The fate of the treatment—MDMA-assisted therapy for post-traumatic stress disorder—will turn on how the FDA interprets data from two clinical trials that, on their face, are promising. Long-suffering patients...

Language is constantly evolving, but you know a change has hit the big time when the AP Stylebook makes it official. In light of all the recent news attention to Ozempic and related drugs, the usage guide’s lead editor announced in April that the entry for “Obesity, obese, overweight” had been adjusted. That entry now advises “care and precision” in...