Medicine

essayIllness and disease
I made it fun
Warren met his cancer diagnosis with tenacious optimism. But can positive thinking really affect the course of the disease?
Kirtan D Nautiyal

videoMedicine
Drinking wine from toxic cups was the 17th century’s own dubious ‘detox’ treatment
11 minutes

essayIllness and disease
The power of the ‘C’ word
Saying the word ‘cancer’ changes a person’s life and can lead to overtreatment and fear. Is the word too hot to use at all?
Benjamin Chin-Yee

essayHistory of science
A nasogenital tale
A bizarre theory (and a gory surgery) in fin-de-siècle Vienna help us get a grip on how science and medicine actually work
Urte Laukaityte

videoIllness and disease
Humanity eradicated smallpox 45 years ago. It’s a story worth remembering
25 minutes

essayIllness and disease
Permission to be ill
It took months for my functional neurological disorder to finally be diagnosed. It’s a condition that must be recognised
Kevin Aho

essayAddiction
The kratom question
Millions are turning to an unregulated herbal extract to curb their opioid addiction. But do the risks outweigh the benefits?
Xi Chen

essayMedicine
When I lost my intuition
For years, I practised medicine with cool certainty, comfortable with life-and-death decisions. Then, one day, I couldn’t
Ronald W Dworkin

essayPublic health
Hearts and brains
Humans always end up with clogged arteries, right? That’s not what the lives of the Tsimane in the Amazon basin tell us
Ben Daitz

essayBioethics
Moral resilience
Nurses experience deep suffering when they can’t act according to their moral compass. Our research shows a way forward
Cynda Hylton Rushton

essaySubcultures
An undulating thrill
Once lauded as a wonder of the age, cocaine soon became the object of profound anxieties. What happened?
Douglas Small

essayProgress and modernity
In praise of magical thinking
Once we all had knowledge of how to heal ourselves using plants and animals. The future would be sweeter for renewing it
Anna Badkhen

essayIllness and disease
Getting past ‘it’s IBS’
While science illuminates the gut-brain relationship, doctors remain ignorant and dismissive of patients with gut problems
Xi Chen

essayMedicine
Last hours of an organ donor
In the liminal time when the brain is dead but organs are kept alive, there is an urgent tenderness to medical care
Ronald W Dworkin

essayNeuroscience
Rethinking the homunculus
When we discovered that the brain contained a map of the body it revolutionised neuroscience. But it’s time for an update
Moheb Costandi

videoMedicine
Why surgery and barbering were one occupation in the Middle Ages
6 minutes

essayMedicine
Physician, invade thyself
Eager for medical breakthroughs, some doctors take enormous risks experimenting on themselves. Should we celebrate them?
Tom Doyle

essayIllness and disease
The war on cancer
Is it time to abandon the century-old idea that cancer is best met with a ‘fight’ from patients and their doctors alike?
Elaine Schattner

videoMedicine
What is it like to be a paramedic, navigating human emergency?
17 minutes

essayIllness and disease
Are they the canaries?
People with multiple chemical sensitivity seem to be allergic to the world. What, if anything, can medicine do for them?
Xi Chen

essayMedicine
The body is not a machine
Modern biomedicine sees the body as a closed mechanistic system. But illness shows us to be permeable, ecological beings
Nitin K Ahuja

essayHistory of science
Shocked
With evidence for efficacy so thin, and the stakes so high, why is ‘electroshock’ therapy still a mainstay of psychiatry?
John Read

essayIllness and disease
Natural and unnatural
‘Natural’ remedies are metaphysically inconsistent and unscientific. Yet they offer something that modern medicine cannot
Alan Jay Levinovitz

essayIllness and disease
Beautiful monsters
Cancer is part of multicellular life. Now the riotous growth of crested cacti show how humans might adapt to live with it
Athena Aktipis