Closer Look
Hospital gardens: 'A place of rest for the weary-hearted and weak-limbed'
Hyacinth Empinado/STAT
A hospital garden can be many things, STAT's Isabella Cueto writes. At UCLA, it's a semi-wild botanical garden. At Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles, it's a prescriptive, meticulous arrangement of aesthetically pleasing plants and seating. The one on the roof of Boston Medical Center is a communal effort, with produce and herbs sprouting from soil turned by many hands. At Boston Children's Hospital, a new garden (above) can be seen as an attempt at reconciliation after an old and beloved space was redeveloped.
"Overall, a hospital garden should provide an environment as different as possible from the straight lines, muted colors, and sanitized — perhaps fearful — atmosphere of a hospital interior," former UC Berkeley professor Clare Marcus Cooper said. "A garden can be a place of rest for the weary-hearted and weak-limbed, for the hopeless and finger-crossed," STAT's Isabella Cueto writes. Read more, and watch a video from Hyacinth Empinado and Alissa Ambrose focused on Boston Children's.
health
Opinion: How doctors' personal politics affect patients' care
Alex Hogan/STAT
President Ronald Reagan delivered a quip while being wheeled into an operating room after being shot in 1981. "Please tell me you're all Republicans," he said to the OR team. They laughed. "Today, we're all Republicans, Mr. President," a (Democratic) surgeon replied, reassuring his patient that political disagreements would not matter. Anupam Jena and Christopher Worsham of Harvard Medical School relate that anecdote in a STAT First Opinion essay adapted from their book, "Random Acts of Medicine: The Hidden Forces That Sway Doctors, Impact Patients, and Shape Our Health."
Caring for a president is unlikely to be controversial, but what about more politically divisive topics? A survey that found Republican doctors perceived patients who had had prior abortions to have more "serious" medical issues than Democratic doctors while Democratic doctors perceived the presence of firearms in the home to be more concerning than Republican doctors. Read more on how politics do and don't come into play.
infectious disease
HIV studies test statins and look at the risk of transmission from low viral loads
Two studies timed to the 2023 International AIDS Society Meeting in Australia this weekend:
- In NEJM, researchers report that a phase 3 trial testing pitavastatin, a drug that lowers "bad" cholesterol, found that people with HIV on antiretroviral therapy who took pitavastatin had a lower risk of a major adverse cardiovascular event than those who got a placebo. That's important because people with HIV carry up to twice the risk of cardiovascular disease as those without HIV.
- In The Lancet, researchers conclude that people on antiretroviral therapy who have low but detectable levels of HIV have almost zero risk of transmitting the infection to others. The study also confirms previous work that found zero risk of transmitting the virus to sexual partners when the viral load is undetectable. "These data provide a powerful opportunity to destigmatise HIV and promote adherence to ART," the authors write, cautioning that their results do not apply to mother-to-child transmission.
Correction: In Friday's newsletter we got the name of the North Carolina town where a tornado hit a Pfizer plant wrong. It's Rocky Mount.
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