Like many, this summer I've binged "The Retrievals," the new Serial/New York Times podcast about how women ended up undergoing egg retrieval without any painkillers.
But as Morgan S. Levy, Vineet Arora, and Arghavan Salles write this week in a powerful First Opinion, physical pain is only one part of the trauma of infertility — a trauma that is particularly pronounced for physicians. Levy, Arora, and Salles — two of whom are physicians, one a medical student — recently published a study in JAMA Internal Medicine about the burden infertility places on doctors. They write: "We surveyed 3,310 physicians and medical students of all sexes, genders, and sexual orientations and found almost two-thirds delayed childbearing due to training. Most (55.8%) who had delayed regretted doing so. More than one-fifth (21.1%) of the whole sample, whose ages ranged from 18 to 81, reported meeting the criteria to be diagnosed with infertility; 31.5% of those age 32 and above met the same criteria. More than a quarter (28%) of those with infertility reported it negatively affected their well-being."
Also in First Opinion this week, a dentist blesses my sugar-free gum habit and begs people not to let recent alarming headlines about aspartame hurt their dental health. The much-needed push to diversify clinical trials is leaving out a critical group: disabled people. Heat deaths may be dramatically undercounted. And so much more.
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