first opinion
'Long Covid feels like a gun to my head'
Andrew Harnik/AP
Rachel Hall-Clifford has spent her career studying neglected tropical diseases. But in 2022, she got Covid for the first time, and now she has her own neglected disease: long Covid. Hall-Clifford is not easily intimidated — she once talked a Guatemalan street gang out of harming her research team as someone held an assault rifle to their heads during a robbery. But in a new First Opinion essay, she admits that long Covid scares her like nothing else.
"This is not a funny story I will tell colleagues over drinks later," she writes. "I spend a lot of my time lying in the dark (I'm here now, even as I type this) negotiating with god and science to make me — and all of us suffering with long Covid and other post-viral illnesses — better." Read the essay, and watch out for an interview with Hall-Clifford on the First Opinion Podcast tomorrow.
technology
Do you have a landline phone? If so, you may be healthier than me
In the second half of last year, 76% of adults and 87% of children lived in homes that did not have a landline telephone, but did have at least one cell phone. For 17 years, the National Center for Health Statistics has regularly released data on the proportion of people with landline phones versus wireless phones — a ratio that has practically flipped on its head over the decades. And in case you were wondering, this is relevant to health. As recently as 2018, NCHS data has shown that people who live in wireless-only homes are less likely to have health insurance or a regular place to go for medical care, and are more likely to face financial barriers to care.
It's another sign that health is inexplicably linked to access to technology. Earlier this month, a federal program to provide people with a discount on a computer and monthly internet expenses ended because funding ran out. In anticipation of this exact scenario, STAT published a First Opinion essay last year from three clinicians and researchers about the real life effects that a lack of internet access can have on patients.
smoking
Should people actually try vaping if they want to quit smoking?
It turns out that e-cigarettes might be just as effective at helping people quit smoking as the gold-standard pharmaceutical drug, varenicline, according to a clinical trial published yesterday in JAMA Internal Medicine. People in the study received either a nicotine-containing e-cigarette and placebo tablets, varenicline and an e-cigarette without nicotine, or a placebo tablet and a nicotine-free e-cigarette for 12 weeks. All three groups were also given intensive tobacco cessation counseling.
There was no statistically significant difference between them in the study, which is the first published randomized controlled trial to compare the two, STAT's Nicholas Florko reports. The trial is likely to cause a stir within the tobacco-control community, which has been bitterly divided over the question of whether e-cigarettes are a help or hindrance for adults who smoke cigarettes, and whether they should be recommended by doctors as a way to kick a smoking habit. Read more on the study from Nick.
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