the maha diagnosis
After one year of MAHA, what has been achieved?
Mike Reddy for STAT
One year ago, Kennedy ended his long-shot independent bid for the presidency. That same day, he stepped on stage at a rally in Glendale, Ariz., to endorse then-nominee Donald Trump. It was there that the MAHA movement began. "Don't you want a president that's going to make America healthy again?" Kennedy asked the crowd.
A year later, STAT's Isabella Cueto has spoken with nearly two dozen people in and around the MAHA world to take stock of its successes and its failures. What she found is a movement still fired up, but struggling to maintain cohesion as the internal dissonance of its ideologies intensifies and as it butts against external critics.
"We talk about it as a unified movement, but it's not. It's a collection of different interests," said historian Kathryn Olivarius. Read more from Isa, who breaks down the struggles of building a unified narrative, how Kennedy's position on vaccines has divided MAHA's followers, and which promises were broken while others were kept.
public health
Pediatric gun injuries by neighborhood
While MAHA leadership tries to tackle chronic disease and more, gun violence is still the leading cause of death for U.S. children. A new study highlights disparities by neighborhood: Children living in disadvantaged areas are up to 20 times more likely to be hospitalized for gun injuries compared with kids in the most well-off areas, according to a study published today in Pediatrics. The study analyzed hospital discharge data across four states along with data on every ZIP code's Childhood Opportunity Index, which ranks areas based on education, health, and socioeconomic factors.
Twenty-eight percent of ZIP codes in "very low-opportunity" neighborhoods were found to be hot spots for pediatric gun injuries, as opposed to just 5% in "very high-opportunity" areas. In Maryland, kids in those lowest opportunity ZIP codes were more than 20 times more likely to be hospitalized with a gun injury than those in the most advantaged neighborhoods. In Wisconsin, they were almost 19 times more likely; 16 in New York; eight in Florida.
first opinion
Testosterone was great — until it could have killed him
Within weeks of starting testosterone therapy as a cisgender man, Jeffrey T. Junig felt younger, stronger, and sharper following major heart surgery. His wife said he was less irritable, and his patients commented on how "stacked" he looked from weight lifting. But there was a problem — within months, he was at serious risk of right-heart failure.
Junig started testosterone after a quick video consultation with an online provider. The prescription came out to about 182 milligrams per week — for context, the Endocrine Society generally recommends weekly doses of 75-100 mg. When Junig, a physician himself, began to notice the warning signs in his body, the online prescriber congratulated him for having "more oxygen-carrying capacity."
"My story is a cautionary tale — but I had the training and resources to notice the danger and stop," Junig writes in a new First Opinion essay. Read more about how his experience deepened both his respect for the hormone and his unease for the way it is prescribed these days.
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