one big number
420
Laura Bargfeld/AP
That's about how many anti-science bills have been introduced in statehouses across the country this year. The bills target longstanding public health protections like vaccine mandates, milk safety, and fluoride as part of Robert F. Kennedy Jr's Make America Healthy Again agenda. An AP investigation found that the wave of legislation is normalizing conspiracies fueled by Kennedy and the anti-vaccine movement. Read the story, which includes heartbreaking testimony from the parents of an 8-year-old boy who died from a vaccine-preventable disease this spring.
"I thought having the vaccines would protect our children," said Erik Dahlberg, the boy's father. "Unfortunately, it did not because other kids, other adults, need to be vaccinated as well."
policy
New legal group aims to protect abortion providers
Launched yesterday, a new legal organization called Reproductive Futures aims to serve as "the legal frontline" of abortion care post-Dobbs, with a particular focus on expanding existing shield laws and introducing similar protective measures in new states. The group's founder, Julie F. Kay, has already had a hand in such work — including in a California law passed last month allowing abortion meds to be mailed without the names of the patient, provider, or pharmacist on the package for privacy protection.
"The past two years of telemedicine within shield states has caused our lawyers to learn a great deal about the strengths of these laws and the ways they could be strengthened for providers and for patients," Kay told me over email. The group will not pursue litigation against restrictive states, as several other organizations already engage in such work, Kay said. That frees up Reproductive Futures "to be laser focused on protecting telemedicine abortion, emergency room and post-abortion care and to develop proactive litigation strategies," she wrote.
Some doctors in states with shield laws have already been targeted by restrictive states for providing abortion medication through telemedicine. "None of these cases appear to have a strong legal basis, but they are an attempt to discourage provision of telemedicine from shield states to those in under-resourced communities," Kay said, adding that Reproductive Futures will offer pro bono legal defense services for telemedicine providers.
first opinion
What's the difference between neurology and psychiatry?
When you hear that somebody's writing an essay about why we should tear down the wall between neurology and psychiatry, you might expect an academic approach. But in a new First Opinion essay, neurologist and pain physician Shaheen E. Lakhan leads with his own family. "My father's brain betrayed him," he writes about a military service-related stroke that left his father paralyzed and able to communicate only through blinking. He goes on to detail other family troubles that, initially, seemed unrelated: his brother's psychosis, his mother's dementia, his own migraines.
"My experiences taught me what textbooks did not: the way we structure brain care is fundamentally flawed," Lakhan writes. Medicine should not separate the way we think about the mind from the way we think about the brain, he argues. Read more on how he came to that conclusion and what he believes should come next.
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