Second Opinion

It’s the same medicine. So why does the convenient version cost so much more?

From a Pacific island overrun by rats to hospital wards battling superbugs, why our best intentions so often backfire.

Would you take $5,000 to be in a painful medical study? And should researchers even be allowed to ask?

We'd never ask a breast cancer patient what she did to deserve it. So why do we ask her?

Veterinarians in Central Africa are bracing for an Ebola outbreak among gorillas. It might sound remote. It's not.

I packed my bag, crossed the border, and eventually flew home to safety. The health care workers I left behind had no such option. 

From the Uganda-Congo border: a firsthand account of an Ebola outbreak, a failing response, and the political decisions that made it worse.

America built the global health system that protects us all — and then walked away from it.

What if one of the most common surgeries performed in the world turned out to be no better than a fake one — and we kept doing it anyway?

There's a vaccine for your dog. There isn't one for you. And that's not an accident — it's a scandal.

Millions of Americans need mental health care and can't get it — so should we lower the bar on who gets to provide it?

If AI can outperform two radiologists reading your mammogram, why is it still sitting on the sidelines?

We've spent decades arguing about whether government-run healthcare could ever work in America — but one system has been quietly proving it can. The answer might surprise you.

Our healthcare system often punishes behavior it doesn’t understand—and trauma is at the center of that misunderstanding.

If you've ever left a doctor's office nodding along and then lain awake at 3 am realizing you understood almost nothing — this might be for you.

The same children once labeled deficient are often highly capable adults — if they survive a system that misjudges them early. Dyslexia has nothing to do with intelligence, but everything to do with how badly we teach reading and judge those who struggle.

“ A built bed is a filled bed” – why in American healthcare, more supply doesn't lower costs, it raises them.

New research suggests that expanding nurses’ roles in our hospitals could be one of the smartest — and most urgent — steps we can take for the future of American healthcare.

The President says TrumpRx will give Americans the lowest drug prices in the world — but a closer look reveals a much more limited program that will leave most patients exactly where they started.

One in four Americans die before age 70 — not because we lack longevity supplements, but because we've abandoned the basic primary care that keeps people alive.

Medical Care is often not enough. Doulas are bringing an ancient practice back to modern dying—one family at a time.

Super Bowl medical ads use celebrity endorsements and fear tactics to promote disease screening - not primarily for public health, but to expand the patient pool for new, expensive treatments.

Most back pain doesn't require surgery—so why are we spending two billion dollars over a three-year period on it?

Every medical injection you've ever received was safety-tested using the blue blood of a 450-million-year-old creature — and we're finally questioning whether that's worth their survival.

My patient Paul has been trying to stop his antidepressants for months, and what's keeping him trapped reveals a truth the medical community has been slow to acknowledge.