By Susannah Baruch
Concerned about privacy protections for pregnancy- and abortion-related health data in the post-Dobbs environment?
The film Preconceived, premiering at SXSW this week, shines a bright light on anti-abortion “Crisis Pregnancy Centers” (CPCs), including their disturbing take on the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).
By DeAnna Baumle and Katie Moran-McCabe
Americans are deeply in debt. In the fourth quarter of 2023, total household debt increased by $212 billion to reach $17.5 trillion, according to a report by the Center for Microeconomic Data.
Debt is linked to lower life expectancy, higher mortality, depression, high blood pressure, and forgone medical care. Debt and resulting bad credit scores can impact a person’s ability to secure housing, employment, and medical care. And it has a disproportionate impact on Black, Indigenous, and Latinx communities, contributing to the perpetuation of intergenerational and structural inequity.
By Vincent Joralemon
In my last post, I discussed the rise of psychedelic lobbying — how companies with vested economic interests in psychedelics have applied pressure to shape regulations that favor their business models.
One such initiative — the ketamine therapy industry’s push to extend the COVID-era telemedicine flexibilities for prescriptions of controlled substances — highlights how sophisticated these campaigns can be, and how their impact stretches beyond the psychedelic industry.
By Hannah Rahim
The regulation of medical assistance in dying (MAID) is drastically different between the U.S. and Canada. Comparing the hasty liberalization of MAID in Canada with the more wary approach of the U.S. can yield important learnings for both countries.
By Bobby Stroup
If you want to read a book about how to guarantee a 100-year lifespan, Peter Atta’s Outlive is going to disappoint you. But if you want to learn about Medicine 3.0, the four horsemen diseases, and how you might increase your healthspan, then you should get a copy of the book today.
Outlive is not a book on public health policy so much as it is an exploration of personal health policy. Even so, the text — existing somewhere between the genres of autobiography and medical journal anthology — offers insights relevant to any health care aficionado. Read More
By Vincent Joralemon
Psychedelic companies and advocacy groups are spending substantial resources to influence regulatory policy, shaping what the blossoming field will ultimately cohere into.
Although regulations are designed to protect the public interest, the rulemaking process is often dominated by lobbying from those with special interests in the fields meant to be regulated. When that leads to undue influence, the result is known as “regulatory capture.”
Yet, not all lobbying campaigns are necessarily problematic — the goal instead should be for regulators to leverage industry insights while maintaining independence in their ultimate decision-making.
By Hannah Rahim
Food is Medicine interventions aim to prevent and treat diet-related chronic health conditions and reduce food insecurity by providing food to individuals and communities, in connection with the health care system. While Food is Medicine has been gaining prominence in recent years, it has also received some criticism. This article will explore the development of Food is Medicine and its limitations, and briefly offer recommendations for successful Food is Medicine initiatives.
By Adithi Iyer
I have written previously about the not-so-distant possibility and promise of regenerative medicine, an area concerned with therapies that encourage the body to repair or heal itself. Cell-mediated and tissue-based technologies hold promise in inducing self-repair from within the body, and they’re making their way to market in traditional medicine. Much has been made of recently discussed CAR-T cell therapies for cancer, which have been around since 2017, and in-human sickle cell treatment Casgevy. Such applications of regenerative medicine and tissue engineering are wide-spanning and range across the bench-to-bedside pathway.
One application of regenerative medicine gaining some ground in the R&D space is the organoid. Organoids are lab-grown masses of cells and tissue that assemble to form miniature organs or organ systems in vitro. They come, too, in different forms and types, and while some organoid applications are heavily modified for specific functions, many are meant to recreate and model the naturally occurring organ systems we would find in our own bodies.
Organoids may sound especially futuristic, but are currently used regularly in labs for different research and therapeutic applications. A functional “organ” model not attached to a human body could offer the opportunity to model diseases and test treatments in real time without the need for an animal model (like the mice used today), especially in preclinical and early clinical trials for new drugs. Organoids generate information and data, and a single organoid model can even be hooked up to a “system” with other organoids to model systems and interrelated processes at once. The production of these models occurs in-lab, often involving stem cells that can divide and organize into tissues and organs on their own.
By Joelle Boxer
This month, the Alabama Supreme Court held that the term “children” in a state statute includes embryos, or “extrauterine children.”
As fertility treatments like in vitro fertilization (IVF) involve the creation of multiple embryos, not all of which are implanted, the implications of this ruling could be far-reaching. Four million births each year in the U.S. are via IVF, an important pathway to parenthood for couples with infertility, LGBTQ couples, and single parents.
This article will examine the Alabama Supreme Court’s decision in LePage v. Mobile Infirmary Clinic and its consequences for Americans building their families through fertility services.
By Katherine L. Kraschel
Last week, the Alabama Supreme Court called frozen embryos created via in vitro fertilization (IVF) “extrauterine children” and referred to the cryotanks where they are stored as “cryogenic nurser(ies).” The Court sided with couples who claim the accidental destruction of frozen embryos created through IVF and cryopreserved ought to be treated equally to the death of a child.
The case, LePage v. Center for Reproductive Medicine, involves plaintiffs seeking punitive damages from an Alabama fertility clinic for the “wrongful death” of their embryos that were destroyed when a patient in the hospital where they were stored removed them from the cryotank. While the lower Alabama Courts concluded that the cryopreserved embryos were not a person or child under the state’s law, the Alabama Supreme Court disagreed and held that the state’s Wrongful Death of a Minor Act “applies to all unborn children, regardless of their location,” and that the plaintiff’s wrongful death claims could proceed.
Thoughtful scholars have argued that existing state laws do not sufficiently redress mistakes and accidents that occur in the process of fertility care, pregnancy, and birth. However, the ends do not justify the means in this case; likening frozen embryos to children is not a legally sound mechanism to hold fertility clinics accountable for negligently storing embryos. It illustrates how sympathetic stories can be used to further the agendas of those who seek to equate embryos and fetuses to “people” under the law and undercut the critical role modern fertility care plays in (re)defining the bonds that create families, and particularly, many LGBTQ+ and single parent families.
Specifically, lawmaking in fertility care stands to fuel the movement to create fetal personhood rights and a federal abortion ban. It may also signify an inflection point in regulating assisted reproduction reminiscent of pre-Dobbs targeted restrictions on abortion provider (TRAP) laws that sought to limit abortion provision by imposing restrictions. TRAP laws’ new sibling – targeted restrictions on IVF Provision – or TRIP laws, as I call them, stand to rob patients of their ability to build their families by compelling physicians to provide less effective, more expensive care. TRIP laws will erect barriers and exacerbate long standing racial disparities in accessing fertility care, and they will disproportionately impact members of the LGBTQ+ community who wish to build families through fertility treatments. The Alabama decision is severe, but it should serve as a warning to state legislators with a new responsibility to safeguard reproductive health care without the floor of Roe’s protections – proceed with extreme care and regard for “unintended” consequences of regulating fertility care. Read More