Vital Magazine

Vital is a monthly online magazine dedicated to the story of health. Follow us for smart, easily acc Vital is a health humanities magazine.

It stopped publishing in 2019. You can read articles at the-vital.com.

07/10/2020

Crucial information

Malone Mukwende, a second-year at St George's, University of London, wrote Mind the Gap, to help other medics recognise life-changing diseases, which present differently on darker skin.

06/18/2020

"However, when clinicians insert race into their tools, they risk interpreting racial disparities as immutable facts rather than as injustices that require intervention. Researchers and clinicians must distinguish between the use of race in descriptive statistics, where it plays a vital role in epidemiologic analyses, and in prescriptive clinical guidelines, where it can exacerbate inequities."

Medicine and Society from The New England Journal of Medicine — Hidden in Plain Sight — Reconsidering the Use of Race Correction in Clinical Algorithms

04/25/2020

“Much is yet unknown about specific cytokines and their roles in disease. But the likelihood of disease in general is not so mysterious. Often, it’s a matter of what societies choose to tolerate. America has empty hotels while people sleep in parking lots. We are destroying food while people go hungry. We are allowing individuals to endure the physiological stresses of financial catastrophe while bailing out corporations. With the coronavirus, we do not have vulnerable populations so much as we have vulnerabilities as a population. Our immune system is not strong.”

COVID-19 is proving to be a disease of the immune system. This could, in theory, be controlled.

04/10/2020

How kind.

Doctors and nurses on the frontlines of the coronavirus pandemic are putting the photos on their protective suits to reassure patients.

04/09/2020

A good overall story of how drugs are being researched and tested.

If there is a way to stop COVID-19, it will be by blocking its proteins from hijacking, suppressing, and evading humans’ cellular machinery.

04/03/2020

Ibrahim Kendi: “I suspect that some Americans believe that racial data will worsen racism. But without racial data, we can’t see whether there are disparities between the races in coronavirus testing, infection, and death rates. If we can’t see racial disparities, then we can’t see the racist policies behind any disparities and deaths.”

The coronavirus is infecting and killing Americans of all races. But there’s little public data on whether the virus is having a disproportionate impact on some communities.

03/04/2020

“The way we talk about disease can actually alter how diseases spread. As medical humanities scholar Heather Schell has said, the practice of epidemiology links statistical analysis and pattern formation with the creation of narratives about the impact disease may have on the world.”

Kari Nixon, a scholar of medical humanities, explains why it's crucial to remember that coronavirus, like all diseases, is about people. She looks back at what the histories of syphilis, HIV and polio can teach us about coronavirus and the impact of 'outbreak narratives.'

01/18/2020

Wonderful!

“Expected to open early next year, the center will serve the neighborhood's immigrant and refugee population regardless of their health insurance or citizenship status. The nonprofit Wyss Foundation donated $3.1 million to launch the center, which aims to reduce health disparity gaps among refugees and immigrants.”

Wyss Foundation donates $3.1 million to launch center in South Philly

01/13/2020

Fascinating read about the science of pain and Melzack’s crucial contributions. For those of us who have always known pain as a subject of study, this story of a shift in thinking is particularly enlightening.

The theory that he and a colleague devised deepened medicine’s understanding of pain and how it is best measured and treated.

11/19/2019

"Doctors are reporting the first evidence that genetically edited cells could offer a safe way to treat sickle cell disease, a devastating, incurable disorder that afflicts millions of people around the world."

Researchers edited the DNA in bone marrow cells taken from a Mississippi woman with sickle cell disease to produce a treatment that could alleviate the excruciating effects of her inherited illness.

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