Архив рубрики: Здоровье Америка

If you get a text that says “wyd”—translation: “what are you doing?”—there’s a good chance there’s one thing you’re crossing off that list: replying to the message.

According to a study published Nov. 14 in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 99.3% of texters regularly use abbreviations that, in theory, could save precious typing time, like opting for “hru?” instead of asking someone how they are, or shortening “really” to “rly.” Study author David Fang, a doctoral student in behavioral marketing at Stanford University, wondered if this habit enhanced or diminished digital communication. He’s always made it a point to text in complete sentences, because he worried that otherwise, the people on the receiving end of his messages would think he was slacking off. But he wasn’t sure if his intuition was correct, so he decided to test it.

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It turns out that Fang was on to something. Abbreviations in text messages register as insincere to recipi..

H5N1 avian influenza, more commonly known as bird flu, has infected more than 100 million birds in the U.S. and almost 500 dairy cattle herds across 15 states. The virus has popped up in mammals including elephant seals, goats, foxes, and house cats.

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Despite its prolific spread among animals, federal health authorities maintain that the risk to the U.S. public remains low. There have only been 46 confirmed human cases in the U.S. during the current outbreak. All but one of those people had a known exposure to affected poultry or cattle, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and all of their illnesses were mild. The CDC says there is no evidence that the virus is spreading from person to person at this time.

Recent news, however, has some people feeling uneasy. On Nov. 12, Canadian health authorities announced that an otherwise healthy teenager there who caught bird flu from an unknown source is in critical condition..

Hours after Donald Trump was elected president for the second time, Dr. Clayton Alfonso had two messages from patients seeking to replace their IUDs. Over the next few days, three women inquired about getting their tubes tied.

All of them said the election was the reason they were making these choices now.

Requests for long-term birth control and permanent sterilizations have surged across the nation since the election, doctors told The Associated Press. And companies that sell emergency contraception and abortion pills say they’re seeing significant spikes in requests from people who are stockpiling the medications — one saw a 966% increase in sales of emergency contraception from the week before in the 60 hours after the election.

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“I saw this bump after the Trump election in 2016″ and after Roe vs. Wade was overturned in 2022, said Alfonso, an OB-GYN at Duke University in North Carolina. “But the patients seem more afraid this time.”

Although ant..

Even though we spend roughly a third of our lives doing it, sleep doesn’t always come easily. More than one in three adults in the U.S. don’t get enough sleep, so there’s a good chance you’ve struggled with getting a solid night’s shuteye from time to time or battled with daytime sleepiness.

We asked sleep docs for the one sleep tip that’s changed their lives. Some might surprise you.

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Create a “wind-up” routine

Wendy Troxel, a senior behavioral scientist at RAND and author of the book Sharing the Covers: Every Couple’s Guide to Better Sleep, credits establishing a consistent morning, or “wind-up,” routine, with significantly improving her sleep.

“While many experts focus on the importance of having a ‘wind down’ before bed, I’ve found that how you start your day is just as crucial for setting up a successful night of sleep,” says Troxel.

Our bodies and brains function best when we follow a regular daily routine, and that starts with a regular wa..

Wannabe grandparents have always ruffled feathers by inquiring—sometimes aggressively—about the timing of their future progeny. They’re not the only ones to overstep: Casual friends, distant relatives, coworkers, and even complete strangers often feel entitled to ask couples about family planning.

Once two people get married, those in their orbit tend to become overly inquisitive: “When am I going to get some good news?” as Shula Melamed, a senior behavioral health coach at Headspace Health, puts it. “As soon as you hit one milestone, you’re expected to hit another.” And forget about rounding the corner into your 30s. “At a certain age, it becomes, ‘You better get started—your biological clock is ticking. Time is running out,’” she says. “It’s questions about your intimate life, it’s questions about your own body. It’s interesting that it’s still not taboo, because it doesn’t get more personal than that.”

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Generally, people mean well with these querie..

Orthopedic doctors have a bone to pick with all the people who forget they’re carrying a very important skeleton around every day. We might not be able to see our ribs or tailbone or humerus, but it’s still important to make bone health a priority—because it’s tied to every other aspect of well-being.

“Your bone health and joint health is really tied to your overall wellness and health,” says Dr. David Shau, an orthopedic surgeon and assistant professor at the Burnett School of Medicine at Texas Christian University. Consider, for example, that about 54 million Americans have osteoporosis, low bone mass, or both, and 2 million osteoporotic fractures occur annually. That number will exceed 3 million per year by 2040, researchers predict. “When that happens, you have a period of time where you have to heal and recover,” Shau says. “You can’t be active with your family. You can’t travel. You can’t exercise, so your cardiovascular health goes down, and you start seeing metabolic issues an..

In November 2022, Jillaine St. Michel was 20 weeks pregnant with her second child when an ultrasound revealed that her baby had serious developmental and genetic conditions that made it unlikely to survive the pregnancy. She and her husband were devastated, and decided that an abortion would be the most compassionate choice for their family. But they lived in Idaho at the time, which has one of the strictest abortion bans in the country. The couple contacted several abortion clinics outside of the state and they were eventually able to get an appointment at a clinic in Seattle, Washington because of a cancellation.

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“I didn’t feel like I was able to properly grieve our situation and our experience because we had to deal with the logistics of everything—finding a hotel room, finding a rental vehicle, paying for the procedure out-of-pocket,” St. Michel, 38, says. “In the time of one of the worst situations you can imagine, having to put on your logistics..

When Donald Trump won the U.S. presidential election last week, emotions spiked to feverish levels. Some people celebrated until they were hoarse; others lost their voice from shouting into the void or at those very revelers. Few on opposite sides knew how to talk to each other, at least in any way that felt productive, meaningful, and (imagine!) kind.

“We have in our minds that the people who support the other candidate are these narrow stereotypes of what we’ve seen in the media, and what our own minds created due to our cognitive biases,” says Tania Israel, a professor of counseling psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and author of Beyond Your Bubble: How to Connect Across the Political Divide. “We tend to see people on the other side as being extreme, irrational, and driven by hatred. But that’s a distortion of who most people are.”

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If you love—and maybe even live with—someone who voted for a different candidate, it is poss..

As seven of the 10 states that voted on reproductive rights passed ballot measures to protect access, the country reelected former President Donald Trump—a man who has claimed credit for the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade two years ago. Trump saw victory in four states that passed protections, highlighting what some experts call a “cognitive dissonance” on how people feel about abortion and the candidates they choose to elect.

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Arizona, Missouri, and Montana will amend their state constitutions to enshrine the right to abortion until fetal viability (which is around 24 weeks of pregnancy), with exceptions after that if the pregnant person’s life or health is at risk. Nevada voters also backed a similar measure, but will need to pass it again in 2026 in order to officially amend the state constitution.

And yet, Trump won almost 59% of the vote in both Missouri and Montana, and about 52% of the vote in Arizona, according to the A..

Donald Trump may only be president for another four years, but the impacts of his administration on public health could be catastrophic for a long time to come. While we don’t know exactly what will happen, there’s no doubt the next four years could see attempts to curtail the authority and autonomy of federal health agencies like the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)— something that the President-elect tried during his first term. However, despite Trump’s bravado around letting RFK Jr “go wild” and “do what he wants” on health, it’s unlikely that sweeping closures or reconstructions of federal agencies will be feasible. A more fundamental issue is the likelihood that another Trump term could further undermine scientific regulatory authorities—turning the cracks in public trust that his first administration helped cause into veritable chasms.

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The concern is not just about what the Tru..