Архив рубрики: Здоровье Америка

When you have social anxiety, walking into a room full of people can make you feel like every eyeball in the place is boring directly into your soul, and that nothing you say will possibly be smart or funny or coherent enough.

That can trigger an array of physical, cognitive, and emotional symptoms. “For some people, it might mean a racing heart and dizziness and feeling flushed,” says Kirsten Hall-Baldwin, a licensed clinical professional counselor in Chicago. “Others might be in these thought spirals, or feel like their mind is going blank or freezing.”

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Hall-Baldwin coaches her anxious clients to create a coping plan: a proactive list of strategies and techniques that can help temper their unease. Here, experts share nine tips on how to carry a conversation when you have social anxiety.

Practice in low-stakes environments

Before showing up at a networking event or your 10-year high school reunion, try making conversation with baristas, waiters, n..

Walking has many demonstrated health benefits: improving heart health, lowering blood sugar, burning calories for weight loss, and improving muscle tone.

But most of the research on walking has focused on how long people walk, not how quickly. Recent studies have hinted that altering your walking pace—which has become popular as Japanese walking (also known as interval walking)—might have additional benefits.

In a study published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, researchers led by Dr. Wei Zheng, professor and director of the Vanderbilt University Epidemiology Center, studied whether walking pace made a difference in people’s health. They studied 86,000 people who reported how much they walked each day, as well as other health-related activities such as their diet and whether they smoked or drank alcohol. Over 17 years, the researchers tracked their death rates and correlated mortality to their walking pattern.

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They found that people ..

On July 28, University of Colorado football coach Deion Sanders revealed that he was diagnosed with an aggressive form of bladder cancer—but now, after treatment, is considered cured.

“We’re going to beat it, ain’t we?” Sanders, who is 57, asked one of his doctors, Dr. Janet Kukreja, who appeared on stage with him at a press conference in Boulder. “It’s beaten,” she responded, later adding that as an oncologist, she does not “use [the word cure] lightly.”

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The spotlight on bladder cancer is “long overdue,” Kukreja told TIME after the press conference. (She is the director of urologic oncology at the CU Cancer Center on the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus.) “It’s high time that people recognize bladder cancer is a very serious cancer, and a very common cancer.”

Here’s what to know about the disease, as well as what it’s like to live with a restructured bladder.

Who’s most at risk for bladder cancer?

More than 80,000 new cases of bladd..

When Katie Thurston was diagnosed with Stage IV metastatic breast cancer earlier this year, at age 34, people kept telling her they knew someone with the same diagnosis. Solidarity, you might think. A helpful way to relate. Not exactly: Their friend or family member had died.

This scenario is “pretty recurring,” says Thurston, who starred on season 17 of The Bachelorette, and while people have good intentions—they want you to know they have experience with what you’re going through—the remark doesn’t land well. “We understand that death is a possibility in this diagnosis,” she says. “I don’t need to hear that.”

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Thurston has been on the receiving end of a lot of outreach and opinions since she shared her breast cancer diagnosis—from strangers online, as well as people she knows in real life. While death-related stories are particularly painful, there are plenty of other comments that fall short of helpful.

Communication slip-ups in this area are com..

The sweeping tax and spending package that President Donald Trump signed into law earlier this month could cause thousands of people to lose access to treatment for opioid use disorder, leading to roughly 1,000 additional overdose deaths each year, researchers estimate.

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Fatal overdoses have been on the decline since they reached a record high in 2022. Drug policy and health experts have widely credited the drop to public health measures, such as investing in treatments, expanding therapies, and decreasing stigma.

But now, they fear that Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” will undo that progress.

The day before the bill passed the House, a group of researchers sent a memo to House Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune, estimating that the package would cause about 156,000 people to lose access to treatment for opioid use disorder. The next day, the bill cleared the House, and the day after, Trump signed it into law.

“I’m angry,” says ..

“Japanese walking” isn’t new, but the workout recently gained legs on TikTok: People credit it with making their walking routines more exciting and leading to an array of benefits, from weight loss to better heart health.

While its name is derived from research conducted in Japan, this style of workout—known as interval walking—is popular around the world, and for good reason. It involves walking at a high intensity level for three minutes, followed by three minutes at a lower intensity, on repeat for at least 30 minutes, four times a week.

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“We know that exercise matters, and we know that intensity matters,” says Laura Richardson, an exercise physiologist and clinical associate professor of kinesiology at the University of Michigan. “I think it’s caught on because it’s so sustainable—it’s short, it’s doable, you don’t have to be in a gym, and there are lots of benefits to walking.”

We asked experts to break down exactly why Japanese walking is so ef..

As much as we want to put it behind us, COVID-19 isn’t going away. Cases are currently rising across the country in a summer surge.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports that cases of COVID-19 are increasing in nine states and likely growing in another 16. The trends are estimates, as the CDC no longer conducts rigorous surveillance of cases based on results from lab tests. Fewer people are also getting tested. But the data do provide a hint of how the disease is changing over time, and new monitoring systems that track viruses in wastewater confirm the rise.

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The CDC says that the overall level of respiratory diseases in the U.S.— COVID-19, flu, and RSV—remains “very low,” but that emergency room visits for COVID-19 are on the rise, accounting for 0.5% of emergency room visits in the country as of mid July, compared to 0.3% of cases at the beginning of the summer. While that may seem like a small increase, emergency room v..

Dr. James H. Bekker made it clear while standing at a podium in front of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in Silver Spring, Md. on July 23: there is no way to replace fluoride supplements if the government decides to take them off the market.

In communities without fluoridated water, these supplements are the only way that families can help children access fluoride, the dentist said, thus protecting their teeth from decay.

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“When we don’t have fluoride, there are certain things that happen that are very disturbing,” said Bekker, a professor at the University of Utah School of Dentistry and a past president of the American Dental Association, at a hearing debating the FDA’s plan to ban ingestible fluoride tablets from the marketplace. “We have an increase in tooth decay, and we have an increase in the use of emergency services to receive care for dental emergencies.”

Yet the FDA appears to be moving towards banning these supplements after ..

Aisha Adkins’ mother Rosetta was adamant that she wanted to age at home. So when Rosetta’s dementia started worsening at age 59, Aisha started looking around for options.

She quickly found that round-the-clock at-home care was extremely costly, and that her mother didn’t qualify for government assistance. Stuck in the middle, Aisha, who was 29 at the time, ended up quitting her job to take of her mother care of her herself.

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At first, Rosetta just needed help preparing meals and reminders to take her medication. But as her care needs deepened, Aisha had to learn how to bathe and dress and feed her mother. She and her father hired a home health aide for a few hours a week when they could, but most of the care fell to the two of them until her mother finally qualified for Medicaid through a complicated process called spousal impoverishment protection, which allowed her father to keep some assets.

“We faced so many challenges; it was really a struggle..

Federal health officials are scrutinizing a mineral—added to some makeup, medications, and foods—that many people have never thought twice about: talc.

In a recent viewpoint article called “Priorities for a New FDA,” published in the medical journal JAMA, Dr. Martin Makary, commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and Dr. Vinay Prasad, the FDA’s Chief Medical and Scientific Officer, wrote that the FDA conducted an expert panel on talc in May. They also noted that some companies have removed talc from baby powder because it’s a carcinogen. Johnson & Johnson, for example, stopped using talc in 2023 following more than 60,000 legal claims from ovarian cancer patients.

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The JAMA article added that talc remains common, since people still “ingest it regularly” as an ingredient in various medications and foods.

Despite the lawsuits, though, research hasn’t confirmed whether talc causes cancer, especially when consumed through food. Mean..