Making America healthy again, it seems, starts with a double cheeseburger and fries. Earlier this month, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. visited a Steak ’n Shake in Florida and…

Photographs by Elliott Verdier In March 2009, after a long night on duty at the hospital, Emmeline Lagrange took a deep breath and prepared to place a devastating phone call.…

For most of the past century, the United States’ track record on infectious disease has been quite good. Thanks to major investments in public health, diseases such as smallpox, polio,…

The first time that Mehmet Oz was questioned by the Senate, in June 2014, the atmosphere was not inviting. He’d been hauled in to defend his habit of promoting unconventional…

Maybe you were one of the 11.7 million people who watched when, on House M.D., the genius diagnostician Gregory House is roused in the middle of the night by a…

He was one of the few ICU patients whose face I saw in early 2021, when COVID raged through Los Angeles. As a palliative-care physician, my job was to meet,…

Awards season may only happen a few months each year, but the red carpets are always ablaze with stunning hairstyles that set the tone for beauty trends. From timeless waves…

Mycobacterium tuberculosis is a near-perfect predator. In 1882, Robert Koch, the physician who discovered the microbe, told a room full of scientists that it caused one in seven of all…

There seems to be a limit to how anti-vax is too anti-vax in the Trump administration. Yesterday, hours before Dave Weldon was slated to begin his Senate confirmation hearing for…

Until the second Trump administration took over, the National Institutes of Health—the world’s single largest public funder of biomedical research—was not in the business of canceling its grants. Of the…