Get the health information and medications you need every weekday with STAT’s free newsletter Morning Rounds. Sign up here.
good morning. Do you know Emily Dickinson’s poem? “For I could not stop for death – / He was kind enough to stop for me – / The carriage sustained only us – / And immortality.” I would love to hear it perused by longevity enthusiasts. In the meantime, scroll down for Sarah Todd’s excellent article on the movement’s latest life-threatening efforts.
President Trump says latest medical exam was ‘perfect’
President Trump underwent another medical exam yesterday, which the White House is calling a preventive health exam and dental exam. This is the fourth public examination he has taken since taking office last year.
Trump said on social media that “everything checked out perfectly” during what he called a “six-month medical checkup.” Read more from AP.
“The bigger issue today is not speculation. The real issue is transparency,” physician Uche Blackstock wrote in a post on X regarding the trial. “The public has the right to clear, timely, medically-based information that is free from political bias, prejudice, or age discrimination.”
Utilization of emergency medical care across the United States
New data from the CDC shows that in 2024, about 28% of people will visit an urgent care center at least once and 19% will visit a retail clinic, such as the Minito Clinic at CVS. Adults 65 and older were less likely to receive emergency care than younger adults. A previous analysis of data by the National Center for Health Statistics, which included a breakdown by race, found that black and Hispanic adults were less likely than white adults to visit urgent care or retail clinics. The latest analysis does not include racial differences.
Urgent care centers have been around since the 1970s, but their number nationwide has doubled in the past decade, from 7,000 to more than 14,000. “Emergency centers have become rescue airports for our broken system,” Franz Rittucci, a physician and president of the American Academy of Emergency Medicine, told WHYY last fall.
Inside a meeting where death is (theoretically) optional
STAT’s Laure Andrillon
The Longevity Conference, launched by Vitalist Bay last year, brings together founders, investors, biohackers, researchers, and those with a general interest in discussing how to avoid and ultimately overcome death. STAT’s Sarah Todd attended this year’s conference and today published an article on the latest in deadly science and theory.
This piece is a little goofy, but also unforgettable. Here are some details I’ve been thinking about for a long time.
- A photo shown to Sarah by one of the attendees showed children holding placards that read, “Stop aging and save your parents (mom first).”
- The whole concept of bodied. Imagine a headless bag of organs in place of an elderly person’s failing heart and kidneys. (“What if we could obtain a supply of human bodies in an ethical way?” said postdoc Carlston Charlesworth. “There’s no logical reason why that would be wrong.”)
- A business model for health testing outlined by a venture capitalist: Always give people at least one positive result, then sell it with subscriptions, interventions, and coaching to improve other metrics.
Read Sarah’s story about how longevity went from a movement to an industry. Bonus: She also asked 45 conference speakers and attendees how long they expected to live. The distribution of that bar graph is really impressive.
Understanding the trends of illegal alien patients
On President Trump’s first day back in the White House, the Department of Homeland Security released a memo rescinding a policy that prohibits immigration agents from conducting searches, arrests and other enforcement actions in “protected areas” such as schools, churches and hospitals. A study published yesterday in JAMA Network Open found that in the six months following the directive, one Massachusetts hospital system saw an approximately 11% drop in emergency room visits by undocumented immigrants.
Or at least researchers think visits from illegal immigrants have declined. Because health systems do not track patients’ documentation status, the analysis was conducted using two alternatives: emergency insurance products available to undocumented immigrants in the state (or those lacking insurance information) and patients’ preferred language. There are limitations to the use of this insurance product, especially when attempted in other states with high rates of uninsured people. However, overall, preferred language did not consistently identify similar reductions in ER visits, meaning that it may not be a reliable surrogate for future research on this group.
It’s the end of science in the world as we know it.
Neuroscientist Jonathan Jackson feels: Are you okay! Really.
Last month, a large-scale study of about 4,000 social science papers found that only about half of them can reproduce the results. Jackson wrote that this wasn’t necessarily surprising, but it was alarming, especially given how American science was shattered last year by Trump administration policies and funding cuts. Despite the very real despair, Jackson argues in a new First Opinion essay that academics and scientists need to stop mourning and start acting.
“We were so busy feeling righteous that we forgot to be resourceful,” he writes. Read more about what happens next.
