Danielle Melfi wants everyone to think about their fertility just a little bit earlier

Thank you Danielle Melfi, and happy National Infertility Awareness Week! You can follow the powerful work of RESOLVE on their website here—in particular, their legislation tracker is a wonderful tool for monitoring on-the-ground movements for fertility access across the nation.

Julia Belluz spent months talking to people who are using GLP-1s to treat things no one designed them for — arthritis, migraines, long Covid, addiction, traumatic brain injury. Her piece in the New York Times is less a story about any one drug than about what happens when a powerful intervention enters a healthcare system too slow to study it. The patients got there first, and now the science is catching up.

I have been a fan of Jennifer Block’s meticulous reporting for a long time, and am thrilled to see her bring it to Substack Unpopular Science. Her special dispatch on a malpractice trial in Corvallis, Oregon involves a 32-year-old woman who says a hospital violated her right to informed consent when her baby was breech. Block sat through three weeks of proceedings in person to tell this story. What she found — about how institutions defend themselves in these cases, and what informed consent actually means in a delivery room — will send a shiver down your spine.

Epic Systems is many things: the largest clearing house of American medical records in the world, one of the longest-standing private companies in healthcare, and potentially, our industry’s next biggest player in AI. Thankfully, Robert Wachter is here to unpack it all for us in his recent piece in Pattern Recognition about what it looks like for an old industry standby to catch up. Nobody knows exactly what will happen…but I do know I’m thrilled to host Dr. Wachter for my next Preprint Live on May 8 at 2:30 PM ET / 11:30 AM PST! Hope to see you then.