Medika Life

Last week, a woman with breast cancer sat across from me and asked whether she had caused it. She didn’t say it that way. She told me she had taken hormone therapy when she entered menopause, then asked, “The hormones caused this, didn’t they?” She was looking backward at a decision she had made and trying to understand whether she had harmed herself. I told her it was more complicated. A few days later, I read a study about hormone therapy and dementia.

Plastic is everywhere. It is in our water bottles, food containers, clothes, and furniture. Over time, plastic breaks down into smaller and smaller pieces. These pieces are called microplastics when they are smaller than five millimeters and nanoplastics when they are even smaller. They are now so common that scientists say almost no person on Earth is free of them. The question remains: if no one is free from them, what is happening to us, and what can we do about this environmental pollution?

For millions living with neurological and psychiatric conditions, medical innovation isn’t moving nearly fast enough. Today, global health systems are confronting a growing brain health crisis encompassing mental, neurological and cognitive well-being. With aging populations, mental health conditions affecting one in eight people worldwide, and the neurological consequences of chronic stress, novel solutions are needed urgently. However, urgency alone doesn’t advance clinical development.

Artificial intelligence moves quickly. Wisdom often takes longer to catch up. That may be why a conversation from the HIMSS 2026 mainstage remains on my mind months later. Amid thousands of pilots, predictions and promises about AI, three health leaders brought something valuable to the conversation: ethics and experience.

For decades we’ve been told to avoid eggs, butter, whole milk, and red meat. Then eggs were declared acceptable again. Butter quietly returned to many breakfast tables. Researchers questioned whether whole milk was really worse than skim milk. Even the evidence surrounding red meat proved to be less certain than many people had assumed. No wonder people throw up their hands and ask, “How can the experts keep changing their minds?” The answer is actually reassuring. Science is supposed to change.

Four days before Dolly Parton died, she was still planning. She was 80. She had written thousands of songs, built businesses, made movies, created Dollywood and spent more than six decades becoming one of the most recognizable people in America. She could reasonably have looked backward and decided there wasn’t much left to accomplish. Instead, she told people she still had “so many things” she wanted to achieve. Four days later, she was dead.

Health innovation loves the language of efficiency: faster, smarter, automated, digital, self-service and AI-enabled. Those words open doors to opportunity because they promise to make health work better for the people who deliver and receive care.

The cleanup process that keeps ordinary cell death from becoming inflammation, and what happens when it begins to fail Billions of your cells will die today. You will probably notice none of them. That may be one of the more remarkable facts about being alive. Cell death sounds catastrophic because we tend to encounter the word in catastrophic settings. A heart attack kills heart muscle. A stroke kills neurons. Cancer treatment kills tumor cells. But most cell death is nothing like this.

Every year, millions of mice, rats, and other animals are used to test new medicines before those medicines ever reach a person. This idea has been around for over a century. If a drug is safe and works in an animal, it should be safe and work in a person too. That belief has shaped how new treatments are built and approved almost everywhere in the world. But now we know that idea doesn’t work, and animals are no substitute for humans.

My artistic wife recently painted a working farm near our vacation home on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. It is a peaceful scene — fields stretching toward a red barn, a white silo, an outbuilding, and a line of mature trees beneath a broad summer sky; a sky hinting of coming rain. On a later occasion she painted exactly the same view from exactly the same location. Everything had changed. Not the trees, the barn, the silo, but the view. The first painting shows crisp detail.