Nov 22: ICYMI news for women

This was a hard post to write. It's also why we're making today's Snippets immediately available to all today.

Sunday Snippets is a round-up of headlines about women’s health and lives from the past week that we haven’t covered in our regular posts. Published first for paid subscribers, check on Tuesdays for the free version. Snippets is a perk for our terrific paid subscribers, released two days later for all subscribers. It takes hours each week to search for relevant news, add context and deeper dive links and get these news stories to you without ads or promotions. If you find this valuable, give us a shout-out with a❤️ or a share, or consider buying us a much needed espresso (or a snippet of wine?) or—definitely better yet—a paid subscription to support our work: we do it for you.

• Make sure you check our posts and Notes: We’re updating more frequently there to keep Snippets a readable length.

• Tip: If you hit a paywall here or anywhere, copy the URL of the article into archive.ph.¹

• See our footnotes and italicized comments for context from our 30+ years in healthcare.

• Articles marked with an asterisk (*) are from professional journals.

• Disclaimer: Listing these headlines does not indicate a recommendation. With so many news items each week, we don’t take the time to review each. Use common sense and dig deeper into any issue that interests you. More on sources and bias.²

This week’s Women in the News pic

Remember when you could point to a president and tell your kids they could grow up to be like him? Or watch a speech that brought tears to your eyes—and not because you were enraged? The genius in the White House reached new misogyny lows this week, telling journalist Catherine Lucey, “Quiet, Piggy” on Air Force 1, surrounded by other reporters and his usual syncophants. Ms. Lucey, pictured in this post, is an experienced, smart, professional journalist, who was doing her job: asking the questions all of us want answered. ABC’s Mary Bruce was doing the same thing this week when Trump lambasted her on national television while also (unconstitutional and likely illegally) threatening her employer, showing off his power to the smirking man honored in the Oval Office, the same man who ordered another journalist murdered and dismembered. The nation is so inured to Trump’s degeneration, we barely blinked. But this article in the LA times has it right: ‘Quiet, piggy’ wasn’t a joke. It’s a dangerous invitation to violence. And it’s a key, well-recognized move in authoritarian playbooks and an on-message call to yet more female violence for his MAGA followers, already primed for exactly that. Ask MTG, now on the receiving end of the death threats she herself frequent created for others.

On multiple fronts (here and here and here and here) there’s an increasing sense the wheels are coming off this mess. In fact, MAGAs may be the only ones whose heads are finally spinning more than the rest of us after a month of chaotic 180s: Israel and Epstein—both huge MAGA priorities, and the big MTG-Trump break-up, with MAGA goddess MTG ultimately quitting Congress. This week, MAGA also watched Trump tell his new BFF Zohran Mamdani that it was OK to call Trump a fascist and then saying he—Trump—would be happy to live in NYC under Mamdani, the same guy Trump’s been calling a communist and threatening to arrest.

More than ever, political news is intersecting with women’s health and lives. This Substack isn’t primarily about politics. It’s about women’s health and lives. But all our lives as women, mothers, and leaders are being massively impacted by politics. There are excellent political writers on Substack who follow the political muck far better than we can. So we’ll try to leave it to them to cover the depths our current political cluster and get back to our mission once we talk about the CDC…again. But do stay keenly tuned on politics right now. As a nation, we haven’t been in a place this dangerous since Nixon.³

Women’s health

Why you won’t see a whole lot of actual women’s health news today:

1. Scan any health news site and you’ll see it’s consumed by the new chaos in the CDC. The lede is Kennedy’s change to the CDC pages on vaccines and autism, which he directed himself because, well, he says. This is a new and devastating turn by the CDC, which has been effectively dismantled by the Secretary of HHS. Behind that story is the power struggle between Kennedy and Marty Makary, an actual physician and public health expert hired by Kennedy to head the CDC. I can’t find anyone who actually says it out loud, but IMO the CDC vaccine-autism dictum from Kennedy was likely because Makary wouldn’t link vaccines and autism. Given Makary was hired in part by Kennedy because of Makary’s own vaccine skepticism, it that’s the case, it says a lot. Kennedy, via Trump, went after Makary’s top policy and research aid this week a time-honored way to undermine a powerful foe’s org structure.

   1. “We can no longer trust the CDC website.” For nearly 80 years, the CDC was respected around the world for its authoritative, evidence-based leadership in public health. After unprecedented autism-vaccine messaging change, scientists, advocates say CDC no longer trustworthy. See this excellent commentary from Dr. Katelyn Jetelina, a former CDC advisor whose advice is followed worldwide by over a half billion people. For anyone like Dr. Jetelina who’s spent a lifetime in healthcare, this is a heart-breaking statement.

2. The ACA bruhaha in Congress, Trump’s malfeasance, undoubtedly the new CDC chaos, and another upcoming paid vaca have stalled the (alrady weak) possibility of any other health news from there.

3. Health reporters have already abandoned ship for the holiday. The good news is that also means there are more in-depth pieces filling the health news that are not time-sensitive that often our affect our lives even more than the headline of the day, below.

Health call-outs by generation and lifestyle

Remember, these issues often overlap generations. the generations before and after yours.

• Gen Z and Millennials

  • 9 easy brain executive function tips for organizing work, ADHD, brain fog and more.

  • More Millennials are being diagnosed with colon cancer. What to know about your risk.

• Pregnancy, birth and parenting. I wish this were a happier section today.

  • The Senator who is actually a physician: “I’m a doctor who has seen people die from vaccine-preventable diseases. What parents need to hear right now is vaccines for measles, polio, hepatitis B and other childhood diseases are safe and effective and will not cause autism. Any statement to the contrary is wrong, irresponsible, and actively makes Americans sicker.”

  • The good news? * Yet another study says Tylenol is not linked to autism or other neurodevelopmental disorders.

  • Because our peer affluent countries do so much better, it’s even more alarming that the US just received another D+ on maternal health. We’re the ones who decide whether we tolerate this—and you start to do that with your vote. (#midterms) We’ve known how to fix this for years. Great maternal and infant health scores are not a mystery; see more below. Coming tomorrow in WomenUnbroken: A good place to start on better health for your own pregnancy and to fix our internationally-embarrassing maternal and infant health grades.

    • A new state ‘leader’ with worst maternal health in US—and among the worst in infant health.

    • How we differ from other developed countries.

    • Related: How you can protect yourself: “I cover women’s health. Here’s my plan to ensure hospital staff listen when I’m in labor.” (Gift article and I can’t believe I even have to post something like this. Women are incredibly vulnerable and dependent during birth; NO woman should have to “protect” herself then. It’s we as a nation who should be protecting her as she does the incredibly difficult work of birthing our nation’s future.)

• Midlife and perimenopause

  • Walking backwards: Unexpected power move for midlife strength. I learned a while ago from an aquatic physical therapist that walking backwards in water—a pool—is great prevention for sciatica attacks. This is the ground version.

  • NSFW: * Kinsey Institute: Free, age-old fix for menopause symptoms.

    • Related and definitely do not open at work: (Womanizer).

  • SFW: *Another old, easy, free trick to reduce hot flashes.

    Tossing and turning: New science on sleep issues during menopause.

• The free-to-be-me years

  • The best books of 2025 about healthy aging.

  • * Study: Is ‘time poverty’ the hidden barrier to dementia risk reduction?

  • The anti-aging gold rush should focus on quality of life, not just quantity.

Women’s lives - news that affects our lives and those we love

• SC tried—again—to make women who get an abortion chargeable for murder. Again, it didn’t make it out of committee. That didn’t stop the state from charging a woman who attempted an abortion for murder.

• Looming affordability crises set to impact Americans with employer insurance plans.

• Unheard. Unserved: Black women face added healthcare barriers as race, gender intersect.

• The Trump administration is turning drug reviews into make-a-deal. Surprised? Not.

• Pediatrician: 5 common mistakes grandparents make. (Gift article)

• The rise of the ‘just in case’ MRI.

• Why embracing technology as we age is a good thing. (Gift article)

• Exactly as expected: With huge increases in ACA costs, Americans searching for cheap health plans are getting scammed.

  • Wonder where your health dollars go? Here you are. Or this.

  • How patients are using AIA to fight denied insurance claims.

• In the midst of worsening physician and nursing shortages, Trump administration changes limit physician and nursing student access to scholarship funds. Guaranteed that if you think healthcare is a problem now, you will absolutely feel this, personally and in caring for those you love.

• We thought the threat was gone, but new bird flu death is a brand new strain. If only we had a functioning CDC.

• How putting thoughts into words can shift brain from despair, overwhelm to clarity.

• Study: Data center pollution health impact tripled in four years.

• Most and least dependable airlines for holiday travel. (Now they tell us.)

1. Archive.ph is a web archiving service that captures and preserves snapshots of web pages. If it’s a lesser-known site or if the article is very popular, it could take a few minutes to load, but it generally works very well—including, BTW, forwarding posts to Canada or other countries wisely concerned about some of our US media.

2. Sources: We check both public and professional news sites, with click-throughs for sources. We tend to go straight to the original info more than the interpretation of popular magazines and blogs, as we’ve found the latter do not always correctly interpret medical science information. Medical editors are becoming rare. We give you the news directly, including the primary studies when available, and leave you to your interpretation.

Bias: Yes, we’re biased. 1) We’ve been in women’s and children’s health for over three decades as providers, international consultants, and health system execs. If you’re in healthcare, with few exceptions, women’s and children’s services are not where you make money; those services are more often loss leaders. From policy to research to reimbursement for providers, women and children are second rate citizens, absolutely related to the historical perception of monetary value. So, you probably won’t be surprised we do not lean politically right on women’s health. We are center left but fair: we do not misrepresent data, and we do scan information from neutral and both center-left and center-right sites. It’s also possible we are a bit cynical. 2) We were trained in Western medicine, but have lived long enough to know much of Eastern and Ayurvedic medicine systems work just as well—what the US now calls “complementary and integrative medicine.” We strongly prefer actual scientific research to back up therapies, and definitely for therapies with potential harmful side effects. 3) If you’re wondering about media bias, check it on AllSides. We do. Another cool website and app (thank you, Julie L!) is ground.news, which rates political bias in particular stories.

3. As The Bulwark wrote this week, we’re at a time more dangerous than the last months of Nixon, this time without the people in Nixon’s WH who backstopped his worst impulses. Generations theory—which looks at five centuries of history—also holds this is a very dangerous time.