Nov. 30: ICYMI news for women
No TL;DR. Just the facts, ma'am. Dozens of new articles in the last week alone that matter to women. Click your picks: we watch the news so you don't have to.
Please let us know what you think about our reformatting—same number of article links, more compactly listed. The lenth of Snippets was making even us crazy. TIA for feedback!
Sunday Snippets is a round-up of the week’s headlines about women’s health and lives that we haven’t covered in our Notes or posts. Snippets goes first to our terrific paid subscribers, then later to free subscribers. It takes a full day each week to search the news and add context. If you find Snippets valuable, give us a shout-out with a❤️ or a share, or reward us one time with a much needed espresso (or snippet of win) or—definitely best of all—a subscription to support what we do. We do it for you.
In the news this week for women: Cover pic: Role model (not) Trump screeches at yet another woman misogyny lives here. A deadly cancer is more prevalent in women, but some vaccines help prevent cancer, heart disease and dementia. Is the flu this year worse than usual? Easy steps to stop snoring. Your fav sleep or arthritis aid could be on the chopping block. How to trust AI on healthcare and not let your phone suck out focus and energy. Red hair strikes again, surprises on causes of non-healing wounds and tendinitis. Pendulum swings anew on OJ and lean beef. Is an occasional holiday binge OK? Lots of news on Ozempic, including a new more powerful version. Multiple news pieces for Gen Z, Millennials, birth and parenting, and midlife/menopause and better. Brain boosts, sleep gifts, and foot massagers. Benefits at 4,000 steps/day for women—that 10K was for men. News on Parkinson’s, mice cured (1) of T1D, and other disease surprises, including big meal dangers. Do world measles outbreaks signal other diseases are next? Updates on ACA subsidies, the infamous Epstein files, and surprisingly quick voter swings. A new category of ‘Seriously?’ and yet more weirdness at Kennedy’s HHS, and lots of news on femtech.
Make sure you check our new 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 cover pic
Katie Rogers, an experienced WH journalist, and Dylan Freedman, an AI analyst journalist, co-authored a data-based piece on Trump aging (gasp! the horror!), including the widely-published video of him dozing through a 20-minute oval office ceremony. Trump went after Ms. Rogers with a vengeance. To make absolutely sure everyone knows it’s fine to bully women, but not men, he didn’t even mention Freedman. That’s the third time in two weeks he’s been awake enough to demo misogyny to his rapt followers, like his Young Republican 24-35 YO male “kid” leaders. Meanwhile, 80% of Americans are not impressed. #whatahero
News about our bodies
- Overall women’s health
Non-smoker lung cancer is an alarming, unrecognized, growing women’s disease. Female heart surgeons unlock the (male) heart fortress. Is it a cold or the flu? Symptoms and testing. Signs point to an ugly flu season; if you didn’t get a flu shot yet, do it now before holiday parties. First steps to stop snoring. Health insurance costs keep going up, affordability crisis looming. Will your fav sleep or arthritis edible be banned next year? Countdown until $24B hemp products ban. Key vaccines that help prevent cancers, chronic disease, dementia. Building trust in Dr. AI. How checking your phone drains focus and energy. Who knew? HRT + smoking may increase hand-elbow tendinitis, and red hair gene linked to poorly-healing wounds.
- Nutrition, exercise, sleep, and looking great
The pendulum swings again. Now it’s (rapid rise blood sugar) orange juice. Some lean beef may be OK on heart disease. That Oura ring might do a lot more in the future. Is occasional holiday binge drinking OK? (Gift article)
GLP news: Ozempic/diet week off during the holidays? (Gift article) More powerful Ozempic v2 coming? WH negotiates lower Ozempic costs—we think; pharmacies will be the canaries on that and other promised drug costs. What happens when you stop GLP-1s?
News by generation/lifestyle
Generation don’t have a ‘hard stop’—they overlap, so the others, too.
Gen Z and Millennials
Traditional medicine is slowly exploring more botanicals. Here’s a common weed that can help heavy periods. (Related: a list of herbs used in medicines.) Women and IBS.
Pregnancy, birth and parenting
Common pregnancy health issues linked to later heart, metabolic problems. (Gift article) Infant botulism update; all MyHeart formula may be contaminated. Study: Fluoride in drinking water doesn’t lower kids’ IQs. Short term social media breaks can improve kids’ mental health. Policy: WHO calls on countries to make fertility care safer, fairer and more affordable. Other countries may; WHO is unloved currently in DC. *Study: Sadly, no surprise: Black women get more (major surgery) C-sections. *Study: Planned out-of-hospital births as safe as hospital birth when risks identified and acted on. It’s complicated: GLP-1s and pregnancy. Toddler’s costly ambulance ride. Dangerous toys on the holiday market.
Midlife and perimenopause
Activities that can slow down brain aging. (Gift article) Midlife blood platelet screening may ID early risk for Alzheimer’s. 14 sleep gifts and the low down on foot massagers.
The free-to-be-me years
*Study (Where was the trial enrollment??) Fun at home with sex toys. *Study: Women’s heart benefits at 4000 steps/day, not [men’s] 10,000 steps/day. When the pendulum swings, it can really swing (and sometimes too far, again), but there researchers say there may be an HRT role in dementia prevention, and prebiotics might yield a brain boost. Medicare cutting reimbursement for home health less than planned.
News affecting our lives and families
Diseases in the news: Experimental hybrid treatment cures(!) T1D in mice. Sleep apnea link to Parkinson’s, and a simple vitamin may help mitigate symptoms. Big meals and heart attacks. Another child dies from (preventable) whooping cough. Deadly, no-cure measles outbreak in SC, but it’s not just in US, and world surge may mean other diseases are next. The good news? Vaccinations are crawling back to pre-pandemic levels. Hog farm run-off and rising cancer rates. Creator warns mental health chatbot danger.
ACA subsidies stand-off: Republicans continue their mastery of the art of indecision against a Dec. 15 deadline. See the latest here.
Epstein files. Remember those? They must be released by Dec 19, with a judge just ruling against the DOJ (again) on two related issues. With sloppy DOJ redacting revictimizing the victims, attorneys ask a judge to order the DOJ to immediately improve their review policy.
An investor says $140K is the new poverty line. Here’s why.
They experienced near-death. Here’s how it changed their lives. (Gift article) And don’t lose your family history: 5 questions to ask elderly relatives over the holidays. (Gift article)
Seriously? The market rewards CVS for claim denial. EPA approves new pesticides with forever chemicals and tries to overturn Biden limits on deadly soot pollution, as FDA faces backlash over reluctance to screen cosmetics for asbestos. Medicaid cuts impact rural health3, and abortion legality bounces again in ND, where OB-Gyns get to spend more time figuring out the law of the day than catching up on science. Trump science privatization (my way or the highway) underway.
Kennedy’s untrustable HHS: HHS confusion ushers in “off-label” COVID vaccination. Pending “update,” CDC quietly turns off vaccine search tool. Vaccine critic who stopped state vaccine campaign to be new CDC deputy. (Makary replacement?) Anti-vax FDA leader links COVID vaccine to maybe 10 childhood deaths out of 22 million kids vaccinated, but the last thing to trust immediately is a tiny study by a known anti-vaxer. And under pressure, the head of the CDC agrees to tighten vaccine approvals. Finally, shades of MTG: Kennedy undertakes weather modification.
Femtech and women’s health innovation: Routine screenings arguably hold the most benefit from AI, and a gyn imaging start-up just raised millions. AHA Ventures looks at investing $20M in heart disease for a potential $2B return. A $20M signal women’s support wear is going mainstream—about time! Most healthcare at home in the future? Female-led start-ups break through women’s health inequity.
Political winds: While young men (but not as many young women) broke somewhat for Trump in 2024, they now are among the strongest who disapprove of him, and Latinos, who also went for Trump, also now strongly disapprove of his policies. Both populations are more likely to be under- or uninsured, so add that to the ACA subsidies bruhaha and escalating health insurance costs as you consider midterms and talk (carefully) with family over the holidays.
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.
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.
Whether you’re 12 minutes or 72 from a hospital can mean life or death. 80% of US counties are already medical deserts, the budget bill Medicaid cuts will hit rural hospitals the hardest. With only two-year terms, the House is particularly unbothered by the future, but reliably red rural areas are going to experience a huge decrease in health access very soon.