Many modern Japanese women are bored with their lives and they use ‘organ language’ to express this frustration…

Medication and the small life-style modifications suggested by professionals for some women no doubt often help to ease the sense of oppression that patients experience. At the same time, medicalization can act as an ‘opiate,’ and can deflect attention away from the social origins of distress.

In 2023, only 407 people donated a kidney to a stranger. The End Kidney Deaths Act would aim to increase that number nearly thirtyfold.

Also read part two here responding to a few, common counterarguments.

Anti-fat bias has an arguably more decisive impact on people’s health than physical body weight.

A hard, sceptical look at the data behind the “obesity epidemic.”

I avoided mirrors. I avoided pictures. I wasn’t going to let anyone take a picture of me from the side until I got my nose fixed.

The above-linked guide is the 2018, Canadian edition which is quite thorough.

The Red Cross in other countries have their own guides. For example, here is the 2020 guidebook for Singapore and India’s 2024 Manual.

The U.S. American Red Cross also has First Aid iPhone and Android apps.

I think most people, who see and experience these statistics take them passively as just like, “That’s just concrete information.” They don’t think of it as a question of like, “Who’s the person you want to be?”

Men’s higher testosterone is typically seen as an innate “sex” difference. However, our experiment demonstrates that gender-related social factors also matter, even for biological measures. Gender socialization may affect testosterone by encouraging men but not women toward behaviors that increase testosterone. This shows that research on human sex biology needs to account for gender socialization and that nurture, as well as nature, is salient to hormone physiology. Our paper provides a demonstration of a novel gender→testosterone pathway, opening up new avenues for studying gender biology.

… a call to a hotline of sorts, though one I’d never heard about before and was surprised to learn existed…

When a doctor reveals a terminal diagnosis to a patient, that process is as delicate a procedure as any surgery

Here’s John Cleese…

Unlike cadaver donation in the West, which has to a large degree maintained the anonymity of the body used to teach medical students, the Taiwanese Tzu Chi Buddhist Silent Mentor programme at the centre of this article foregrounds the identity of the training cadaver as an essential element of medical pedagogy

… hurt and harm are not the same. You can have damage to your body without accompanying pain. You can have pain without accompanying tissue damage. […] what we know about chronic pain is that the brain does become more sensitive over time, and it misinterprets these danger messages as amplified when they don’t need to be.

Wisdom enables helping practitioners to free themselves from “sentimental compassion” and reduce stress when serving

While today a fever is seen as a symptom of some underlying disease like the flu, back then the fever was essentially regarded as the disease itself.

Visitors would pay ten cents to enter a spacious room full of glass boxes that were incubators with tiny premature babies on display.

… it is most likely that the Buddha suffered from mesenteric infarction caused by an occlusion of an opening of the superior mesenteric artery

The Pali account of the physician Jīvaka illustrates a well-established āyurvedic medical tradition and preserves at least one practice not found in classical āyurveda.

Comparing Jīvaka’s story to the old āyurvedic texts.

… to create a healthy indoor space, make it more like the outdoors

“It would not be appropriate for me to give the Buddha a powerful laxative.”

The first few sections of the Robe Chapter tells of the origins and exploits of the Buddha’s personal physician.

Note that, while the treatments described in this tale remain undeniably dramatic, they nevertheless present an accurate account of ancient Indian medicine.

See also: the version of this story preserved in T553.

How much evidence do we need of the harmfulness of something before we act?

… madness itself is not a role that can be played any old how. In every generation are quite firm rules about how you should behave when you are crazy.

A meditation on the impact of biotechnology on society.

… how lust, hatred, delusion and other negative emotions are considered to cause physical and mental pain among [unenlightened beings]

My favorite part of this lovely article is its subtle normalization of the ariya and pathologizing of puthujjanas—a rhetorical flip from our usual conceptualization that I hope catches on!