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By
Eric Boodman
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Cheryl Senter for STAT
NEW LONDON, N.H. — The voice sounded like a child crying. It seemed to follow Dr. Anna Konopka around, echoing through the rooms of her house, audible everywhere. She thought it might be coming from the neighbors’ — but no, it was clearly inside
her own walls. “Mrs. Ghost,” she called it.
Of course, she didn’t tell anyone. They would think she was unstable. She was a primary care doctor, treating both children and adults. It wouldn’t do for people to hear that she was bothered by ghosts. But finally, one night around midnight, as
she was getting ready for bed — there it was, in her room, a few feet away, sobbing. “I said, ‘All right, what do you want from me? I will … pray for you for three days. Let me know if it is enough,’” Konopka recalled. “And she stopped crying. She never followed
me again.”
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By
Rebecca Robbins
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Alex Hogan/STAT
CANTON, Mass. — Collegium Pharmaceutical, the scrappy upstart taking on the mighty opioid maker Purdue Pharma, is having a moment.
The company recently convinced
Cigna, Humana, Navitus, and top health insurers in Florida and Pennsylvania to cover only its product Xtampza — and not Purdue’s infamous
OxyContin — for most patients prescribed the long-acting opioid known to scientists as oxycodone. Earlier this month came another win: The Food and Drug Administration agreed to let Collegium
update Xtampza’s label to describe data demonstrating that the capsules are harder than OxyContin to abuse when crushed.
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By
Bob Tedeschi
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Maria Fabrizio for STAT
It was mid-October in St. Joseph, Mo., and Michael Bischoff, 46 and rail thin with dark wispy hair and a faintly visible scar behind his right ear, stood before nursing home residents and their family members, to tell a story of generations.
The community room smelled like hamburgers and potatoes. At Bischoff’s side sat his father, Donald, 75, head down and silent as usual, in a wheelchair, a decades-old scar arcing his scalp.
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By
Sue Trupin
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JENS BUTTNER/AFP/Getty Images
One morning in the fall of 2010, my husband got out of bed and crashed to the floor, unconscious. As Eddie came to, he complained of a painful pressure in his chest. In the hospital, his condition worsened. Every test confirmed what I as a nurse
already knew, that his heart was shutting down. A day later he died.
As I mourned Eddie’s death, I worried that it would plunge me deeper into an episode of depression that had begun earlier that spring after a succession of harrowing family crises.
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By
Leah Samuel
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STAT
’Tis the season for the gift of science. And we’ve taken some of the work out of the holiday by rounding up the most inspired, innovative, and delightful gift ideas for anyone on your list.
Maybe you’ve got a budding young scientist in your family, or you want to inspire someone in your life to love medicine. Maybe you’ve got a friend in a scientific profession — or one who dabbles on the side. Or maybe you need that perfect something
for a colleague, neighbor, or your family physician.
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By
Jennifer Adaeze Okwerekwu
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Mike Reddy for STAT
’Tis the season.
Thanksgiving? Sure. Christmas? That too. But for thousands of fourth-year medical students and foreign medical graduates all over the United States, fall through early winter is a time of job hunting — interviewing for residencies. This is a critical
step in our training, where we specialize in the individual fields of medicine that will carry us through our careers.
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By
Ike Swetlitz
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APStock
The Food and Drug Administration this week made an announcement that sounded quite definitive: It’s illegal to sell do-it-yourself kits to edit human genes.
“FDA is aware that gene therapy products intended for self-administration and ‘do it yourself’ kits to produce gene therapies for self-administration are being made available to the public,” according to an
FDA website updated Tuesday. “The sale of these products is against the law.”
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