A historian and sociologist of science re-examines the “posture panic” of the last century. You’ll want to sit down for this.For decades, the idea of standing properly upright carried considerable political and social baggage. Slouching was considered a sign of decay.In the early 20th century, posture exams became mainstays in the military, the workplace and schools, thanks in part to the American Posture League, a group of physicians, educators and health officials that formed in 1914. In 1917, a study found that roughly 80 percent of Harvard’s freshman class had poor posture. Industrialists piled on with posture-enhancing chairs, products and gadgets.But the actual science doesn’t support the conventional wisdom about proper posture, Beth Linker argues in her new book, “Slouch: Posture Panic in Modern America.” Dr. Linker, a historian and sociologist of science at the University of Pennsylvania, recently sat for an interview with The New York Times; the conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.Nice to meet you.Your posture looks pretty good. And it doesn’t matter — that’s the whole point of my book. It’s fake news.Our obsession with great posture is fake news? I’m off the hook!Concern for posture, as a matter of etiquette, has been around since the Enlightenment, if not earlier, but poor posture did not become a scientific and medical obsession until after the publication of Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species” in 1859. He posited that humans evolved through natural selection, and that the first thing to develop was bipedalism; in other words, standing upright preceded brain development.This idea was controversial because convention taught that higher intellect distinguished humans from nonhuman animals, and now it appeared that only a mere physical difference, located in the spine and feet, separated humankind from the apes.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

Dr. Nora Volkow, who leads the National Institutes of Drug Abuse, would like the public to know things are getting better. Mostly.Historically speaking, it’s not a bad time to be the liver of a teenager. Or the lungs.Regular use of alcohol, tobacco and drugs among high school students has been on a long downward trend.In 2023, 46 percent of seniors said that they’d had a drink in the year before being interviewed; that is a precipitous drop from 88 percent in 1979, when the behavior peaked, according to the annual Monitoring the Future survey, a closely watched national poll of youth substance use. A similar downward trend was observed among eighth and 10th graders, and for those three age groups when it came to cigarette smoking. In 2023, just 15 percent of seniors said that they had smoked a cigarette in their life, down from a peak of 76 percent in 1977.Illicit drug use among teens has remained low and fairly steady for the past three decades, with some notable declines during the Covid-19 pandemic.In 2023, 29 percent of high school seniors reported using marijuana in the previous year — down from 37 percent in 2017, and from a peak of 51 percent in 1979.There are some sobering caveats to the good news. One is that teen overdose deaths have sharply risen, with fentanyl-involved deaths among adolescents doubling from 2019 to 2020 and remaining at that level in the subsequent years.Dr. Nora Volkow has devoted her career to studying use of drugs and alcohol. She has been the director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse since 2003. She sat down with The New York Times to discuss changing patterns and the reasons behind shifting drug-use trends.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

What’s in the $24.99 tub, exactly? Lindsay Moyer, a nutritionist, reviews the contents of the movie-snack “vessel.”In the “Dune” movies, a gigantic sandworm can rise from the desert and devour soldiers and military vehicles in its gaping maw. In real life, humans watching movies devour popcorn. These two ideas have been combined to spawn the “Dune” popcorn bucket, a sandworm-shaped tub that is having a cultural moment. The bucket arrives on the heels of other recent popcorn collectibles, like the 16-inch Barbie Corvette snack holder. But is there more to these vessels than meets the eye?Lindsay Moyer thinks about popcorn. She is the senior nutritionist at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a nonprofit consumer advocacy group focused on food systems and healthy eating. She sat down with The New York Times to discuss what she sees when she considers “Dune: The Popcorn Bucket.” This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.Have you seen the “Dune” popcorn bucket?I’ve seen photos. I haven’t seen it in real life.First impressions?It looks pretty wild. It looks like it would actually slow you down in terms of eating. It doesn’t seem ideally designed to serve yourself popcorn out of.Because it is shaped like a worm’s mouth?Yeah, because of all the stuff sticking out of it.Do you like popcorn?We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

The NewsIncreasingly, doctor visits by adolescents and young adults involve mental health diagnoses, along with the prescription of psychiatric medications.That was the conclusion of a new study that found that in 2019, 17 percent of outpatient doctor visits for patients ages 13 to 24 in the United States involved a behavioral or mental health condition, including anxiety, depression, suicidal ideation, self-harm or other issues. That figure rose sharply from 2006, when just 9 percent of doctor’s visits involved psychiatric illnesses.The study, published Thursday in JAMA Network Open, also found a sharp increase in the proportion of visits involving psychiatric medications. In 2019, 22.4 percent of outpatient visits by the 13-24 age group involved the prescription of at least one psychiatric drug, up from 13 percent in 2006.The Big PictureThe study is the latest evidence in a shift in the kinds of ailments affecting children, adolescents and young adults. For many decades, their health care visits involved more bodily ailments, such as broken bones, viruses and drunken-driving injuries. Increasingly, however, doctors are seeing a wide variety of behavioral and mental health issues.Marshall Motsenbocker, standing right, a researcher at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, leading a mental health session at a school in Dallas in 2018.Benny Snyder/Associated PressThe reasons are not entirely clear. Some experts have said that modern life presents a new kind of mental pressure, even as society has limited the risks of physical ailments.The latest study does not posit a reason for the shift. But the pandemic alone was not to blame, it noted. “These findings suggest the increase in mental health conditions seen among youth during the pandemic occurred in the setting of already increasing rates of psychiatric illness,” wrote the authors, a pediatrician and psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School. “Treatment and prevention strategies will need to account for factors beyond the direct and indirect effects of the pandemic.”The NumbersThe analysis was drawn from the National Ambulatory Care Survey, which asks a sample of clinicians from across the country about the reasons for patient visits. Between 2006 and 2019, patients aged 13 to 24 made 1.1 billion health care visits, of which 145 million involved mental health issues. But the share of mental-health-related visits rose each year, the study found, as did the prescription of psychiatric medications, including stimulants, antipsychotics, mood stabilizers and anti-anxiety drugs.The study found that antidepressants had the greatest increase, but it did not specify the exact level, said Dr. Florence T. Bourgeois, a pediatrician at Boston Children’s Hospital, an associate professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and a co-author of the paper.The prescription patterns leave an open question, she said.“We can’t differentiate whether this speaks to the severity of conditions or changes in prescribing attitudes and trends,” she said. Either way, she added, “We are treating these conditions aggressively.”

The F.D.A. recently approved the first therapy for patients in danger of losing their toes, fingers and other exposed parts of the body.The first time Dr. Peter Hackett saw a patient with frostbite, the man died from his wounds. It was in Chicago in 1971, and the man had gotten drunk and passed out in the snow, his fingers so frozen that gangrene eventually set in.Dr. Hackett later worked at Mount Everest Basecamp, on Denali, Alaska, and now in Colorado, becoming expert in treating cold-weather injury. The experience was often the same: There was not much to do about frostbite, except rewarm the patient, give aspirin, amputate in severe cases and, more often, wait and accept that six months later the patient’s body might “auto-amputate” by naturally shedding a dead finger or toe.His mentor in Anchorage used to say, “Frostbite January, Amputation July,” remembered Dr. Hackett, clinical professor at the Altitude Research Center at the University of Colorado’s Anschutz Medical Campus. “For centuries, there was nothing else to do.”This month, the Food and Drug Administration approved the first therapy for treatment of severe frostbite in the country. The drug, iloprost, is given intravenously for several hours a day over a little more than week. It works by opening blood vessels to improve circulation, limiting inflammation and stopping the formation of platelet clumps that can stop circulation and kill tissue. Most at risk are a person’s toes, fingers, ears, cheeks and nose.The approval of the treatment is as much scientific novelty as it is pharmaceutical industry moneymaking bonanza. Experts say there is not good data on how many people suffer severe enough frostbite to receive this therapy. But the cases could be as few as several dozens of people a year in the United States, according to Dr. Norman Stockbridge, head of the F.D.A.’s division of cardiology and nephrology in the agency’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, which approved the drug.“When you get down to people who get really frostbitten and really at risk of losing digits, it’s pretty uncommon,” Dr. Stockbridge said. Still, “it’s better to have a drug for this than nothing.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

The NewsGrowing numbers of children and adolescents are being prescribed multiple psychiatric drugs to take simultaneously, according to a new study in the state of Maryland. The phenomenon is increasing despite warnings that psychotropic drug combinations in young people have not been tested for safety or studied for their impact on the developing brain.The study, published Friday in JAMA Open Network, looked at the prescribing patterns among patients 17 or younger enrolled in Medicaid in Maryland from 2015 to 2020. In this group, there was a 9.5 percent increase in the prevalence of “polypharmacy,” which the study defined as taking three or more different classes of psychiatric medications, including antidepressants, mood-stabilizing anticonvulsants, sedatives and drugs for A.D.H.D. and anxiety drugs.The Big PictureThe study looked at only one state, but state data have been used in the past to explore this issue, in part because of the relative ease of gathering data from Medicaid, the health insurance program administered by states.At the same time, some research using nationally weighted samples have revealed the increasing prevalence of polypharmacy among young people. One recent paper drew data from the National Ambulatory Medical Care Survey and found that in 2015, 40.7 percent of people aged 2 to 24 in the United States who took a medication for A.D.H.D. also took a second psychiatric drug. That figure had risen from 26 percent in 2006.The latest data from Maryland shows that, at least in one state, the practice continues to grow and “was significantly more likely among youths who were disabled or in foster care,” the new study noted.Mental health experts said that psychotropic medications can prove very helpful and that doctors have discretion to prescribe what they see fit. A concern among some experts is that many drugs used in frequently prescribed cocktails have not been approved for use in young people. And it is unclear how the simultaneous use of multiple psychotropic medications affects brain development long-term.The NumbersThe latest study looked at data from 126,972 people over the study period. It found that in 2015, 4.2 percent of Medicaid enrollees under the age of 17 in Maryland had overlapping prescriptions of three or more different classes of psychiatric medications. That figure rose to 4.6 percent in 2020.The numbers were higher for those in foster care, where the prevalence of polypharmacy rose to 11.3 percent from 10.8 percent.“The findings emphasize the importance of monitoring the use of psychotropic combinations, particularly among vulnerable populations, such as youths enrolled in Medicaid who have a disability or are in foster care,” the study concluded.

Damian R. Murray, a psychologist at Tulane University, studies how various social circumstances and life events affect people’s political views. For instance, he found recently, becoming a parent makes a person grow more socially conservative. On the eve of the Super Bowl, he sat down for an interview with The New York Times to discuss another recent study, which examined how the political perspectives of sports fans can be altered by their teams’ wins and losses.This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.What inspired this work?These games are so emotionally potent, and people are so emotionally invested. The question is: What might be the downstream, real-world implications for things that have nothing to do with the sporting event itself? Are there consequences for political attitudes or voting patterns, or for our group affiliations?To be clear, we’re talking about fans, not people actually playing in the game.Right. As viewers, we’re experiencing the ups and downs of athletes that we otherwise have no relationship to. The material changes that we experience, whether the players win or lose, are essentially zero. But we still go along on this psychological ride.Can you describe the research?We did two different studies in two different populations. The first sample was of British people in England during the 2016 Euro Cup. a monthlong tournament held every four years to determine the best national soccer team in Europe.It’s huge over there, the closest thing to the Super Bowl, outside of the World Cup. So we sampled British people immediately after significant wins and losses in the tournament. We asked questions about their national in-group bias — which is, for example, how intelligent or charismatic they perceived a typical United Kingdom resident to be. We also asked them about what we call their financial egalitarianism.Which is?We asked them whether they agreed or disagreed that it’s the responsibility of better-off people to help those who are worse off, and things like that. It gets at how tolerant people are of financial inequality.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

For the longest time, researchers focused on diagnosing and treating girls, but that is changing.For decades, eating disorders were thought to afflict mostly, if not exclusively, women and girls. In fact, until 2013, the loss of menstruation had long been considered an official symptom of anorexia nervosa.Over the last decade, however, health experts have increasingly recognized that boys and men also suffer from eating disorders, and they have gained a better understanding of how differently the illness presents in that group. A small but growing body of scientists and physicians have dedicated themselves to identifying the problem, assessing its scope and developing treatments.Recently, two of these experts spoke to The New York Times about how the disease is affecting adolescent boys, what symptoms and behaviors parents should look for, and which treatments to consider. Dr. Jason Nagata is a pediatrician at the University of California, San Francisco, who specializes in eating disorders; he is senior editor of the Journal of Eating Disorders and editor of the book “Eating Disorders in Boys and Men.” Dr. Sarah Smith is a child and adolescent psychiatrist at the University of Toronto who specializes in eating disorders; she was the lead author on a study published in JAMA Open Network in December that showed sharp increases in the rates of hospitalizations for boys with eating disorders.The conversation was condensed and edited for clarity.The medical and scientific understanding of eating disorders is changing and expanding. What happened?Dr. Smith: Historically, eating disorders have been conceptualized mostly as anorexia, which has been portrayed as an illness of adolescent females who want to lose weight for aesthetic reasons.Dr. Nagata: There’s increasing recognition, particularly in the last decade or so, that some people with body image dissatisfaction are not trying to lose weight at all. Some men and boys are trying to become large and muscular. In fact, one-third of teenage boys across the United States report that they’re trying to bulk up and get more muscular. And a subset of those may develop eating disorders or muscle dysmorphia that can lead to significant psychological distress and physical health complications.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

More than one-third of American adults now supplement or substitute mainstream medical care with treatments long considered alternative.The doctor is in. So is the yogi.A sharp shift in health care is taking place as more than one-third of American adults now supplement or substitute mainstream medical care with acupuncture, meditation, yoga and other therapies long considered alternative.In 2022, 37 percent of adult pain patients used nontraditional medical care, a marked rise from 19 percent in 2002, according to research published this week in JAMA. The change has been propelled by growing insurance reimbursement for clinical alternatives, more scientific evidence of their effectiveness and an increasing acceptance among patients.“It’s become part of the culture of the United States,” said Richard Nahin, the paper’s lead author and an epidemiologist at the National Center of Complementary and Integrative Health, a division of the National Institutes of Health. “We’re talking about the use for general wellness, stress management use, sleep, energy, immune health.”And for pain management. The use of yoga to manage pain rose to 29 percent in 2022 from 11 percent in 2002, an increase that Dr. Nahin said reflected in part efforts by patients to find alternatives to opiates, and the influence of media and social media.“It’s in the public domain so much,” he said. “People hear acupuncture, meditation, yoga. They start to learn.”The change is impacting medical practitioners as well. Dr. Sean Mackey, chief of the pain medicine division at Stanford Medicine, said that a growing number of studies have validated alternative therapies, providing even traditional clinics like Stanford’s with more mind-body therapies and other nonpharmaceutical tools. He said the acceptance of those ideas has grown among younger people in particular, whereas patients of earlier generations may have seen these options as too out there.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

Meet Sholto David, whose error-spotting has raised a question: If researchers aren’t getting the little things right, what else might be wrong?Sholto David, 32, has a Ph.D. in cellular and molecular biology from Newcastle University in England. He is also developing an expertise in spotting errors in scientific papers. Most recently, and notably, he discovered flawed or manipulated data in studies conducted by top executives at the Harvard-affiliated Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. The institute said that it was requesting retraction of six manuscripts and had found 31 other manuscripts that required corrections.From his home in Wales, Dr. David scours new research publications for images that are mislabeled and manipulated, and he regularly finds mistakes, or malfeasance, in some of the most prominent scientific journals. Accuracy is vital, as peer-reviewed papers often provide the evidence for drug trials or further lines of research. Dr. David said that the frequency of such errors suggests an underlying problem for science.His interview with The New York Times has been edited and condensed.Are you done hunting scientists for the day?I haven’t had time today. But if I spent a couple of hours reading papers, I’d probably write four or five comments about errors in scientific papers. It’s not hard to find these problems, and it’s not hard to find them at any institution. They’re all out there to find, if anyone wants to read the scientific literature.What motivates you to spend the time to do it?I’m not an anti-vaxxer, I’m not a crank conspiracist or anything like that. I’m a scientist myself, and I care about getting the science right.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.