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Dr. Marty Makary will testify before the Senate health committee on Thursday. Lawmakers may press him over staff reductions and changes in agency direction on issues like vaccines.Dr. Marty Makary may face sharp questions from senators about whether he will defend the Food and Drug Administration against staff cutbacks and industry pressure on Thursday, although he is still expected to sail through his confirmation hearing to become the agency’s commissioner.Dr. Makary built his reputation as a contrarian in the medical field, gaining widespread notice by speaking out about medical errors. Those close to him have remarked on his willingness to agree with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nation’s health secretary, on a variety of issues.As a pancreatic cancer surgeon and health policy researcher at Johns Hopkins University, Dr. Makary has been viewed by some as a study in contrasts. He has written several books criticizing what he considers flaws in medical orthodoxy that result in recommendations backed by scant evidence.Yet he also drew attention from the Trump team as a Fox News personality with more controversial views, like his relatively early predictions that Covid would fade as a concern and that widespread immunity would take hold long before it did.Dr. Reshma Ramachandran, an assistant professor at the Yale School of Medicine, said that it was not clear which is the “true Marty Makary.”She said that was an important question, given some of Mr. Kennedy’s pronouncements. The health secretary has suggested that the F.D.A. should lift constraints on risky products like raw milk, which can be rife with bacteria, and had embraced hydroxychloroquine, a drug briefly used as a Covid therapy before its risks were deemed to exceed any benefit.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.

Jill Warren heads the European Cyclists’ Federation, a Brussels-based nongovernmental organization that advocates cycling to help lower carbon emissions.This article is part of a Women and Leadership special report highlighting women who are charting new pathways and fighting for opportunities for women and others.Jill Warren was in corporate law firms for 20 years, doing business development and working as chief marketing officer. But in her private life, cycling was her absolute passion.“I cycled for daily mobility,” she said in a phone interview, “and a holiday wasn’t complete without taking a bike along.”Like many people, she had cycled as a child. But when she got her driver’s license at age 16, like most teenagers in American towns like Cary, Ill., the Chicago suburb where she grew up, the car was her main means of transport.That changed when she was studying abroad in Freiburg, Germany, where “absolutely everybody cycled.” There, she said, “I rediscovered cycling.”Now 56, she is the chief executive of the European Cyclists’ Federation (E.C.F.), a Brussels-based nongovernmental organization that advocates cycling as a sustainable and healthy form of transport and leisure. The conversation has been edited and condensed.Why is the federation’s work necessary?It’s a chance to make a big difference to people’s health, the environment and the livability of cities. Transport is responsible for about 27 percent of global carbon emissions. Road vehicles account for about three quarters of transport CO2 emissions, and this isn’t decreasing. A recent study found that people who cycle daily have 84 percent lower carbon dioxide emissions than noncyclists.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.

Here’s how to know, and how to get out of it.Therapy has been a part of Katerina Kelly’s weekly routine since elementary school, when a teacher suggested counseling for the 8-year-old.At the time, Katerina’s autism was affecting their ability to manage time, make decisions and socialize. And for many years, the therapist seemed helpful. But once college rolled around, things changed.“I always left counseling feeling either worse than I started — or numb,” said Mx. Kelly, 29, who lives in Natick, Mass, and uses they/them pronouns.The skills that Mx. Kelly’s therapist had taught her in childhood weren’t translating as well now that she was older. In other words, they had hit a rut — the therapy, and the therapist, were not producing the desired results.A therapy rut can feel disheartening, but it doesn’t have to end your pursuit of better mental health. We asked psychologists how to identify whether you’ve reached a sticking point and what to do about it.What exactly is a therapy rut?If you’ve hit a rut, you may feel as if your therapy sessions have stalled or become unhelpful, said Jameca Woody Cooper, president of the Missouri Psychological Association.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.

A patient from Telford who needed a lifesaving treatment developed from blood plasma has thanked donors.

After voting to confirm Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as health secretary, Senator Bill Cassidy, a doctor and Republican of Louisiana, is embracing “the gestalt” of Kennedy’s measles response.Perhaps no vote was as agonizing for Senator Bill Cassidy, the Louisiana Republican and medical doctor, than his vote to confirm Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as President Trump’s health secretary. Mr. Cassidy wondered aloud for days how Mr. Kennedy, the nation’s most vocal and powerful critic of vaccinations, might handle an infectious disease crisis.Now, as a measles outbreak rages in West Texas, Mr. Cassidy has found out. It all comes down, he said, to “the gestalt.”On Monday, days after the Texas outbreak killed an unvaccinated child, Mr. Cassidy, who chairs the Senate Health Committee, was clipping down a Capitol corridor when he was asked about Mr. Kennedy. He pointed to a Fox News Digital opinion piece in which Mr. Kennedy advised parents to consult their doctors about vaccination, while calling it a “personal” decision.“That Fox editorial was very much encouraging people to get vaccinated,” he said.Reminded that Mr. Kennedy had described it as a personal choice, Mr. Cassidy thought for a moment. “If you want to like, parse it down to the line, you can say, ‘Discuss with your doctor,’” Mr. Cassidy said. “He also said, ‘We’re making vaccinations available. We’re doing this for vaccination. We’re doing that for vaccination.’ So if you take the gestalt of it, the gestalt was, ‘Let’s get vaccinated!’”Mr. Cassidy’s assessment — that the whole of Mr. Kennedy’s message was more than the sum of its parts — reflects how the measles outbreak has put a spotlight on how Mr. Trump’s unorthodox choice to run the country’s top health agency has brought a once-fringe perspective into the political mainstream, creating discomfort for some Republicans.As the founder and chairman of his nonprofit, Children’s Health Defense, and later as a presidential candidate, Mr. Kennedy has repeatedly downplayed the benefits of vaccination. He has also repeatedly suggested that the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine causes autism, despite extensive research that has found no link.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.

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Some commercially insured patients stand to save $150 per month on Wegovy, a popular obesity medication. Patients on Medicare and Medicaid are not eligible.Novo Nordisk will cut the price of its blockbuster weight loss medication Wegovy to $499 per month for certain patients who pay using their own money instead of going through insurance, the drug maker said on Wednesday.The move could cause more patients to start taking the drug. But the impact stands to be limited, because the decision does not lower prices for patients who get their health insurance through government programs or for employers that are struggling with the huge costs of medications like Wegovy, which have revolutionized the treatment of obesity.To be eligible for the reduced price, patients must be uninsured or commercially insured on plans that don’t cover the drug. Previously, the drug maker had offered a coupon to such patients allowing them to get a month’s supply of the drug for $650; Wednesday’s move translates into savings of $150 per month for such patients.The new offering is not available to tens of millions of Americans who get their insurance through government programs like Medicare and Medicaid — a demographic that largely lacks insurance coverage for weight loss drugs like Wegovy. To get Novo Nordisk’s drug, these patients must generally pay $1,300 or more per month out of pocket at a pharmacy.Novo Nordisk will offer the discounted product through an online pharmacy that will send prescriptions to patients through the mail — a strategy that drug makers are increasingly using to take more control of the distribution of their products. Novo Nordisk’s competitor, Eli Lilly, has a similar offering for vials of its weight loss drug, Zepbound, for $499 per month or less.Novo Nordisk’s price reduction comes just weeks before the market for cheaper copycat versions of Wegovy is expected to contract substantially.For the past few years, patients seeking lower prices have turned to versions created through a drug-ingredient mixing process known as compounding, which is permitted by regulators when patented products are in short supply.Patients often pay about $150 per month out of pocket for compounded versions of Wegovy. An estimated two million patients got the drug this way over a recent one-year period.But last month the Food and Drug Administration declared the Wegovy shortage over and ordered compounders to wind down their operations by April or May. Novo Nordisk now has the opportunity to scoop up displaced patients who had been relying on compounding and increase sales of its official version of the drug.

Researchers identified a gene that seems to help slow brain aging in women, and studied links between hormone therapy, menopause and Alzheimer’s.Women’s brains are superior to men’s in at least in one respect — they age more slowly. And now, a group of researchers reports that they have found a gene in mice that rejuvenates female brains.Humans have the same gene. The discovery suggests a possible way to help both women and men avoid cognitive declines in advanced age.The study was published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances. The journal also published two other studies on women’s brains, one on the effect of hormone therapy on the brain and another on how age at the onset of menopause shapes the risk of getting Alzheimer’s disease.A gene that slows brain agingThe evidence that women’s brains age more slowly than men’s do seemed compelling.Researchers, looking at the way the brain uses blood sugar, had already found that the brains of aging women are years younger, in metabolic terms, than the brains of aging men.Other scientists, examining markings on DNA, found that female brains are a year or so younger than male brains.And careful cognitive studies of healthy older people found that women had better memories and cognitive function than men of the same age.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.