BBCA woman who lives with a form of cancer caused by exposure to asbestos is trying to raise awareness of the dangerous substance.

HandoutTwo people with cystic fibrosis have said they are having to eat less due to a shortage in a medication which helps them eat.

A Welsh actress has described how obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) after she gave birth made her fear she was a danger to her baby.

Adult children are less likely to assist an aging stepparent, studies show. A growing “step gap” in senior care worries experts.The encounter happened years ago, but Beverly K. Brandt remembers it vividly.She was leaving her office at Arizona State University, where she taught design history, to run an errand for her ailing stepfather. He had moved into a retirement community nearby after his wife, Dr. Brandt’s mother, died of cancer.As his caregiver, Dr. Brandt spoke with him daily and visited twice a week. She coordinated medical appointments, prescriptions, requests for facility staff — the endless responsibilities of maintaining a man in his 90s.Maybe she looked especially frazzled that day, she said, because a longtime colleague drew her aside with a startling question.“Beverly, why are you doing this?” he said. “He’s not a blood relative. He’s just a stepfather. You don’t have any obligations.”“I was dumbfounded,” Dr. Brandt, 72, recalled. “I still can’t understand it.”She was 5 when her father died. Three years later, she said, her mother married Mark Littler, an accounting executive and a “wonderful” parent.“He’d come home from a grueling job, change out of his good clothes, then carry me around the living room on his back,” she recalled. Later, he introduced her to the symphony and the theater, funded her graduate education and mentored her as she entered the academic world.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 Canadian Medical Association has called for a ban on payments for procedures long covered by public systems and is warning about contracting services out.With perhaps 6.5 million Canadians finding themselves without a personal doctor and with seemingly endless waiting times becoming almost a norm for some medical procedures, private medicine is increasingly being pitched as a solution for those and other problems in Canada’s public health system.In Quebec, doctors have been leaving the public health care system for private clinics.Ian Austen/The New York TimesPrivate medicine comes in various forms. Ontario’s Progressive Conservative government is planning to expand public funding for cataract surgeries and M.R.I. scans in private clinics and contract out hip and knee replacement surgeries.In Quebec, doctors have increasingly been dropping out of the public medical system entirely to open private medical clinics where patients pay thousands of dollars each year to see a family doctor. Elsewhere, clinics are exploiting a loophole in current laws that ban payment for essential medical services by using nurse practitioners rather than doctors.Canadians impatient with wait times have long flown to other countries for surgeries they pay for themselves.And many hospitals across the country are coping with nurse shortages, which became widespread during the pandemic, by bringing in temporary nursing staff from for-profit agencies.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.

In “Telltale Hearts,” a new memoir, Dr. Dean-David Schillinger traces the links between narrative and well-being.One of the riveting tales in “Telltale Hearts,” a new memoir, is about the author’s great-uncle Aladar, a Hungarian Jew who was drafted to fight the Russians in 1916 and spent months in trenches, shooting and getting shot at, and waiting.Russian troops launched an offensive that fall that overwhelmed the Austro-Hungarian soldiers. At one point, Aladar found himself on his back, staring up at a massive Russian soldier who was about to plunge a bayonet into his chest.The two locked eyes, and the Russian looked at Aladar as if he knew him from somewhere.“Are you a Jew?” he asked. Aladar didn’t answer, so the Russian asked again. In Yiddish.This time, Aladar nodded, and the Russian looked around, winked, pulled him out of the trench, hugged and kissed him, and said he would take Aladar prisoner and keep him safe until the war ended. And he did.What’s this war story doing in a book about a safety net hospital that treats poor patients in San Francisco? For the author, Dr. Dean-David Schillinger, the moment of recognition, of seeing oneself in another, is a critical part of doctoring.One of the chief complaints about physicians these days is that they don’t have enough time and they don’t really listen. So Dr. Schillinger, a primary care physician at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center, has written a book about the importance of patients’ stories. He writes of the power of narrative to build trust that cuts through the barriers that often separate doctors and patients to ultimately improve care.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.

BBCIt had been the NHS’s longest-running and bitterest pay dispute – responsible for hundreds of thousands of cancelled operations and appointments.

Mariana Pajón is one of the world’s most accomplished BMX riders, and she can quickly recount some of her career totals: 18 world championships, two Olympic gold medals in racing (in 2012 and 2016) and one silver, in Tokyo in 2021.But Pajón, a Colombian, can also rattle off the much more painful totals of the cost of so much riding: 25 fractures, 12 screws, eight surgeries and countless tears of ligaments and tendons. The medical hardware in her left arm and knee included so much metal that she used to travel with her X-rays. Opening a door or serving a glass of water hurts.“My joints are of an 80-plus-year-old,” Pajón said with a laugh. She is 32.Pajón, who has been racing competitively since she was 4, wasn’t lamenting her injuries during a recent conversation. They are simply a fact of life for an athlete.Wear and tear naturally degrades human bodies, even the most talented ones. But performing at the elite level, especially in high-impact Olympic sports such as wrestling, rugby or gymnastics, inherently has more risks. Shoulders give out. Ligaments tear. And, for some, metal screws and titanium plates become just more hardware in the lifelong pursuit of gold, silver and bronze.Pajón training in Medellín, Colombia, in June. She has sacrificed her body “to achieve a dream,” she said.Federico Rios for The New York TimesConnor Fields, an American BMX rider, was badly injured during the men’s semifinals at the Tokyo Olympics in 2021.Chang W. Lee/The New York TimesWe 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 British Medical Association has called for the ban on puberty blockers for under 18s to be lifted.

A seven-year-old boy has become the first child in the UK to undergo surgery using a pioneering robot-assisted device.