Publisher Health

Getty ImagesA leading medical royal college says physician associates (PAs) should only be supervised by senior doctors, and not doctors in training, in guidance issued to members.

A 53-year-old Alabama woman with kidney failure who waited eight years for an organ transplant has received a kidney harvested from a genetically modified pig, NYU Langone Health surgeons announced on Tuesday.The patient, Towana Looney, went into surgery just before Thanksgiving. She was in better health than others who have received porcine organs to date and left the hospital 11 days after the procedure.But Ms. Looney returned on Friday for a series of intravenous infusion treatments. Even before the transplant, she had high levels of antibodies that made it difficult to find a compatible human donor kidney.The case will be closely watched by the transplant community, as success could speed initiation of a clinical trial, bringing pig transplants closer to reality and helping to solve the organ-supply shortage.Since the transplant, Ms. Looney has been off dialysis, doctors said, and her blood pressure, stubbornly high for decades despite a cocktail of medications, is now controlled.The kidney she received started making urine even before she woke from surgery, and blood tests show it is clearing creatinine, a waste product, from her body. 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.

Natural, tallow-based cosmetics can be made at home or bought from artisans. Doctors aren’t thrilled, but they’re all the rage on TikTok.Beauty content creators on TikTok have found an audience hungry for products made from beef fat.Sascha Green, Savanna DiMuccioWhen Sascha Green goes to Costco, she buys ground pork, turkey and chicken breasts for a week of dinners. And then she gets steak for her face.It may seem gross, but beef tallow — rendered fat from around a cow’s organs — has become a popular ingredient in cosmetic products. Customers swear by its natural moisturizing properties while businesses have begun selling tallow-based creams to meet the demand. But dermatologists warn that just because something’s natural doesn’t mean you should put it on your face.“I give it a thumbs down from the scientific and dermatologic perspective,” said Dr. Zakia Rahman, a clinical professor of dermatology at Stanford University School of Medicine. “It could potentially cause acne flares or cause irritation.”Still, many people swear by its benefits. Last year, Ms. Green, 28, stopped spending a fortune on a litany of skin care products when she started seeing TikToks from people promoting what they described as a natural miracle ingredient that’s cheaper than Sephora products.“I made my own to start, just by getting meat from Costco and stripping the fat off the meat and rendering it,” said Ms. Green, who lives in Hillsdale, Ind., about 70 miles west of Indianapolis. In a video documenting her process, she cooked the fat repeatedly with water and salt, removing brown-colored impurities until she was left with a white, waxy disk. She then whipped it up with essential oils and declared it ready.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 2017, the drug industry middleman Express Scripts announced that it was taking decisive steps to curb abuse of the prescription painkillers that had fueled America’s overdose crisis. The company said it was “putting the brakes on the opioid epidemic” by making it harder to get potentially dangerous amounts of the drugs.The announcement, which came after pressure from federal health regulators, was followed by similar declarations from the other two companies that control access to prescription drugs for most Americans.The self-congratulatory statements, however, didn’t address an important question: Why hadn’t the middlemen, known as pharmacy benefit managers, acted sooner to address a crisis that had been building for decades?One reason, a New York Times investigation found: Drugmakers had been paying them not to.For years, the benefit managers, or P.B.M.s, took payments from opioid manufacturers, including Purdue Pharma, in return for not restricting the flow of pills. As tens of thousands of Americans overdosed and died from prescription painkillers, the middlemen collected billions of dollars in payments.The details of these backroom deals — laid out in hundreds of documents, some previously confidential, reviewed by The Times — expose a mostly untold chapter of the opioid epidemic and provide a rare look at the modus operandi of the companies at the heart of the prescription drug supply chain.The P.B.M.s exert extraordinary control over what drugs people can receive and at what price. The three dominant companies — Express Scripts, CVS Caremark and Optum Rx — oversee prescriptions for more than 200 million people and are part of health care conglomerates that sit near the top of the Fortune 500 list.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.

Barry Blechman, 81, an international relations analyst with metastatic bladder cancer, traveled last winter from his home in Washington, D.C., to a clinic in Bend, Ore., where he drank a tea containing psilocybin, the psychoactive component of magic mushrooms. He then stretched out on the floor and closed his eyes.When he phoned his wife, Kitty, 10 hours later, she was startled by the levity in his voice. “He sounded 20 years younger, like a weight had been lifted off him,” she said.In the months since, the angst and depression triggered by his cancer diagnosis no longer hound him, Mr. Blechman said, and he has gained profound insights into aspects of his personality he believes negatively affected his relationships.“Psilocybin therapy has been a life-changing experience,” he said.Mr. Blechman is among the thousands of Americans with serious medical conditions who have turned to psychedelic medicine to address the anxiety and existential distress that often accompany a potentially terminal diagnosis.Those who can afford the $2,000 treatments have been flocking to psilocybin clinics in Oregon, the only state besides Colorado where they can legally operate. (Colorado’s psilocybin program begins in 2025.) Many more have been trying ketamine in their therapist’s office or at home.Although not a classic psychedelic like LSD and psilocybin, ketamine, a powerful anesthetic, is widely considered a psychedelic therapy because of its effects. It can be legally prescribed “off label” for psychiatric conditions, and it is far less expensive than psilocybin therapy.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.

Merope MillsAlmost one out of every eight phone calls made under the Martha’s Rule scheme has led to a potentially life-saving change of treatment, NHS England has revealed.

A van full of U.S. Special Operations veterans crossed the border into Mexico on a sunny day in July to execute a mission that, even to them, sounded pretty far out.Over a period of 48 hours, they planned to swallow a psychedelic extract from the bark of a West African shrub, fall into a void of dark hallucinations and then have their consciousness shattered by smoking the poison of a desert toad.The objective was to find what they had so far been unable to locate anywhere else: relief from post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury symptoms.“It does sound a little extreme, but I’ve tried everything else, and it didn’t work,” said a retired Army Green Beret named Jason, who, like others in the van, asked that his full name not be published because of the stigma associated with using psychedelics.A long combat career exposed to weapons blasts had left him struggling with depression and anger, a frayed memory and addled concentration. He was on the verge of divorce. Recently, he said, he had put a gun to his head.“I don’t know if this will work,” Jason said of psychedelic therapy. “But at this point, I have nothing to lose.”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.

Getty ImagesOne out of every four babies is now born by Caesarean section,

BBCA man who made a desperate online plea for a kidney donor is now recuperating from a successful transplant after a former work colleague answered the call.

Getty ImagesFormer professional darts champion Kevin Painter has thrown arrows almost every day for 40 years.