Publisher Health

Declarations of love, snoring, exercising and other boundary violations can really derail a therapeutic relationship.In her first session with a new therapist in San Diego, Elise, 37, immediately felt turned off. Not because of anything the therapist said, but because of the fact that she was riding a stationary bike during their conversation.Maria Danna, 35, was alarmed when her therapist in Portland, Ore., “vigorously shook a maraca at my face” in order to “pick up the energy I was giving off in session.”And Carson, who sought help from a psychiatrist in Ohio for severe postpartum depression and anxiety, felt troubled when the doctor sent her thousands of text messages and eventually revealed his sexual feelings for her.Therapy is transformative for many people, regardless of whether they have a mental illness. But what do you do if your therapist is unprofessional, inept or even abusive?Last year, The New York Times asked readers whether they had ever had a bad experience with a therapist, and we received more than 2,700 responses.Among them were examples of ethical violations, unprofessional behavior and interactions that were simply bizarre. (Some readers who shared their stories asked to be referred to only by their first names to protect their privacy.)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.

17 minutes agoSharon BarbourBBC North East and Cumbria health correspondent

Since 2023, Dr. Mehmet Oz, the celebrity doctor nominated by President Trump to head the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, has been a high-priced pitchman for iHerb, a California supplement retailer.He has aggressively promoted iHerb products on social media, recommending supplements that he says will stimulate hair growth and provide smoother skin. Olive oil, which iHerb sells, he said, “might be able to actually help with Alzheimer’s.”It turns out Dr. Oz is also a sizable investor in the supplement company, according to filings released on Wednesday by the Office of Government Ethics.Dr. Oz pledged to sell the vast majority of his multimillion-dollar holdings, which are varied and include investments in numerous health care companies and two artificial intelligence firms.But the fate of his iHerb holding, one of the largest in his portfolio and valued at an unspecified figure in the range of $5 million to $25 million, is unclear, according to experts who reviewed his disclosure forms.In one filing, Dr. Oz pledged to divest his iHerb holdings “as soon as practicable but not later than 90 days after confirmation” by the Senate to the government post.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.

2 hours agoJames CookScotland editor

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced Wednesday that his department had issued new “guidance on sex-based definitions” aimed, in part, at keeping transgender women and girls out of female sports and fulfilling President Trump’s pledge that the federal government will recognize only two sexes: male and female.“This administration is bringing back common sense and restoring biological truth to the federal government,” Mr. Kennedy said in a statement. “The prior administration’s policy of trying to engineer gender ideology into every aspect of public life is over.”As part of the initiative, the Health and Human Services Department has launched a new web page for the federal Office on Women’s Health. The page, entitled “Protecting Women and Children,” features a video with Riley Gaines, the former University of Kentucky all-American swimmer who says she was put at a competitive disadvantage when competing against a transgender woman.The guidance offers detailed definitions for the words “male” — “a person of the sex characterized by a reproductive system with the biological function of producing sperm” — and “female” — “a person of the sex characterized by a reproductive system with the biological function of producing eggs (ova).”The announcement came in response to an executive order Mr. Trump issued on Jan. 20 that gave the health department 30 days to issue “clear guidance” to the public on how to interpret sex-based definitions. “These sexes are not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality,” the order declared.On Tuesday, Mr. Kennedy delivered a welcome address to department employees in which he said his agency would work toward helping Americans “to discover our own paths to living our fullest lives, unleashing the potential in every one of us to make good personal choices that allow us to nourish, to heal and to develop ourselves.”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 woman, a Georgia resident, lost custody of the child she had carried. The in vitro fertilization clinic, Coastal Fertility Specialists, apologized for “an embryo transfer mix-up.”A Georgia woman is suing a fertility clinic after she gave birth to a baby conceived through in vitro fertilization and subsequently lost custody of the child to his biological parents, according to a lawsuit.The woman, Krystena Murray, 38, is suing Coastal Fertility Specialists, an I.V.F. clinic based in South Carolina, for the devastating mix-up, the lawsuit said. The clinic’s actions, which led to her losing custody of the baby after months of bonding with him, “have left irreparable damage to my soul,” she said at a news conference as reported by NBC News.In a statement issued on Wednesday, Coastal Fertility Specialists said that the clinic “deeply regrets the distress caused by an unprecedented error that resulted in an embryo transfer mix-up.”“While this ultimately led to the birth of a healthy child, we recognize the profound impact this situation has had on the affected families, and we extend our sincerest apologies,” the emailed statement said.Ms. Murray’s is among a handful of stories regarding mix-ups after in vitro fertilization, a procedure that is widely used by people seeking to have children and that has come under new scrutiny with the repeal of Roe v. Wade and the anticipation of President Trump’s policies on reproductive rights. Mr. Trump has said that he hopes to expand the practice and lower its cost, a move that could irk people in more conservative circles.Stories of I.V.F. mix-ups are exceedingly rare. Still, those that do occur are harrowing for all involved, often leading to gut-wrenching decisions about a child’s future, sometimes years after the child has been raised by people who are not the biological parents.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.

At the nation’s borders, federal workers keep the country safe in many ways: Some investigate sick passengers. Some examine animals for dangerous pathogens. And some inspect plants for infestations that could spread in this country.Late last week, the Trump administration dispatched hundreds of those federal employees with the same message that colleagues at other agencies received: Their services were no longer needed.The absence of these federal officers at the borders leaves Americans vulnerable to pathogens carried by plants, animals and people, experts warned.The firings come even as the Trump administration is said to be readying plans to turn back migrants on the grounds that they might bring diseases like tuberculosis and measles into the country.“Screening for communicable diseases at ports of entry is an important role of public health in order to prevent communicable diseases from entering our country,” said Dr. Carlos del Rio, an infectious disease physician at Emory University.“Not having public health employees to do this job is concerning and makes us less safe,” he added.The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that every day, nearly 30,000 planes travel in and out of the country. In 2019, more than 400 million travelers arrived via more than 300 ports of entry. About half of those people crossed the border between the United States and Mexico.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 a small study, patients with the syndrome were more likely to experience reactivation of Epstein-Barr virus and high levels of a coronavirus protein.The Covid-19 vaccines were powerfully protective, preventing millions of deaths. But in a small number of people, the shots may have led to a constellation of side effects that includes fatigue, exercise intolerance, brain fog, tinnitus and dizziness, together referred to as “post-vaccination syndrome,” according to a small new study.Some people with this syndrome appear to show distinct biological changes, the research found — among them differences in immune cells, reawakening of a dormant virus called Epstein-Barr, and the persistence of a coronavirus protein in their blood.The study was posted online Wednesday and has not yet been published in a scientific journal. “I want to emphasize that this is still a work in progress,” said Akiko Iwasaki, an immunologist at Yale University who led the work.“It’s not like this study determined what’s making people sick,” she said, “but it’s the first kind of glimpse at what may be going on within these people.”Independent experts noted that the findings were not conclusive on their own. Yet the results, from a scientific team known for rigorous work, suggest that post-vaccination syndrome deserves further scrutiny, they said.“One of the most important things is that we get some attention to really shine a light on this and try to understand exactly what it is,” said John Wherry, director of the Institute for Immunology at the University of Pennsylvania. (Dr. Wherry has previously collaborated with Dr. Iwasaki’s team, but did not participate in this work.)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 Human Virome Program will analyze samples from thousands of volunteers in an effort to understand how viruses affect health.The viruses we know best are the ones that make us sick — the influenza viruses that send us to bed and the smallpox viruses that may send us to the grave.But healthy people are rife with viruses that don’t make us ill. Scientists estimate that tens of trillions of viruses live inside of us, though they’ve identified just a fraction of them. A vast majority are benign, and some may even be beneficial. We don’t know for sure, because most of the so-called human virome remains a mystery.This year, five universities are teaming up for an unprecedented hunt to identify these viruses. They will gather saliva, stool, blood, milk and other samples from thousands of volunteers. The five-year effort, called the Human Virome Program and supported by $171 million in federal funding, will inspect the samples with artificial intelligence systems, hoping to learn about how the human virome influences our health.“I think it will swamp the data that we’ve had up until now,” said Frederic Bushman, a microbiologist at the University of Pennsylvania and one of the program’s leaders.The first hints of the human virome emerged over a century ago. Analyzing stool samples, scientists discovered viruses known as phages that could infect bacteria inside the gut. Phages also turned up in the mouth, lungs and skin.Scientists later found viruses that infected our own cells without causing any major symptoms. A vast majority of the world’s population gets infected with cytomegaloviruses, for example, which can colonize just about every organ.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.

Max’s unusually accurate medical drama, starring Noah Wyle as a beleaguered E.R. physician, has become the talk of real-life hospital breakrooms.Doctors and nurses who love Max’s “The Pitt” remember the moment they realized it wasn’t like other medical shows.Caitlin Dwyer, a charge nurse in Milwaukee, took note of a character’s decision — counterintuitive but medically correct — not to defibrillate a patient with no pulse.Dr. Elizabeth Rempfer, an attending physician in Maryland, felt a pang of recognition at the depiction of a chaotic and desperate waiting room.For Dr. Tricia Pendergrast, a resident physician in Ann Arbor, Mich., it was a character who faced such an unrelenting caseload that even a trip to the bathroom was cut short.“It’s the first time that I’ve watched doctors on television that I felt like I could see myself in them,” she said.Most medical professionals learned long ago not to expect reality in dramatizations of their work. From the early days of “General Hospital,” to “Grey’s Anatomy” and its various spinoffs, to more recent hits like “The Good Doctor” and “Brilliant Minds,” TV medical dramas have tended to go heavy on the drama, light on the medicine.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.