On microplastics, unneeded pelvic exams, and the feminist case for fertility awareness

IRL

If you’re in Portland, you can see me at Powell’s this Sunday, January 19th at 7:30pm talking with Caren Beilin about her new memoir, Blackfishing the IUD.

The Latest in Doing Harm

Tashonna Ward, a young black woman experiencing chest pain and shortness of breath went to an emergency room in Milwaukee. After asking to be seen by a doctor for hours, she left to seek help at urgent care and died en route. As women’s heart disease expert Dr. Martha Gulati says, “We need to start listening to women and taking them seriously.”

A new study concludes that a majority of the pelvic exams and Pap tests performed on young women each year are medically unnecessary and may lead to harms like “false-positive test results, overdiagnosis, anxiety, and unnecessary costs.” An ob-gyn questions how we got to the point where most Americans give birth in a position that makes the process harder: “bed-bound, on their backs, with their knees up, legs spread, feet in the air.” The feminist case for fertility awareness.

How to Be Well

On the unknown health effects of pervasive microplastic pollution in our cities. What Medicare for all looks like in Canada. After two decades of decline, the suicide rate among young Americans is on the rise—a trend that should be recognized as “a collective failure—one that requires political solutions.” Even with insurance, it cost more than $4,500 to have a baby in the U.S. And in some cities, child care is so expensive that it doesn’t make financial sense for many parents—mothers, in particular—to work. There’s a “remarkable gap” in research into how medications affect personality and behavior. On #vanlife and how the capitalist internet has turned us all into rootless and disoriented digital nomads. Improve your sleep—and reduce fossil-fuel burning—by turning your thermostat down at night.

Bookend

Continuing on my current obsession with sleep, I’ve been reading Alice Robb’s Why We Dream: The Transformative Power of Our Nightly Journey, which makes the case that dreaming is under-studied and important—and it’s worth putting in some effort to improve our dream recall upon waking instead of “throwing away a gift from our brains without bothering to open it.”