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Hollywood celebrities brought the issue of postpartum depression out of the shadows, but that does little to help the moms in poverty who are trying to cope with an infant and feelings of overwhelming sadness at the same time. Their struggle is a far lonelier one, made more difficult by federal Medicaid rules that limit the medical treatment covered by that insurance to 60 days past the birth of the child — despite a strong body of evidence that for many women the symptoms may not appear for months and can last for a year or more. (9/20)

"I couldn’t take her pain away." Those were the words of Danny King after his wife Sharon King died. She is reportedly one of the first New Mexico residents to use the state’s new groundbreaking law that allows terminally ill adults to have better access to medical aid in dying. The law – which allows patients to take prescription medication that ends unbearable suffering – is already serving as a model for other states to improve current medical aid-in-dying laws or pass new ones. (Kim Callinan, 9/18)

In a maverick method, nephrologist Michael Field taught medical students to decipher different heart murmurs through their stethoscopes, trills, grace notes, and decrescendos to describe the distinctive sounds of heart valves snapping closed, and blood ebbing through leaky valves in plumbing disorders of the heart. (Elaine Chew, Psyche Loui, Grace Leslie, Caroline Palmer, Jonathan Berger, Edward W. Large, Nicolo F. Bernardi, Suzanne Hanser, Julian F. Thayer, Michael A. Casey and Pier D. Lambase, 9/18)

The word abortion is a medical not a political term. Abortion can be a spontaneous abortion, sometimes called a miscarriage. An elective termination is also called an elective abortion. So proper use of the terminology is important. The Texas Heartbeat bill went into effect September 1, stating that a pregnancy cannot be terminated once a fetal heartbeat is detected. Using the terminology “heartbeat” can be misleading. When an adult goes to a doctor’s visit, the doctor listens to the adult’s heart with a stethoscope. The sound heard on a stethoscope is the sound of the heart valves opening and closing. (Dorette Noorhasan, 9/19)

Newly graduated from the University of Texas medical school, I began my obstetrics and gynecology residency at a San Antonio hospital on July 1, 1972. At the time, abortion was effectively illegal in Texas — unless a psychiatrist certified a woman was suicidal. If the woman had money, we’d refer her to clinics in Colorado, California or New York. The rest were on their own. Some traveled across the border to Mexico. At the hospital that year, I saw three teenagers die from illegal abortions. One I will never forget. (Alan Braid, 9/18)

My son Aaron was 19 years old when he died. His death certificate says the cause of death was asphyxia. The actual cause was meth addiction and mental illness. There was more to Aaron than that, just as there is more to so many like him. As a new report from the California Health Care Foundation shows, there is also much more we could be doing to help people who live with both mental illness and substance use disorder. It’s not just a California problem or an American challenge. Throughout the world, far too many people have suffered because they were treated primarily for one diagnosis rather than for their intertwined conditions. Integrated care is hard to achieve, but a few states — including California — are pursuing promising approaches. (Katherine Haynes, 9/19)

The American health care system is built on the idea that a pill is a pill. Generic drugs are considered equal to and interchangeable with one another — and also with the name brand. This gospel has existed since 1984, when a law known as Hatch-Waxman was passed, allowing companies to make drugs that had gone off patent without having to replicate the same expensive clinical trials. For the most part, all they had to do was prove that the generic was manufactured using good practices and worked in the body in a similar way, within an acceptable range. (Farah Stockman, 9/18)