Trust me, you’re beautiful

If you look in the mirror and don’t believe you look as good as you do, well, you’re not alone. (Trust me, I’ve seen the pictures. You’re all disturbingly good looking.) The Age of Zoom has led to an increase in people seeking ‘beauty consultations’ because they think they’re not as pretty, handsome, or hot as they really are.

What’s really at work? Camera distortion on their end, combined with seeing other people’s filtered pics — and a little social isolation thrown in.

“We think all of these factors could have contributed to this disproportionate negative perception of a person’s self-image.”

After the virus is over

After the aches are gone…

Survivors are at higher risk of death.

Between one and six months after becoming infected, those patients had a significantly greater risk of death — 60 percent higher — than people who had not been infected with the virus.

And those survivors could join the ranks of people with new, crippling medical debt for long Covid.

Medical debt among Credit Karma’s members spiked by $2.8 billion, or about 6.5 percent, from the end of May to the end of March. The number of people with past due medical debt grew by nearly 9 percent, from 19.6 million to 21.4 million.

There’s some good news, though. The Biden administration is reversing Trump’s cuts for Obamacare navigators, so it will be easier for people to find health coverage.

A malaria vaccine. We have a malaria vaccine.

The team at Oxford who helped create the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine has now created a vaccine for malaria — one that’s 77 percent effective according to preliminary results.

The phrase “game changer” gets tossed around a lot, but this really might be. Malaria infects millions and kills hundreds of thousands of people a year, and until we can eradicate mosquitoes, a vaccine could be the best chance we have to get a handle on the disease.

In other words: Yay!

Medicare bill would be one small step forward

A bill introduced in Congress would be a small but important step toward that frustratingly elusive goal of full provider status for pharmacists. The Pharmacy and Medically Underserved Area Enhancement Act would have Medicare pay pharmacists for the services they provide, on a state-by-state basis.

So, for example, whatever services Georgia authorizes pharmacists to provide, Medicare would cover.

It wouldn’t expand pharmacists’ scope of practice — it simply authorizes Medicare to pay pharmacists for the same services they already legally provide, many of which are covered by other insurance policies.

Scarred for life no more

Sure, scars add a bit of character, but sometimes you don’t want a bit of character. Skin cells — fibroblasts — create scar tissue because they want to seal the wound fast, not necessarily prettily.

Now Stanford University biologists have figured out how to reprogram those fibroblasts to take the time to heal wounds with normal skin … and they did it with verteporfin (aka Visudyne). Result: perfect healing.

Mice that received this tweak healed from wounds with no scars […] Their recovery was so complete that an image-classifying algorithm couldn’t tell the healed wound apart from the animals’ healthy, unmaimed skin.

Because verteporfin is an existing drug, it should be easy to start trials on pigs, and eventually humans.

By the time you read this…

…there’s a good chance the Johnson & Johnson vaccine will be re-approved, sporting a new warning — 1 out of 1.2 million people have had a reaction.

Once can be too much

When it comes to opioids, even a short, low-dose prescription can be enough to start younger patients towards opioid dependence. That’s what pediatricians at the University of Pittsburgh discovered in a just-published cohort study.

It’s not every kid, by far, “there is a small number of youths at very high risk for complications from the first opioid prescription,” the lead researcher explained — and that includes even short, low doses.

“The key take-home message is that even short, fairly low-dose opioid prescriptions are not without risks for some youths. We see a high proportion of those in the higher risk trajectory that go on to receive a formal diagnosis of opioid use disorder, suggesting they have an addiction or problem with opioids.”