Category: BLOG

(WSJ) – Some companies have found lucrative opportunities to capitalize on a growing need, billing long hours and extracting payments as high as $800 an hour

The business of providing therapy to children with autism has surged in recent years across the U.S., fueled by taxpayer-funded Medicaid payments. Some companies have found lucrative opportunities to capitalize on the growing need for such care, sometimes outpacing regulators’ oversight, the Journal’s analysis found.

The number of companies offering such therapy—individualized treatments meant to help patients manage behavior and develop daily living and social skills—almost doubled between 2019 and 2023. Direct payments from state Medicaid programs to autism therapy providers grew to $2.2 billion in 2023, from $660 million just four years earlier, according to the data. Private insurers administering Medicaid benefits paid hundreds of millions more. (Read More)

(404 Media) – Mental health experts say identifying when someone is in need of help is the first step — and approaching them with careful compassion is the hardest, most essential part that follows.

As their conversation turned from broken code to physics concepts and quantum entanglement, David realized something was very wrong. Talking to his friend — whom he’d shared many deep conversations with over the years, unpacking matters of religion and theories about the world and how people perceive it — suddenly felt like talking to a cultist. Michael thought he, through ChatGPT, discovered a critical flaw in humanity’s understanding of physics.

“ChatGPT had convinced him that all of this was so obviously true,” David said. “The way he spoke about it was as if it were obvious. Genuinely, I felt like I was talking to a cult member.” (Read More)

(AP) – Wyoming Gov. Mark Gordon on Monday signed ban on abortions after embryonic cardiac activity can be detected, generally at about six weeks’ gestation and often before women know they’re pregnant.

The signing makes Wyoming the fifth state to bar abortions at that stage of pregnancy, along with Florida, Georgia, Iowa and South Carolina. Thirteen other states bar abortion at all stages of pregnancy, with some exceptions. (Read More)

(New York Times) – Influencers have long hawked supplements on platforms like Instagram and TikTok. Increasingly, the influencers are fake.

With her modest white hair-covering and wire-rim spectacles, Melanskia is earnest, charming and quite convincing. She is also not real.

She is one of a handful of synthetic influencers created with artificial intelligence who are promoting an untested dietary supplement, Modern Antidote, which sells for just under $50 a jar. There is no disclosure on her account that everything about her is A.I.-generated.

Behind Melanskia is a genuine human being, Josemaria Silvestrini, who is part of a growing vanguard of entrepreneurs taking advantage of rapid advances in A.I. to promote their brands using people who don’t actually exist. (Read More)

(Gizmodo) – The blood biomarker p-tau217 has “shown the most promise in detecting Alzheimer’s in the brain,” researchers of a new study say.

Your blood might someday reveal much about the distant future of your brain health. A study out today indicates that doctors could use a biomarker in blood to predict Alzheimer’s disease in women decades before their actual diagnosis. (Read More)

(NPR) – The long-running campaign against smoking could find reinforcements from the new wave of research into psychedelics.

Though much of the attention around psychedelics has focused on depression and other mental health conditions, researchers believe these substances also hold the potential to transform addiction treatment.

A new study makes the strongest case yet for a psychedelic drug’s impact on smoking, which remains the leading cause of preventable death in the U.S. (Read More)

(TechCrunch) – Amazon announced on Tuesday that it’s expanding access to its healthcare AI assistant to its website and app. The assistant, called Health AI, was previously only available on the app for One Medical, the healthcare company Amazon acquired for $3.9 billion in 2023.

Health AI can answer questions, explain health records, manage prescription renewals, book appointments, and more. Users don’t need to be Prime subscribers or One Medical members to use the assistant, Amazon says. (Read More)

(IVT News) – Suffering a miscarriage is still a “dismissive and dehumanising” experience in the UK, with women at further risk of harm and distress due to inadequate follow-up care, a report has found.

Research published by the Miscarriage Association showed that 65% of women lacked access to suitable follow-up care after pregnancy loss, while more 42% did not receive treatment for mental health symptoms.

The report described a continuous “lack of dignity”, including encountering insensitive wording from healthcare professionals, with one woman told her baby “had been put in the incinerator with the rest of the medical waste” whilst recovering from a ruptured ectopic pregnancy. (Read More)

(Daily Mail) – Canada performed thousands of same-day assisted suicides, as it was revealed one elderly woman was killed despite withdrawing her request the day before. 

The medical assistance in dying (MAiD) program was approved in 2016 and has since been expanded to include requests from patients whose deaths are ‘not reasonably foreseeable,’ and will soon include those with mental illness. 

More than 200 people in Ontario alone chose to die within 24 hours of their approval in 2023, a 2024 Ontario report found, The Free Press first reported. 

Of the 219 deaths, 30 percent of them chose a same-day procedure. (Read More)

(Self) – A new partnership between Costco, Sesame (a cash-pay health care marketplace), and IVI RMA (a network of fertility clinics) aims to lower some of the major barriers to accessing fertility care in this country. On Monday, the companies announced that for $99 a month with a Costco membership (or $119 without), you can meet virtually with a doctor of your choosing on the Sesame platform for a fertility intake and diagnostic workup. That means bypassing often months-long wait times to get an appointment with a specialist. (Read More)

(Wired) – The tool, offered by the recently-rebranded company Superhuman, gives feedback based on the work of famous dead and living writers—without their permission.

Do you have fond memories of being a teacher’s pet? Wish you could still get notes from your favorite college professor? Dream about some implacable voice of authority correcting your every word choice and punctuation mark? Well, great news: A certain software company has engineered a way to simulate criticism not just from bestselling authors and famous academics of our time, but also many who died decades ago—and the company evidently didn’t need permission from anybody to do it.

Once relied upon only to proofread for correct grammar and spelling, the writing tool Grammarly has added a host of generative AI features over the past several years. (Read More)

(WSJ) – Federal investigators are uncovering new layers of fraud in government programs, with a Minnesota man pleading guilty last week to bilking Medicaid by setting up a sham autism center. Meantime, a federal audit last week revealed how Medicaid autism treatment has become an open vault for fraud and abuse.

Behavioral therapy is an especially ripe target for people looking to game Medicaid. (Read More)

(Axios) – The Food and Drug Administration’s top vaccine regulator will leave the agency at the end of April, a Department of Health and Human Services spokesperson confirmed to Axios.

Why it matters: Vinay Prasad, director of FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, has presided over controversial decisions including declining to review Moderna’s new mRNA flu vaccine approval application — a decision that was later reversed. (Read More)