Dear clients and friends: Given your interest in health and medicine, we would like to share with you our collection of the most interesting perspectives on our industry's trends and developments. We are happy to share them with you — and hope you share your thoughts with us.

1. Just Say No?

Should drugmakers give consenting, supplicating patients access to unproven treatments? What if the patient is dying, and doesn’t care about the safety or efficacy? MIT Technology Review outlines why industry may want to just say no:

Trying an experimental drug could cure a person’s disease. It could also end up making no difference, or even doing harm. And if companies struggle to get funding following a bad outcome, it could delay progress in an entire research field—perhaps slowing future drug approvals…When companies decide not to offer someone a drug, you can’t really blame them for making that decision. If someone were to die after taking that drug, not only would it look bad, but it could also put off investors from funding further development.

2. Sweet Child o’ Mine

Nary a day does pass without another fearful headline declaiming the crisis of youth mental health. The usual suspects get the blame: social media, COVID, bullying, climate change. But new research from Norway points to mom and dad:

A parental mental health diagnosis is associated with a 9.3 percentage point (40%) higher probability of a mental health diagnosis of their adolescent child. Intensive margin physical and mental health associations are similar, and dynastic estimates account for about 40% of the intergenerational persistence. We also show that a policy targeting additional health resources for the young children of adults diagnosed with mental health conditions reduced the parent-child mental health association by about 40%.

3. Paging Dr. Chatbot

Do you want your medical questions answered by a licensed healthcare professional or a chatbot? If you picked chatbot, you’re not alone. A recent study in JAMA found “chatbot responses were preferred over physician responses and rated significantly higher for both quality and empathy.” The authors conclude:

Further exploration of this technology is warranted in clinical settings, such as using chatbot to draft responses that physicians could then edit. Randomized trials could assess further if using AI assistants might improve responses, lower clinician burnout, and improve patient outcomes.

4. A Traumatic Start

The field of trauma has not always enjoyed a place in the scientific mainstream. The Intelligencer outlines the journey from the fringes, led by Bessel van der Kolk. It’s part personality profile, part science history:

Widening trauma to include both acute and developmental stressors transformed it from a “you have it or you don’t” binary into a spectrum. The result is if everyone’s body is keeping the score, what that score actually adds up to starts to get less clear. Decades of research and millions of dollars later, the heft of neuroscientific findings remains descriptive. Thousands of fMRI imaging studies have shown that traumatized brains tend to activate in certain patterns (for example, with a hyperactive amygdala). But crucial theoretical questions remain.

5. How COVID Flattened Africa’s Next Curve

Rejoice, dear reader, in yet another post-COVID success story. This dispatch, courtesy of Speigel International, examines how COVID prompted African healthcare systems to make sustainable improvements:

When the Marburg virus recently broke out in Tanzania, it was quickly detected and combated, thanks to mobile laboratory capacities from the corona period. Authorities in Malawi were able to bring a cholera outbreak under control because the authorities could draw on infrastructure put in place during the measures to contain the spread of the coronavirus. And when Ebola spread in Uganda last year, teams of nurses promptly assembled to spread familiar messages over loudspeakers: Keep your distance. Wash your hands. Remain in quarantine if you've had contact with infected individuals.