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People are forming strong emotional bonds with chatbots, sometimes exacerbating feelings of loneliness. And others are having psychotic episodes after talking to chatbots for hours each day. The mental health impact of generative AI is difficult to quantify in part because it is used so privately, but anecdotal evidence is growing to suggest a broader cost that deserves more attention from both lawmakers and tech companies who design the underlying models. (Parmy Olson, 7/14)

Deciding whether to participate in a clinical research study can be difficult, especially for people who are newly diagnosed with a serious medical condition and are asked to take risks for the sake of scientific progress, when the outcome is perilous and unknown. The last thing you want is to be coerced into participating as a subject in a research study. (Ivor Prichard, 7/15)

State and local governments are about to get a lot of money to combat the opioid epidemic. They could fritter it away on nice-sounding programs — or save the most lives. (7/15)

It’s easy to say in hindsight, but also true, that even when the anti-vax movement was in its infancy in the late 90s before I had kids, let alone knew what you were supposed to vaccinate them against, I could smell absolute garbage. After all, Andrew Wakefield, a doctor until he was struck off in 2010, was not the first crank to dispute the safety and effectiveness of childhood vaccines. There was a movement against the diphtheria-tetanus-whooping cough vaccine in the 1970s in the UK, and a similar one in the US in the early 1980s. The discovery of vaccination in the first place was not without its critics, and enough people to form a league opposed the smallpox rollout in the early 1800s on the basis that it was unchristian to share tissue with an animal. (Zoe Williams, 7/14)

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s recently published Roadmap to Reducing Animal Testing in Preclinical Safety Studies may have caused a stir across the pharmaceutical and biotech industries, but I wasn’t surprised. I’ve been working in drug development for 30 years and can tell you that the truth is the 3Rs (reduce, replace, and refine) principle for animal testing has been a goal in development for decades. (Amin Rostami-Hodjegan, 7/15)

In medicine, conditions that primarily affect female bodies are still underdiagnosed and under researched. That hurts women who suffer from painful reproductive health conditions like endometriosis (10 percent of women), as well as autoimmune diseases and chronic pain, both of which women develop at higher rates. Even today, girls grow up absorbing the message — sometimes explicit, often implied — that their bodies are fragile and weak. The reality couldn’t be more different. (Starre Vartan, 7/13)

For most of the 20th century, heat-related deaths of Americans went underreported. In the era before 1995, at least in Chicago, when temperatures would rise above 100 degrees, officials traditionally undercounted the number of deaths because they didn’t make a firm connection between the weather and mortality. Deaths due to the effects of heat were rarely reported until a prolonged heat wave affected a highly populated area. (Cory Franklin, 7/13)