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Last week, just a few days after the White House proposed dramatic cuts to health and development aid, I headed to Indonesia. The timing was coincidental — the trip had been planned for months — but the reason I was going happened to be especially relevant to our country’s national debate. Indonesia has strategically used foreign aid to transform itself from a poor nation into a middle-income one. I was there to talk about the role that smart investments in contraceptives have played in the transformation. (Melinda Gates, 4/2)

While success is important, so is trying: Trying to make a difference. Trying to make a change. Trying to speed up the progress of what we know will eventually come but is taking too long. Trying to spare another family from the horrific conversation that there’s nothing that can be done for their dying loved one. Disruption is always uncomfortable, and it doesn’t happen overnight. (Howard Krein, 3/31)

He is breathing better and the doctors say his lungs will recover, but he can’t remember his appointments or where he put his keys. It has been months since the surgery and the scars are fading, yet she still wakes almost nightly to the sound of phantom alarms. Those are the sorts of stories I heard one morning at a support group for patients who had survived a critical illness and their family members. ... And it was among the first times that I — then a doctor in my final year of critical care training — had heard directly from them about their lives after the I.C.U. (Daniela J. Lamas, 4/1)

Jim Durgeloh, 59, was desperate to avoid surgery. After a career as a construction contractor and hours of leisure time spent on a motorcycle around his Longview, Wash., home, he was facing an operation to replace his left hip. “That’s pretty invasive,” he said, nervous about a surgery that would require being cut open and implanted with an artificial hip; Jim’s brother had died from complications after a similar operation. In the search for an alternative, he and his wife, Janet, happened upon the website for La Jolla-based StemGenex Medical Group, which touts itself as “the world’s first and only Stem Cell Center of Excellence.” (Michael Hiltzik, 3/31)

Millions OF Americans, seeking improved health, take “natural product” dietary supplements, from Gobi berries to Echinacea. With little or no evidence that these products confer health benefits, ongoing struggles between the supplement industry and the medical science community are hardly surprising. So why did seven Nobel laureates associate with a company that markets an unproven dietary supplement — especially at a time when the integrity and reproducibility of bioscience research is being questioned? In this case, the product was marketed as an “anti-aging” supplement that improves “cellular health,” a description that connects it to a lineage of “cures,” remedies, and “miracle drugs” that extend back at least as far as the Fountain of Youth. (Jeffrey S. Flier, 3/31)