From Dr. Oz to Heart Valves: A Tiny Device Charted a Contentious Path Through the FDA
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In 2013, the FDA approved an implantable device to treat leaky heart valves. Among its inventors was Mehmet Oz, the former television personality and former U.S. Senate candidate widely known as “Dr. Oz.”
In online videos, Oz has called the process that brought the MitraClip device to market an example of American medicine firing “on all cylinders,” and he has compared it to “landing a man on the moon.”
MitraClip was designed to spare patients from open-heart surgery by snaking hardware into the heart through a major vein. Its manufacturer, Abbott, said it offered new hope for people severely ill with a condition called mitral regurgitation and too frail to undergo surgery.
“It changed the face of cardiac medicine,” Oz said in a video.
But since MitraClip won FDA approval, versions of the device have been the subject of thousands of reports to the agency about malfunctions or patient injuries, as well as more than 1,100 reports of patient deaths, FDA records show. Products in the MitraClip line have been the subject of three recalls. A former employee has alleged in a federal lawsuit that Abbott promoted the device through illegal inducements to doctors and hospitals. The case is pending, and Abbott has denied illegally marketing the device.
The MitraClip story is, in many ways, a cautionary tale about the science, business, and regulation of medical devices.
Manufacturer-sponsored research on the device has long been questioned. In 2013, an outside adviser to the FDA compared some of the data marshaled in support of its approval to “poop.”
The FDA expanded its approval of MitraClip to a wider set of patients in 2019, based on a clinical trial in which Abbott was deeply involved and despite conflicting findings from another study.
In the three recalls, the first of which warned of potentially deadly consequences, neither the manufacturer nor the FDA withdrew inventory from the market. The company told doctors it was OK for them to continue using the recalled products.
In response to questions for this article, both Abbott and the FDA described MitraClip as safe and effective.
“With MitraClip, we’re addressing the needs of people with MR who often have no other options,” Abbott spokesperson Brent Tippen said. “Patients suffering from mitral regurgitation have severely limited quality of life. MitraClip can significantly improve survival, freedom for hospitalization and quality of life via a minimally invasive, now common procedure.”
An FDA spokesperson, Audra Harrison, said patient safety “is the FDA’s highest priority and at the forefront of our work in medical device regulation.”
She said reports to the FDA about malfunctions, injuries, and deaths that the device may have caused or contributed to are “consistent” with study results the FDA reviewed for its 2013 and 2019 approvals.
In other words: They were expected.
Inspiration in Italy
When a person has mitral regurgitation, blood flows backward through the mitral valve. Severe cases can lead to heart failure.
With MitraClip, flaps of the valve — known as “leaflets” — are clipped together at one or more points to achieve a tighter seal when they close. The clips are deployed via a catheter threaded through a major vein, typically from an incision in the groin. The procedure offers an alternative to connecting the patient to a heart-lung machine and repairing or replacing the mitral valve in open-heart surgery.
Oz has said in online videos that he got the idea after hearing a doctor describe a surgical technique for the mitral valve at a conference in Italy. “And on the way home that night, on a plane heading back to Columbia University, where I was on the faculty, I wrote the patent,” he told KFF Health News.
A patent obtained by Columbia in 2001, one of several associated with MitraClip, lists Oz first among the inventors.
But a Silicon Valley-based startup, Evalve, would develop the device. Evalve was later acquired by Abbott for about $400 million.
“I think the engineers and people at Evalve always cringe a little bit when they see Mehmet taking a lot of, you know, basically claiming responsibility for what was a really extraordinary team effort, and he was a small to almost no player in that team,” one of the company’s founders, cardiologist Fred St. Goar, told KFF Health News.
Oz did not respond to a request for comment on that statement.
As of 2019, the MitraClip device cost $30,000 per procedure, according to an article in a medical journal. According to the Abbott website, more than 200,000 people around the world have been treated with MitraClip.
Oz filed a financial disclosure during his unsuccessful run for the U.S. Senate in 2022 that showed him receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars in annual MitraClip royalties.
Abbott recently received FDA approval for TriClip, a variation of the MitraClip system for the heart’s tricuspid valve.
Endorsed ‘With Trepidation’
Before the FDA said yes to MitraClip in 2013, agency staffers pushed back.
Abbott had originally wanted the device approved for “patients with significant mitral regurgitation,” a relatively broad term. After the FDA objected, the company narrowed its proposal to patients at too-high risk for open-heart surgery.
Even then, in an analysis, the FDA identified “fundamental” flaws in Abbott’s data.
One example: The data compared MitraClip patients with patients who underwent open-heart surgery for valve repair — but the comparison might have been biased by differences in the expertise of doctors treating the two groups, the FDA analysis said. While MitraClip was implanted by a highly select, experienced group of interventional cardiologists, many of the doctors doing the open-heart surgeries had performed only a “very low volume” of such operations.
FDA “approval is not appropriate at this time as major questions of safety and effectiveness, as well as the overall benefit-risk profile for this device, remain unanswered,” the FDA said in a review prepared for a March 2013 meeting of a committee of outside advisers to the agency.
Some committee members expressed misgivings. “If your right shoe goes into horse poop and your left shoe goes into dog poop, it’s still poop,” cardiothoracic surgeon Craig Selzman said, according to a transcript.
The committee voted 5-4 against MitraClip on the question of whether it proved effective. But members voted 8-0 that they considered the device safe and 5-3 that the benefits of the device outweighed its risks.
Selzman voted yes on the last question “with trepidation,” he said at the time.
In October 2013, the FDA approved the MitraClip Clip Delivery System for a narrower group of patients: those with a particular type of mitral regurgitation who were considered a surgery risk.
“The reality is, there is no perfect procedure,” said Jason Rogers, an interventional cardiologist and University of California-Davis professor who is an Abbott consultant. The company referred KFF Health News to Rogers as an authority on MitraClip. He called MitraClip “extremely safe” and said some patients treated with it are “on death’s door to begin with.”
“At least you’re trying to do something for them,” he said.
Conflicting Studies
In 2019, the FDA expanded its approval of MitraClip to a wider set of patients.
The agency based that decision on a clinical trial in the United States and Canada that Abbott not only sponsored but also helped design and manage. It participated in site selection and data analysis, according to a September 2018 New England Journal of Medicine paper reporting the trial results. Some of the authors received consulting fees from Abbott, the paper disclosed.
A separate study in France reached a different conclusion. It found that, for some patients who fit the expanded profile, the device did not significantly reduce deaths or hospitalizations for heart failure over a year.
The French study, which appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine in August 2018, was funded by the government of France and Abbott. As with the North American study, some of the researchers disclosed they had received money from Abbott. However, the write-up in the journal said Abbott played no role in the design of the French trial, the selection of sites, or in data analysis.
Gregg Stone, one of the leaders of the North American study, said there were differences between patients enrolled in the two studies and how they were medicated. In addition, outcomes were better in the North American study in part because doctors in the U.S. and Canada had more MitraClip experience than their counterparts in France, Stone said.
Stone, a clinical trial specialist with a background in interventional cardiology, acknowledged skepticism toward studies sponsored by manufacturers.
“There are some people who say, ‘Oh, well, you know, these results may have been manipulated,’” he said. “But I can guarantee you that’s not the truth.”
‘Nationwide Scheme’
A former Abbott employee alleges in a lawsuit that after MitraClip won approval, the company promoted the device to doctors and hospitals using inducements such as free marketing support, the chance to participate in Abbott clinical trials, and payments for participating in “sham speaker programs.”
The former employee alleges that she was instructed to tell referring physicians that if they observed mitral regurgitation in their patients to “just send it” for a MitraClip procedure because “everything can be clipped.” She also alleges that, using a script, she was told to promote the device to hospital administrators based on financial advantages such as “growth opportunities through profitable procedures, ancillary tests, and referral streams.”
The inducements were part of a “nationwide scheme” of illegal kickbacks that defrauded government health insurance programs including Medicare and Medicaid, the lawsuit claims.
The company denied doing anything illegal and said in a court filing that “to help its groundbreaking therapy reach patients, Abbott needed to educate cardiologists and other healthcare providers.”
Those efforts are “not only routine, they are laudable — as physicians cannot use, or refer a patient to another doctor who can use, a device that they do not understand or in some cases even know about,” the company said in the filing.
Under federal law, the person who filed the suit can receive a share of any money the government recoups from Abbott. The suit was filed by a company associated with a former employee in Abbott’s Structural Heart Division, Lisa Knott. An attorney for the company declined to comment and said Knott had no comment.
Reports to the FDA
As doctors started using MitraClip, the FDA began receiving reports about malfunctions and cases in which the product might have caused or contributed to a death or an injury.
According to some reports, clips detached from valve flaps. Flaps became damaged. Procedures were aborted. Mitral leakage worsened. Doctors struggled to control the device. Clips became “entangled in chordae” — cord-like structures also known as heartstrings that connect the valve flaps to the heart muscle. Patients treated with MitraClip underwent corrective operations.
As of March 2024, the FDA had received more than 17,000 reports documenting more than 22,000 “events” involving mitral valve repair devices, FDA data shows. All but about 200 of those reports mention one iteration of MitraClip or another, a KFF Health News review of FDA data found.
Almost all the reports came from Abbott. The FDA requires manufacturers to submit reports when they learn of mishaps potentially related to their devices.
The reports are not proof that devices caused problems, and the same event might be reported multiple times. Other events may go unreported.
Despite the reports’ limitations, the FDA provides an analysis of them for the public on its website.
MitraClip’s risks weren’t a surprise.
Like the rapid-fire fine print in television ads for prescription drugs, the original product label for the device listed more than 60 types of potential complications.
Indeed, during clinical research on the device, about 6% of patients implanted with MitraClip died within 30 days, according to the label. Almost 1 in 4 — 23.6% – were dead within a year.
The FDA spokesperson, Harrison, pointed to a study originally published in 2021 in The Annals of Thoracic Surgery, based on a central registry of mitral valve procedures, that found lower rates of death after MitraClip went on the market.
“These data confirmed that the MitraClip device remains safe and effective in the real-world setting,” Harrison said.
But the study’s authors, several of whom disclosed financial or other connections to Abbott, said data was missing for more than a quarter of patients one year after the procedure.
A major measure of success would be the proportion of MitraClip patients who are alive “with an acceptable quality of life” a year after undergoing the procedure, the study said. Because such information was available for fewer than half of the living patients, “we have omitted those outcomes from this report,” the authors wrote.
If you’ve had an experience with MitraClip or another medical device and would like to tell KFF Health News about it, click here to share your story with us.
KFF Health News audience engagement producer Tarena Lofton contributed to this report.
KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.
Subscribe to KFF Health News’ free Morning Briefing.
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Cheeky diet soft drink getting you through the work day? Here’s what that may mean for your health
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Many people are drinking less sugary soft drink than in the past. This is a great win for public health, given the recognised risks of diets high in sugar-sweetened drinks.
But over time, intake of diet soft drinks has grown. In fact, it’s so high that these products are now regularly detected in wastewater.
So what does the research say about how your health is affected in the long term if you drink them often?
Breakingpic/Pexels What makes diet soft drinks sweet?
The World Health Organization (WHO) advises people “reduce their daily intake of free sugars to less than 10% of their total energy intake. A further reduction to below 5% or roughly 25 grams (six teaspoons) per day would provide additional health benefits.”
But most regular soft drinks contain a lot of sugar. A regular 335 millilitre can of original Coca-Cola contains at least seven teaspoons of added sugar.
Diet soft drinks are designed to taste similar to regular soft drinks but without the sugar. Instead of sugar, diet soft drinks contain artificial or natural sweeteners. The artificial sweeteners include aspartame, saccharin and sucralose. The natural sweeteners include stevia and monk fruit extract, which come from plant sources.
Many artificial sweeteners are much sweeter than sugar so less is needed to provide the same burst of sweetness.
Diet soft drinks are marketed as healthier alternatives to regular soft drinks, particularly for people who want to reduce their sugar intake or manage their weight.
But while surveys of Australian adults and adolescents show most people understand the benefits of reducing their sugar intake, they often aren’t as aware about how diet drinks may affect health more broadly.
Diet soft drinks contain artificial or natural sweeteners. Vintage Tone/Shutterstock What does the research say about aspartame?
The artificial sweeteners in soft drinks are considered safe for consumption by food authorities, including in the US and Australia. However, some researchers have raised concern about the long-term risks of consumption.
People who drink diet soft drinks regularly and often are more likely to develop certain metabolic conditions (such as diabetes and heart disease) than those who don’t drink diet soft drinks.
The link was found even after accounting for other dietary and lifestyle factors (such as physical activity).
In 2023, the WHO announced reports had found aspartame – the main sweetener used in diet soft drinks – was “possibly carcinogenic to humans” (carcinogenic means cancer-causing).
Importantly though, the report noted there is not enough current scientific evidence to be truly confident aspartame may increase the risk of cancer and emphasised it’s safe to consume occasionally.
Will diet soft drinks help manage weight?
Despite the word “diet” in the name, diet soft drinks are not strongly linked with weight management.
In 2022, the WHO conducted a systematic review (where researchers look at all available evidence on a topic) on whether the use of artificial sweeteners is beneficial for weight management.
Overall, the randomised controlled trials they looked at suggested slightly more weight loss in people who used artificial sweeteners.
But the observational studies (where no intervention occurs and participants are monitored over time) found people who consume high amounts of artificial sweeteners tended to have an increased risk of higher body mass index and a 76% increased likelihood of having obesity.
In other words, artificial sweeteners may not directly help manage weight over the long term. This resulted in the WHO advising artificial sweeteners should not be used to manage weight.
Studies in animals have suggested consuming high levels of artificial sweeteners can signal to the brain it is being starved of fuel, which can lead to more eating. However, the evidence for this happening in humans is still unproven.
You can’t go wrong with water. hurricanehank/Shutterstock What about inflammation and dental issues?
There is some early evidence artificial sweeteners may irritate the lining of the digestive system, causing inflammation and increasing the likelihood of diarrhoea, constipation, bloating and other symptoms often associated with irritable bowel syndrome. However, this study noted more research is needed.
High amounts of diet soft drinks have also been linked with liver disease, which is based on inflammation.
The consumption of diet soft drinks is also associated with dental erosion.
Many soft drinks contain phosphoric and citric acid, which can damage your tooth enamel and contribute to dental erosion.
Moderation is key
As with many aspects of nutrition, moderation is key with diet soft drinks.
Drinking diet soft drinks occasionally is unlikely to harm your health, but frequent or excessive intake may increase health risks in the longer term.
Plain water, infused water, sparkling water, herbal teas or milks remain the best options for hydration.
Lauren Ball, Professor of Community Health and Wellbeing, The University of Queensland and Emily Burch, Accredited Practising Dietitian and Lecturer, Southern Cross University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Aspirin vs Cancer Metastasis
10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.
Aspirin is a bit of a mixed bag.
In the category of things in its favor, it’s a modest analgesic with few side effects from occasional use, so it’s a good option if you have a headache, for example.
Unless you’re already on blood thinners or having a bleeding disorder, in which case, aspirin is not the thing to reach for.
About aspirin and heart disease
This is actually a complicated one, and we covered it at length in a dedicated main feature. If you want a one-line summary, it’s “chronic low-dose aspirin use can lower overall CVD risk, but does not reduce CVD mortality or all-cause mortality, and you may pay for it with gastrointestinal bleeding, and increased risk of ulcers“.
For a more nuanced explanation, see: Aspirin, CVD Risk, & Potential Counter-Risks
On the other hand, if you are having a heart attack and are waiting for the ambulance that you already called, and have aspirin to hand that you don’t have to go looking for, then it can be good to take a dose then.
For more on that, see: How To Survive A Heart Attack When You’re Alone
There are more problems
In the case of chronic use of low-dose aspirin, not only does it increase the risks of bleeding, especially gastrointestinal bleeding, and ulcers, but also it increases the risk of anemia. Given that anemia also gives the symptom “dizziness”, this is also a significant threat for increasing the incidence of falls in the older population, too, which can of course lead to serious complications and ultimately death.
For the science about this, see: Low-Dose Aspirin & Anemia
Now, about aspirin and cancer metastasis
This one’s a point in aspirin’s favor.
Cancer is, in and of itself, obviously a big problem. In terms of when it’s most likely to kill someone, that is usually when the cancer becomes metastatic, that is to say, it has spread.
So, while preventing cancer and, failing that, killing cancer are very important goals, there is a third axis to cancer care, which is preventing metastasis in someone who has cancer.
And that’s what aspirin does. How, you ask?
Scientists found this one out by accident!
They were doing genetic research in mice, to find genes that had an effect on metastasis. In the process, they found a certain gene that instructs the creation of a certain protein, and mice that lacked that gene (and thus its associated protein) had less metastasis.
The protein in question suppresses T-cells, which are programmed to recognize and kill metastatic cancer cells (amongst having other great jobs; they are an important part of the immune system in general, and one that declines with aging; most people in their 60s or older are producing very few T-cells).
About that, see: Focusing On Health In Our Sixties
Tracing the cell signaling, the researchers found that the protein is activated when T-cells are exposed to thromboxane A2 (or TXA2 to its friends).
And TXA2? That’s produced by platelets, and aspirin works by inhibiting TXA2 production, effectively making platelets (and thus the blood as a whole) less sticky.
So, that’s quite a few steps in the process, but ultimately:
- Aspirin inhibits TXA2 production
- Lower TXA2 levels mean ARHGEF1 (that’s the protein) isn’t activated
- ARHGEF1 not being activated means T-cells are free to do their thing
- T-cells are now free to kill metastatic cancer cells
You can read the paper here:
Aspirin prevents metastasis by limiting platelet TXA2 suppression of T cell immunity
Take care!
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Is It Possible To Lose Weight Quickly?
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In Victorian England, weight-loss trends like the dangerous tapeworm diet were popular. While modern fad diets can seem less extreme, they often promise similarly fast results. However, these quick fixes can have similarly harmful consequences:
Not so fast
To illustrate the difference between gradual and extreme dieting, the video bids us consider two identical twins, Sam and Felix:
- Sam adopts a gradual approach, slowly reducing calorie intake and exercising regularly. This causes his body to burn glycogen stores before transitioning to fat as an energy source. Regular exercise helps Sam maintain muscle mass, which boosts his metabolism and supports sustained weight loss.
- Felix drastically cuts calories, forcing his body into starvation mode. He quickly depletes glycogen stores, loses muscle mass, and burns fewer calories, making long-term weight loss more difficult. Although Felix might initially lose water weight, this is temporary and unsustainable.
You cannot “just lose it quickly now, and then worry about healthiness once the weight’s gone”, because you will lose health much more quickly than you will lose fat, and that will sabotage, rather than help, your fat loss journey.Healthy weight loss requires gradual, balanced changes in diet and exercise tailored to individual needs. Extreme diets, whether through calorie restriction or things like elimination of carbs or fats, are unsustainable and shock the body. It’s important to prioritize long-term health over societal pressures for quick weight loss and focus on developing a sustainable, healthy lifestyle.
In short, the quickest way to lose weight and keep it off (without dying), is to lose it slowly.
For more on all of this, enjoy:
Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!
Want to learn more?
You might also like to read:
How To Lose Weight (Healthily)
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Improving Women’s Health Across the Lifespan – by Dr. Michelle Tollefson et al.
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We say “et al.”, because this hefty book (504 pages) is a compilation of contributions by about 60 authors, of whom, 100% are doctors and about 90% are women.
As one might expect from a book with many small self-contained chapters by such a lot of doctors, the content is very diverse, though the style is consistent throughout, likely due to the authors working from a style sheet, plus the work of the editorial team.
About that content: the focus here is lifestyle medicine, and while much of the advice will go for men too (most people are unlikely to go wrong with “eat more fruits and vegetables and get better sleep” etc), anything more detailed than that (of which there’s a lot) is focussed on women. Hence, we get chapters on optimal nutrition for women, physical activity for women, sleep and women’s health, etc, as well as topics that can affect everyone but disproportionately affect women—ranging from autoimmune diseases to social burdens that affect health in measurable ways. There’s also, as you might expect, plenty about sexual health, pregnancy-related health, menopausal health, and so forth.
The strength of this book is really in its diversity; it’s very much a case of “60 heads are better than one”, and as such, we’re pretty much getting 60 books for the price of one here, as each author brings what they are most specialized in.
Bottom line: if you are a woman and/or love a woman, this book is packed with information that will be of interest and applicable use.
Click here to check out Improving Women’s Health Across The Lifespan, and do just that!
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What immunocompromised people want you to know
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While many people in the U.S. have abandoned COVID-19 mitigations like vaccines and masking, the virus remains dangerous for everyone, and some groups face higher risks than others. Immunocompromised people—whose immune systems don’t work as well as they should due to health conditions or medications—are more vulnerable to infection and severe symptoms from the virus.
Public Good News spoke with three immunocompromised people about the steps they take to protect themselves and what they want others to know about caring for each other.
[Editor’s note: The contents of these interviews have been condensed for length.]
PGN: What measures have you been taking to protect yourself since the COVID-19 pandemic began?
Tatum Spears, Virginia
From less than a year old, I had serious, chronic infections and have missed huge chunks of my life. In 2020, I quit my public job, and I have not worked publicly since.
I have a degree in vocal performance and have been singing my whole life, but I haven’t performed publicly since 2019. I feel like a bird without wings. I had to stop traveling. Since no one wears a mask anymore, I can’t go to the movies or social outings or any party.
All my friends live in my phone now. It’s a community of people—a lot of them are immunocompromised or disabled in some way.
There are a good portion of them who just take COVID-19 seriously and want to protect their health, who feel the existential abandonment and the burden of all of this. It’s really isolating having to step back from any sort of social life. I have to assess my risk every single time I leave the house.
Gwendolyn Alyse Bishop, Washington
I was hit by a car when I was very young. I woke up from surgery, and doctors told me I had lost almost all of my spleen. So, I was always the sickest kid in my school.
When COVID-19 hit, I started working from home. At first, I wore cloth masks. I didn’t really learn about KN95 masks until right around the time that COVID-19 disabled me. [Editor’s note: N95 and KN95 masks have been shown to be significantly more effective at preventing the transmission of viral particles than cloth masks.]
I actually don’t get out much anymore because I am disabled by long COVID now, but when I do leave, I wear a respirator in all shared air spaces. My roommate and I have HEPA filters going in every room.And then we test. I have a Pluslife testing dock, and so we keep a weekly testing schedule with that and then test if there are any symptoms. I got reinfected [with COVID-19] last winter, and a Pluslife test helped me catch it early and get Paxlovid. [Editor’s note: Pluslife is a brand of an at-home COVID-19 nucleic acid amplification test, which has been shown to be significantly more effective at detecting COVID-19 than at-home antigen rapid tests.]
Abby Mahler, California
I have lupus, and in 2016, I started taking the drug hydroxychloroquine, which is an immunomodulator. I’m not as immunocompromised as some people, but I certainly don’t have a normal immune system, which has resulted in long-term infections like C. diff.I started masking early. My roommates and I prioritize going outside. We don’t remove our masks inside in public places.
We are in a pod with one other household, and the pod has agreements on the way that we interact with public space. So, we will only unmask with people who have tested ahead of time. We use Metrix, an at-home nucleic acid amplification test.
While it’s not easy and it’s not the life that we had prior to COVID-19’s existence, it is a life that has provided us quite a lot of freedom, in the sense that we are not sick all the time. We are conscientiously making decisions that allow us to have a nice time without a monkey on our backs, which is freeing.
PGN: What do you want people who are not immunocompromised to know?
T.S.: Don’t be afraid to be the only person in a room wearing a mask. Your own health is worth it. And you have to realize how callous [people who don’t wear a mask are] by existing in spaces and breathing [their] air [on immunocompromised people].
People think that vaccines are magic, but vaccines alone are not enough. I would encourage people to look at the Swiss cheese model of risk assessment.
Each slice of Swiss cheese has holes in it in different places, and each layer represents a layer of virus mitigation. One layer is vaccines. Another layer is masks. Then there’s staying home when you’re sick and testing.
G.A.B.: I wish people were masking. I wish people understood how likely it is that they are also now immunocompromised and vulnerable because of the widespread immune dysregulation that COVID-19 is causing. [Editor’s note: Research shows that COVID-19 infections may cause long-term harm to the immune system in some people.]
I want people to be invested in being good community members, and part of that is understanding that COVID-19 hits the poorest the hardest—gig workers, underpaid employees, frontline service workers, people who were already disabled or immunocompromised.
If people want to be good community members, they not only need to protect immunocompromised and disabled people by wearing a mask when they leave their homes, but they also need to actually start taking care of their community members and participating in mutual aid. [Editor’s note: Mutual aid is the exchange of resources and services within a community, such as people sharing extra N95 masks.]
I spend pretty much all of my time working on LongCOVIDAidBot, which promotes mutual aid for people who have been harmed by COVID-19.
A.M.: An important thing to think about when you’re not disabled is that it becomes a state of being for all people, if they’re lucky. You will become disabled, or you will die.
It is a privilege, in my opinion, to become disabled because I can learn different ways of living my life. And being able to see yourself as a body that changes over time, I hope, opens up a way of looking at your body as the porous reality that it is.
Some people think of themselves as being willing to make concessions or change their behavior when immunocompromised people are around, but you don’t always know when someone is immunocompromised.
So, if you’re not willing to change the way that you think about yourself as a person who is susceptible [to illness], then you should change the way that you consider other people around you. Wearing a mask—at the very least in public indoor spaces—means considering the unknown realities of all the people who are interacting with that space.
This article first appeared on Public Good News and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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Clams vs Oysters – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing clams to oysters, we picked the clams.
Why?
Considering the macros first, clams have more than 2x the protein, while oysters have nearly 2x the fat, of which, a little over 5x the saturated fat. So, in all accounts, clam is the winner here.
In terms of vitamins, clams have more of vitamins A, B1, B2, B3, B5, B6, B7, B9, B12, and C, while oysters are not higher in any vitamins. Another win for clams.
The category of minerals is more balanced; clams are higher in manganese, phosphorus, potassium, and selenium, while oysters are higher in copper, iron, magnesium, and zinc. This makes for a 4:4 tie, though it’s worth noting that the margin of difference for zinc is very large, so that can be an argument for oysters.
Nevertheless, adding up the sections makes for a clear win for clams.
A quick aside on “are oysters an aphrodisiac?”:
That zinc content is probably largely responsible for oysters’ reputation as an aphrodisiac, and zinc is important in the synthesis of both estrogen and testosterone. However, as the synthesis is not instant, and those sex hormones rise most in the morning (around 8am to 9am), to enjoy aphrodisiac benefits it’d be more sensible, on a biochemical level, to eat oysters one day, and then have morning sex the next day when those hormones are peaking. That said, while testosterone is the main driver of male libido, progesterone is usually more relevant for women’s, and unlike estrogen, progesterone usually peaks around 10pm to 2am, and is uninfluenced by having just eaten oysters.
So, in what way, if any, could oysters be responsible for libido in women? Well, the zinc is still important in energy metabolism, so that’s a factor, and also, we might hypothesize that oysters’ high saturated fat and cholesterol content may increase blood pressure which, while not fabulous for the health in general, may be considered desirable in the bedroom since the clitoris is anatomically analogous to the penis, and—while estrogen vs testosterone makes differences to the nervous system down there that are beyond the scope of today’s article—also enjoys localized increased blood pressure (and thus, a flushing response and resultant engorgement) during arousal.
Want to learn more?
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