June 2024 Shell Exchange

Welcome to the June 2024 Shell Exchange!

Midway through each month, I drop a list of recommended reads. I try to feature winning hermit crab essays (🦀) when possible. But those charming crabbies aren’t always easy to find. So I also make it a point to share pieces on invisible illness.

If you come across an essay or article I haven’t mentioned that you feel warrants attention, drop the link in the comments, and I’ll add it to the rotation next month.

1. “Treating chronic pain requires much more than medications” by Antje M. Barreveld and Edin Randall from STAT

“A no-brainer, right? Wrong. Although research shows that programs addressing physical, psychological, and social parts of pain for children and adults are effective, they are expensive, difficult to access, and clinicians aren’t paid what it costs to deliver these services.”

2. “Sweating It” by Sari Botton from Oldster

“Consider that maybe you brought this on yourself, with your brilliant sense of humor, no less. Your karmic error: not taking your mom’s hot flashes seriously all those years ago. Making fun of her. Jesus.”

3. “What Time is It?” by Jeff Wood from Split Lip

“Neurologists use the clock face test as a screening for early onset dementia, as well as other disorders. It’s about 85% reliable, according to the internet. The internet also tells me why the clock face test works so well. It measures episodic memory, language fluency, time orientation, visuospatial function, and executive function. I didn’t know what all those terms meant when I first heard them, but now I know them well.”

4. “Study Finds Mental Disorders Spread Between Teenagers” by Jess Thomson from Newsweek

“In the paper, the researchers suggest several mechanisms for how these mental disorders may be transmitted in peer networks, one of which is the normalization of mental disorders, where increased mental health awareness and receptivity to diagnosis could occur when individuals with diagnoses are present in a social network.”

5. “NIH documents show how $1.6 billion long Covid initiative has failed so far to meet its goals” by Betsy Ladyzhets from STAT

“While many long Covid patient advocates are disappointed with RECOVER’s progress so far, some say the NIH could turn this program around by using $515 million in additional funding, allocated earlier this year, to support high-impact biological research and clinical trials.”

6. “A Cancer Lexicon” by Kathleen Quigley from Hypertext Magazine 🦀

“Fight. Fight like a girl. Put up a good fight. Flight or fight. You don’t like to argue, let alone fight. The war on cancer is fought with drugs. The war on drugs is fought with prison. During treatment your body is held hostage by IV lines and the machines you are tethered to.”

7. “Black Negation” by Allen M. Price from The Audacity

“But when my mother arrived at Butler, she again refused treatment, and so the doctor took her to court. The judge was convinced by the doctor to keep my mother at Butler until she agreed to accept treatment, which she finally did a week later. She stayed for just over a month.”

8. “‘I could bench-press 100kg. Now, I can’t walk’: Lucy’s life with long Covid” by Sam Wollaston from The Guardian

“In September, the Guardian published a reader callout asking for long Covid stories. The response was extraordinary: more than 950 people – including Lucy – got in touch, from across the UK and beyond – Germany, Belgium, the US, Mexico, New Zealand. Almost 1,000 people for whom Covid is very much not over.”

9. “Pain and Suffering” by Ann Neumann from The Baffler

“Demand created a market: pill mills. Those dependent on opioids sought out their own prescriptions, while others began to sell their unused pills for extra income. Instead of addressing drug use with treatment—methadone, buprenorphine, abstinence programs—states and the federal government began to respond by limiting the quantity of opioids that doctors could prescribe, hurting legitimate pain patients, who were now unable to get the medication that allowed them to function, and leaving those dependent on or addicted to illicit prescription medication in deep withdrawal.”

10. “Four Tops Singer Sues a Michigan Hospital For Racial Discrimination” by Phillip Jackson from HuffPost

“Not long after he was checked in, an emergency room doctor ordered that Morris stop receiving oxygen, had him placed in a restraining jacket and requested a psychological evaluation of him. When Morris asked if he could show his ID to prove his identity, the lawsuit claims a security guard told him to ‘sit his Black ass down.’”