Author: Emma Yasinski

Emma Yasinski

I am a freelance science and medical journalist, fascinated by how the scientific process leads to incredible discoveries, but also can lead to publication bias leaning toward positive findings and minimizing negatives. With a bachelor’s degree in neuroscience from Lafayette College and a Master’s in Science and Medical Journalism from Boston University, I’ve written about clinical trial transparency, organ donation, and basic molecular biology for publications like The Scientist, The Atlantic, Undark.org, Kaiser Health News, and more. At MedShadow, I research and write about the sometimes unexpected ways that medicines can affect us, and what we can do if and when it does.

Mental health is a description of your psychological and emotional wellbeing. Your mental health can impact everything from your productivity at work or school, to your relationships to your risk for long term conditions like heart disease. Making sure you get regular exercise, eat a healthy diet, socialize and take time to relax are all crucial to maintaining your mental health. But sometimes, mental health conditions, also known as mental illnesses, strike anyway. A mental illness is any condition, such as depression or schizophrenia, that impacts your thinking, behavior, or mood. While they often emerge on their own, they can…

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Read through MedShadow’s coverage of the side effects of drugs and you’ll see many of the same side effects mentioned over and over. For example, patients report nausea after taking a whole host of drugs, such as those for Lupus, HIV prevention, cancer and more. It’s crucial to differentiate side effects from symptoms, explains Suzanne Soliman, PharmD, founder of the Pharmacist Moms Group, so that you and your healthcare provider can work together to improve your care. She says, when she works with patients who are experiencing new symptoms or side effects, the first step is for her to take…

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Madeline Shonka told MedShadow it took her years to get an accurate lupus diagnosis. Even then, she had to go through trial and error with many different combinations of medications for treatment, all the while trying to decipher the best lifestyle changes to manage her condition. For example, she eventually discovered that making time for light exercise had a huge positive impact on her quality of life. Jill Dehlin, an RN who suffers from migraines, told MedShadow that tracking her symptoms helped immensely. “I recommend to everyone that I speak with to keep a journal or diary and keep track…

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Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a term often “thrown around loosely,” says Howard Pratt, doctor of osteopathic medicine (DO) and a psychiatrist at the Community Health of South Florida, who treats PTSD. In reality, it’s is a condition in which you might develop a variety of symptoms like nightmares, intrusive memories, or a tendency to avoid anything that reminds you of a traumatic event you experienced or even heard about. You might get startled easily or even blame yourself for what happened to you or to a friend. “What really makes it difficult is that these are not consistent things…

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