Author: Heather Boerner

St. John’s wort is a popular herbal supplement used especially for depression. But does it actually work and what drugs might it interact with? In my 20s, I wasn’t much for traditional medicine. For one thing, navigating our labyrinthine health care system seemed like a lot of unnecessary work. For another, I was broke. Plus, I used henna to dye my hair. I wanted something natural. That meant that when I felt down in the winter and was quick to worry and anxiety, I didn’t go to the doctor. I went to the drug store and got myself a bottle…

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Laura Arrowsmith knows what it’s like to go through gender transitioning. She struggled to find a provider willing to prescribe the hormone therapy that would allow her body to reflect the woman she knew herself to be. Medical transition care — that is, the prescribing and managing of feminizing or masculinizing hormones for people whose perceived gender differs from the sex assigned to them at birth — has been prescribed for decades. But only now are physicians beginning to offer the treatment more readily, said Arrowsmith, herself a DO (doctor of osteopathic medicine) who runs a transgender care clinic in…

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The PrEP regimen, which relies on taking the combination antiretroviral pill Truvada, can help prevent HIV. Here’s what you should know about it. For decades, abstinence and condoms were the only options for preventing HIV. Today, there’s a third: Truvada, a combination pill comprising 2 antiretroviral medications (emtricitabine and tenofovir) is approved by the FDA for HIV prevention. The protocol, called  PrEP (pre-exposure prophylaxis), is exactly what it sounds like — a chemical prophylactic against HIV that prevents infection, even if you are exposed. It is, as Meagan Jordan — a 22-year-old who got a prescription for Truvada in 2015…

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