Category: Health / Healthcare / Illness / Vaccines
New videos and stuff coming tomorrow.
Hi Everyone. Hope all is well for everyone. I have been in bed for the last 48 hours. Two days. The first day I was in too much pain to function well. This morning I got up to watch the morning Sunday news shows and was in so much pain I took so much pain I had to go to bed by 10 am. Great news is I got all the issues surrounding my video recording taken care of. I can and will start doing them very soon. Hugs and so much love to all. Scottie
Here’s An Important Resource!
Mid Century Women’s Publications Did Important Medical Work
It reminds me of how “Cosmopolitan” was one of the early ‘mainstream’ magazines honestly discussing the AIDS virus, where to find care, and knowledge to avoid contracting it. They knew and reported early on that any- and everyone can catch what we now know as HIV. This piece is about early cancer info dissemination.
How Midcentury Women’s Magazines Fought Cancer
At a time when people wouldn’t even say the word, journalists at Good Housekeeping, Redbook, and other women’s magazines were informing readers how to recognize, protect against, and talk about cancer.
Maxine Davis wrote about plenty of tough topics during her long career in journalism, but none of them frightened her as much as the assignment she received in the spring of 1940. Her editors at Good Housekeeping wanted her to cover cancer, a disease so cloaked in stigma that Davis, like many other Americans, was afraid to say its name out loud.
The sweeping series of articles she produced that year changed her thinking. “My research has dispelled that terror,” she wrote in an article that appeared in Good Housekeeping’s April 1940 issue, declaring that cancer could be cured especially if it was caught early through education and hypervigilance. Cancer, she explained, was “sneaking, insidious. Only you and you alone can guard yourself against it.”
At the time Davis wrote these words, cancer was a taboo topic. The term itself wouldn’t be spoken on the radio until 1945. Rumors about its causes were rampant. (Many Americans at the time believed it to be contagious or a sign of poor character.) Physicians routinely withheld cancer diagnoses from patients to spare them shame. Although it wasn’t always a death sentence, the treatments we rely on today were nascent or nonexistent. And yet, the editors at Good Housekeeping still decided to devote pages and pages to in-depth coverage of the disease.
This is one example of how, during the 1940s and 1950s, women’s magazines played a vital and largely forgotten role in educating average Americans about burgeoning efforts to prevent and treat cancer. It was a pivotal era for modern medicine thanks to scientific advancements and increased attention to public health. Cancer was among the leading causes of death, and rates were increasing in part because people were living longer. Print media in all its forms played a major role in normalizing public conversations about cancer, but women’s magazines took a unique approach. They made disease prevention personal, calling upon women to become cancer watchdogs for themselves and their families.
Davis was among the best-known of the women’s magazine journalists covering cancer. By the early 1940s, she had reported on the League of Nations, driven all over the United States to research a book about American youth, and founded a wire service aimed at explaining politics to women. Her cancer stories for Good Housekeeping launched her to a new level of prominence, one akin to modern day health influencers. Her editors promoted her work heavily, framing her as a lay expert with carefully cultivated sources. “Doctors like to work with her,” they wrote in an introduction to her spring 1940 cancer series, “and they give her all the help they can.”
Writing in May of 1940, Davis introduced readers to the basics of cancer treatment, explaining in plain language how surgery, X-rays, and radium were being used to help patients.
Sometimes X-ray, radium, and surgery are all used to treat a malignant condition. Take the case of Ada Johnson. Ada put off going to hospital longer than she should have after she felt a lump in her breast; but the doctor didn’t think the situation was hopeless. This is what he did:
First, there was a surgical operation. When that had been successfully accomplished, the specialist in cancer of the breast applied radium to the chest wall. That wasn’t all. The doctor then used deep X-ray therapy on Ada’s breast and armpit….This was repeated for thirty-five treatments. Ada is perfectly well today.
Davis was not, however, the only women’s magazine reporter working the cancer beat at midcentury. Seventeen magazine’s beauty editor Jean Campbell urged her young readers to get involved in efforts to bring specialized cancer to more communities. “Demand them,” she wrote in the April 1948 issue, “and raise funds for them.” That same year Miriam Zeller Gross deftly described the history of stomach cancer treatment in a gripping feature story that appeared in Better Homes and Gardens. In the early 1950s, Redbook’s Collie Small encouraged women to overcome “false modesty” and allow physicians to screen them for breast cancer. Women’s magazines were publishing hundreds of articles on cancer by dozens of writers. Women also wrote about cancer for general magazines including The Saturday Evening Post, which featured a handful of stories in the 1950s by female cancer survivors.
Stories about cancer were far less common before World War II, but they did sometimes appear in women’s magazines. Ladies Home Journal has been credited by medical historians with publishing the very first general interest article about cancer detection in 1913. Others, including Good Housekeeping, featured occasional educational columns by physicians during the 1920s.
In addition to becoming quick experts on complex medical topics, these journalists managed often-fraught relationships with health professionals who tended to distrust journalists. It became common practice during this time for physicians to review stories before they were published. Sometimes, one of those physicians would write a sidebar: In 1955, American Cancer Society vice president Dr. Charles S. Cameron had reviewed a draft of an April 1955 article on cervical cancer by health journalist Gladys Denny Shultz for Ladies Home Journal, and wrote a public note of thanks, proclaiming that the magazine was “offering its readers a great service by publishing this excellent article. It should be a means of saving thousands of lives.”
While most of the bylines atop women’s magazine stories about cancer belonged to female journalists, editors did occasionally invite physicians, almost always men, to contribute. Cosmopolitan published a 14-page essay by Walter Alvarez, who had just retired from clinical practice to pursue a second career in medical writing. The piece, which appeared in January of 1953, sprawled across 14 pages under the headline “Danger Signals in Your Life” and includes tips to spot illnesses like cancer in children, teens, and adults. Alvarez assured readers he wasn’t out to scare them. Instead, he hoped to save “wise persons from avoidable illness or death.”
Much of this coverage was driven by coordinated public relations campaigns initiated by the American Cancer Society and similar organizations. In addition to connecting journalists with expert sources and organizing junkets to prominent research centers, such campaigns included advertising blitzes promoting new treatments, championing medical breakthroughs, and reminding Americans of the importance of cancer screenings. Women’s magazines were a popular venue for such ads, so it wasn’t uncommon for some issues to feature a reference to cancer on nearly every page.
While groundbreaking, the cancer coverage provided by midcentury women’s magazines was imperfect. Race and class were seldom addressed because these publications — like much of the news media — assumed their audience was white and financially stable. Some coverage also illustrates the era’s rudimentary and fast-evolving scientific knowledge. One example is a story that appeared in Parents magazine in 1943. Written by journalist Constance J. Foster and prominently endorsed by the New York City Cancer Committee, the article proclaimed that “cancer is not hereditary.” A piece that appeared in Redbook a decade later explained new research showing that some forms of cancer do run in families.
The role of women’s magazines in the fight against cancer is a fascinating chapter in media history, one laced with a type of gender politics that feels familiar today. The cancer beat gave women journalists like Davis access to male-dominated sectors like medicine, public policy, and journalism, but it also kept them firmly tethered to domestic matters and subservient to male physicians. Their work, while educational, put undue pressure on individual women to spot the signs of cancer. But it also brought hope to families facing a terrifying diagnosis. As Davis wrote in the October 1948 issue of Good Housekeeping, “Cancer is not necessarily fatal. Cures do exist.”
Northeastern University student Elsa O’Donnell contributed archival research for this article.
Trans Journalist Guesting on ‘The Handbasket’
Guest Column: The Current ‘mindf*ck’ Of Being a Trans Journalist
Katelyn Burns explains the personal and professional toll of Trump’s anti-trans executive orders.
Katelyn Burns
February 04, 2025
Source
A note from Marisa: Hi all. I’m proud to share the first-ever guest column on The Handbasket. It’s written by Katelyn Burns, a talented journalist and longtime internet pal of mine who has deeply covered trans rights and her experience as a trans journalist for nearly a decade. Trans people in this country are under direct attack by the Trump administration, and her perspective on navigating it all personally and professionally is crucial. Now I’ll hand it over to Katelyn…
I’ve covered trans issues for nine years now, going back to 2016. As a trans freelance journalist, I was there when the US right wing shifted from attacking gay marriage to attacking trans rights. I was there for the North Carolina bathroom bill and Trump’s first election. I covered every awful anti-trans policy introduced in the first Trump term in the White House, and I saw hundreds of red states pass bill after bill targeting people like me over the last few years.
But these first two weeks of Trump’s new term and the extensive executive orders removing nearly every right I have as a trans American have been by far the worst in all my professional years. Trump has already rolled trans rights back further than he did in his first term, and it’s only been two weeks. He sprayed the anti-trans firehose at us, obliterating the rights of my community immediately upon assuming office.
At the same time, I haven’t been this busy as a journalist since Trump was last in office. I’m hearing from editors who are looking for stories from me again. I’m sending my poor editors at MSNBC multiple column pitches each week, and my Patreon has hit a new record for subscribers. As I was writing about Trump’s new passport policy—one which will affect me when my own passport expires in two years—I noticed my Patreon broke 500 paid subscribers for the first time. Since then it has grown to more than 570 paid subsriptions and nearly 1,000 total subscribers.
Watching my own civil rights disappear while my bank account and workload grow is a total mindfuck.
I can’t help but feel guilt at profiting from the suffering of my community, while also feeling like I deserve to be fairly compensated for my work covering all of these horrible new policies—policies that I had predicted would come into being before the election (before being dismissed as “hysterical” by the centrist cabal of pundits that currently dominate American media).
I wrote a piece published the day before Election Day detailing all of the things I feared would happen should Trump get re-elected. In the piece, I said Trump would attempt to ban trans athletes from women’s sports, ban trans teens from accessing medically necessary transition care, punish doctors who administer that care, and crack down on trans inclusiveness in schools.
“Beyond the executive branch, a Trump win and an accompanying Republican-controlled Congress would be likely to try to nationalize the anti-trans efforts that were previously undertaken at the state level,” I wrote in that piece. “Over the last several years, hundreds of anti-trans bills have been proposed and passed in red states.”
Little did I know how quickly those national attacks would crystalize. In Trump’s first two weeks, he’s already pushed through anti-trans executive orders on all the topics I predicted he would, and has quickly gone significantly further than I anticipated.
It started on inauguration day when he signed an executive order defining male and female as “determined at conception” (a nod to the language used by anti-abortion activists). The order impacted trans people in two significant ways: trans women were now to be kept in men’s federal prison, where they would be subject to rampant prison rape; and the State Department would no longer allow gender markers to be changed on US Passports.
The passport rules were clarified shortly thereafter to say that passports with an X gender marker would be invalidated, and any previously issued passport would be reverted to birth sex upon renewal. Since then, there have been numerous anecdotal reports of trans people having their passports confiscated by passport office personnel who refuse to reissue a new one—even with their birth sex. With no official word from the State Department, trans people right now could be experiencing a shadow travel ban.
Over at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), they stopped all anti-LGBTQ bias claims and declared that they would investigate employers who allowed trans employees to use the work bathroom of their gender identity. Last week, Trump re-instituted his trans military ban, an action that he took during his first term and one I’ve covered deeply. This time, instead of arguing that trans people are medically unfit to serve, the Trump administration has accused all trans service members of being untruthful and dishonorable in claiming a trans identity.
Later on last week, Trump issued yet another anti-trans executive order, this time about education. Not only did this order ban trans women from women’s school sports, it threatened to investigate and cut off federal funding for any school that allowed a trans student to use the bathroom of their gender identity, or even teachers who use a student’s names and pronouns consistent with their gender identity.
Earlier today, The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump will be signing his 10th anti-trans executive order since taking office. This one explicitly bans trans girls and women from girls’ and women’s school sports, and was perhaps the heaviest blow to me personally and to my career. I posted a thread on Bluesky of some of my most significant work on trans athletes, and it’s safe to say that coverage of trans athletes—more than any other issue—is what built my career as a journalist. It’s hard not to feel like my words have failed the trans girl athletes of this country.
In perhaps the cruelest order, last week Trump ordered that federal funding be denied to any medical facility that provides gender affirming care to anyone under the age of 19. In response, several major hospital systems suspended their trans-related practices, including NYU Langone in New York City and DC Children’s Hospital in Washington, DC.
I’d like to be running deep investigations on how each of these orders are impacting the estimated 1.6 million trans people in the US, but doing all of them at once is too much for just one person. There’s a common misconception pervading the editors in the American press industry that trans reporters are simply too biased to fairly cover trans issues, which means I am one of the few trans reporters who is able to actually cover national trans issues for mainstream press outlets. But that also means I feel the weight of my whole community. I want to cover every new problem with the depth my people deserve.
In the first Trump term, each new anti-trans action came months apart from each other, allowing me to cover one at a time with a much needed depth that I worry isn’t possible anymore. By piling all of these orders into a two week period, the Trump administration has effectively strangled the press from covering all of them.
By the time I finished my piece about Trump’s first anti-trans order of his second term, two more had been issued—and my editors didn’t have time to run a piece about the second. I managed to farm out a piece about the third executive order about the trans military ban to the San Francisco Chronicle, and I have a piece coming out soon about the puberty blocker ban. But the news hook on the education and employment orders is already expiring, and bigger problems within the Trump administration are taking up valuable journalistic time.
I will never stop covering the harm done by Trump’s anti-trans orders, but there is already so much of it. I learned in the first Trump term how to separate the personal from the professional, at least when on deadline. But once the draft is done, and edits are in the can, and I’m laying in bed at night trying to fall asleep, it all comes back to me:
Do I need to plan for a quick getaway if some Trump lackey decides the loudmouth tranny journalist needs to go? How do I prevent myself from burning out again like I did during the first Trump term? How do I deal with the guilt of not being able to cover everything? These are the thoughts that haunt me when I’m not pouring myself into work or whatever movie or video game I’m playing to distract myself.
During the first Trump administration, there were at least a dozen openly trans journalists scattered about the liberal online media covering trans issues. Now we are few and far between. The 19th has both Orion Rummler and Kate Sosin, two powerhouses of the trans reporting field, and beyond them, Erin Reed and Evan Urquhart are doing great work. So many of us are trying to make it on our own as freelancers or bloggers, but the headwinds are strong.
I worry about the future of my community, but there’s no time for that now. There are too many stories to write.
Katelyn Burns is a freelance journalist and columnist at MSNBC. She’s co-host of the Cancel Me, Daddy podcast, and a co-founder of The Flytrap. In a previous role she was the first ever openly trans Capitol Hill reporter in US history. You can find her on BlueSky and Patreon.
A Multi-Post
A few things I’ve run across while doing other things. We’re having freezing rain until noon, though it’s mostly not slick out. Still cloudy. Yesterday it was heaven, but today, Ollie is sad about no sun. There are fewer visitors to the trees and lawn for him to watch and play with!
Here’s one about Dems getting in the middle of DOGE. It sounds collegial, but the plan, of course, is oversight. They have no majority, but they can tell us what’s happening.
Why a Florida Democrat joined the DOGE caucus that’s looking to cut federal spending
Updated December 5, 202411:45 AM ET
Heard on Morning Edition By Steve Inskeep
A new GOP-led congressional caucus that supports President-elect Donald Trump’s push to cut trillions in federal spending has welcomed a Democrat.
This week, Rep. Jared Moskowitz of Florida joined the Department of Government Efficiency caucus in the U.S. House of Representatives, becoming the first Democrat to do so.
The caucus would partner with DOGE, the unofficial advisory body led by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy tasked with regulating government spending.
Moskowitz, who represents a “middle of the road” Florida district that includes Boca Raton and Ft. Lauderdale, said joining doesn’t mean he fully shares Trump’s agenda. <snip>
====================================
This is just a quickie mental health break video.
===============================================================
This I saw this morning, and it’s really heartening to see Kansas businesses organizing on behalf of customers! Here’s hoping businesses organizing for people becomes a thing.
More than 100 pharmacies in Kansas to temporarily close in protest of PBM practices
by: Jeremiah Cook Posted: Feb 3, 2025 / 07:24 AM CST Updated: Feb 3, 2025 / 09:34 AM CST
KSNF/KODE — More than 100 Sunflower State pharmacies will close shop next week—to help send a message to lawmakers.
Wolkar Drug president and pharmacist Brian Caswell says on Wednesday, February 5, roughly 100 stores in 56 Kansas counties will close—including Wolkar Drug in Baxter Springs.
Roughly 400 people from those stores will be headed to Topeka—hoping to make a change in healthcare laws.
Caswell says pharmacy benefit managers—or PBM’s—have had a big, and negative, impact on the healthcare industry.
Caswell tells us PBM’s act as the middlemen between insurance companies and pharmacies—and can cause higher deductibles and even dictate what medications are covered, based on what makes them more money.
“PBM’s have been around for, like, well over 40 years, and they’ve slowly kind of changed the industry altogether and taken over. With the success of money and power, they’ve actually created a healthcare industry that’s just unsustainable right now,” said Brian Caswell, Wolkar Drug president & pharmacist. (snip-MORE)
Who’s Boiling All This Cabbage? | Leanne Morgan
I quickly visited the Male Survivor site this morning. One of the other members posted this. I liked it, thought it was funny and true at the same time. Hugs.
Is It, Truly?
Trump’s tariffs by Ann Telnaes
Hopefully his supporters can take a yoke (I’m sorry) Read on Substack
Yes, I believe it is worthwhile to challenge hate speech.
And this is a blog well worth following, though I don’t read there often enough.
Trans People Are Real and Detransitioning Isn’t That Common – SOME MORE NEWS
Ok the first few minutes are sort of campy and over the top, it is the guy’s style thing I guess. But then he settles down and delivers the facts and debunks a lot of stuff by showing the actual studies the right wrong claim back them up, but he shows how the studies say the opposite of that the trans haters claimed. Great info on trans people and the made up faked outrage caused by a small group of trans haters who are making big money off of pushing lies about trans kids and trans issues. Hugs
Hi. Right-wing politicians, lawyers, and grifters (and some liberals) want to convince you that trans youth are the victims of a social contagion and that the majority of those who transition will detransition. This is a lie that puts all trans people at risk. Get the world’s news at https://ground.news/SMN to compare coverage and see through biased coverage. Subscribe for 40% off unlimited access through our link.
Scottie's Playtime 