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Pretty much everyone who cares about public health agrees that it’s a good idea to help people quit smoking, the No. 1 cause of preventable death in the U.S. Doctors may soon get some extra encouragement to lend a hand, thanks to proposed changes in Medicare’s physician fee schedules. (Todd, 7/17)

Novo Nordisk, maker of Ozempic and Wegovy, lists the telehealth company LifeMD on its website as a provider that offers “legitimate medicine sourcing and patient support” for people seeking GLP-1 drugs. But some former employees describe LifeMD differently, as a company that has sought to maximize the volume of prescriptions it doles out at the expense of patient safety. (Chen, 7/20)

�������ýҕ�l Health News: Violence Repeatedly Erupts At Dementia Care Facilities Despite Warnings, Inspections Show 

Sam Ato Timaloa, a paroled sex offender who also served time for attempted murder, had dementia and an acute intolerance of noise — especially from roommates at Sunrise Post Acute, a nursing home in Banning, California. Over four months in 2025, a state investigative report found, Sunrise switched Timaloa’s room eight times, the last into one occupied by Attilio Cecchetto, 92, a retired tile installer whose dementia led him to frequently moan, mumble, and yell. (Rau, 7/20)

At the end of a particularly difficult shift in the University of Chicago Trauma Center, Dr. Selwyn Rogers Jr. came home, put some Miles Davis on and started to write. During that shift in the summer of 2022, Rogers and the team of trauma surgeons he leads at UChicago Medicine had treated two teenage boys who were each shot multiple times and died from their injuries. (Kubzansky, 7/17)

In 2016, the “Godfather of AI,” Geoffrey Hinton, stood onstage at a machine learning conference in Toronto and declared AI would soon kill the radiology profession. (Quiroz-Gutierrez, 7/19)

Many dentists prescribe antibiotics for common procedures, such as tooth removals, “just in case,” hoping to prevent their patients from developing oral bacterial infections. But prescribing unnecessary antibiotics can put patients at risk. Research shows that 80% of preventive antibiotics prescribed by dentists are unnecessary or inappropriate, because they don’t actually reduce infections. (Szabo, 7/17)

�������ýҕ�l Health News: Doctors ‘Cringe’ At Possibility Of Documenting Which Medicaid Enrollees Too Sick To Work 

Alice Thornton has spent more than two decades treating people living with HIV in Lexington, Kentucky. Her team tends to “cringe” anytime they hear about patients having to fill out lots of paperwork, like when applying for Social Security Disability payments, because it can be a difficult, burdensome process. (Whitehead, 7/20)