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Good morning. You know that one Emily Dickinson poem? “Because I could not stop for Death – / He kindly stopped for me – / The Carriage held but just Ourselves – / And Immortality.” I’d love to hear a longevity enthusiast’s close reading. In the meantime, scroll down for a great story from Sarah Todd on the movement’s latest death-defying initiatives.
Trump says latest medical exam went ‘PERFECTLY’
President Trump had another medical exam yesterday, for what the White House described as preventive medical and dental checkups. It’s the fourth publicly disclosed exam he’s had since returning to office last year.
On social media, Trump said that “everything checked out PERFECTLY” at what he called his “6 month physical.” Read more from the AP.
“The bigger issue today isn’t speculation. The real question is transparency,” physician Uché Blackstock posted on X regarding the exam. “The public deserves clear, timely, medically grounded information without political spin, stigma, or ageism.”
Urgent care usage across the U.S.
In 2024, about 28% of people visited an urgent care center at least once, while 19% went to a retail health clinic (like the MinuteClinic at CVS, for example), according to new CDC data. Adults 65 and older were less likely to go to urgent care than younger adults. A previous iteration of this data analysis from the National Center for Health Statistics included a breakdown by race, finding that Black and Hispanic adults were less likely than their white peers to visit urgent care or a retail clinic. The latest analysis did not include racial differences.
While urgent care centers have existed since the 1970s, the number across the U.S. has doubled over the last decade from 7,000 to more than 14,000. “Urgent care centers have become the reliever airport for our broken system,” Franz Ritucci, a physician and president of the American Academy of Urgent Care Medicine, told WHYY last fall.
Inside the conference where death is (theoretically) optional
The longevity conference that Vitalist Bay launched last year brings together founders, investors, biohackers, researchers, and those with a general interest in discussing how to forestall — and eventually beat — death. STAT’s Sarah Todd attended the meeting this year and today published a story on the latest death-defying science and theories.
The piece is a little goofy but also haunting. Here are just a few details that I’ll think about for a long time:
- A photo that one attendee showed Sarah, featuring his children holding up a sign that read “Stop aging, save my parents (Mom first).”
- The entire concept of bodyoids. Imagine a sort of headless sac of organs to replace an aging person’s failing heart and kidneys. (“What if we could obtain a supply of human bodies in an ethical way?” postdoc Carlston Charlesworth said. “There’s logically no reason why it’s wrong.”)
- The business model for health testing as outlined by one venture capitalist: Be sure to give people at least one good result, then sell them on subscriptions, interventions, and coaching to improve the other metrics.
Read more from Sarah on how longevity turned from a movement into an industry. Bonus: She also asked 45 conference speakers and attendees how long they predict they’ll live. The distribution on that bar graph is really something.
Understanding trends among undocumented patients
On President Trump’s first day back in the White House, the Department of Homeland Security issued a memo rescinding a policy that prevented immigration officers from doing searches, making arrests, or other enforcement actions in “protected areas,” including schools, churches, and hospitals. In the six months after that directive, emergency room visits in one Massachusetts hospital system declined about 11% among undocumented immigrants, according to a study published yesterday in JAMA Network Open.
Or at least the researchers believe that visits among undocumented immigrants declined. The health system does not track patients’ documentation status, so the analysis was done using two proxies: an emergency insurance product that’s available to undocumented immigrants in the state (or missing insurance information), and the patients’ preferred language. There are limitations to using the insurance product, especially if attempted in other states with higher rates of uninsured people. But overall, preferred language did not consistently identify the same declines in ER visits, meaning that it may not be a reliable proxy for research on this group moving forward.
It’s the end of the world science as we know it
And neuroscientist Jonathan Jackson feels fine! Really.
Last month, a massive study of nearly 4,000 social-science papers found that results could be replicated for only about half of them. It wasn’t exactly surprising, Jackson writes, but it was alarming — especially considering how American science had been shattered over the last year by the Trump administration’s policies and funding cuts. Despite the very real despair, Jackson argues in a new First Opinion essay that academics and scientists need to stop mourning and start taking action.
“We’ve been so busy feeling righteous that we forgot to be resourceful,” he writes. Read more about what could come next.