The Split's health writers dig into the science, the experiments, and the fundamentals of living well.
John Galvin delayed a colonoscopy because he couldn't afford it before Medicare. That's not a budgeting problem. That's a deferred cancer screening, and the research on what happens next is not reassuring.
By Dr. Alex Chen · 4 min read
A third of Americans now turn to AI chatbots for medical advice before calling a doctor. The chatbots are fast. They are also unaccountable, unprotected, and structurally rewarded for telling you what you want to hear.
By Maya Okafor · 3 min read
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act cuts $137 billion from rural Medicaid while offering $50 billion to soften the blow. A clinic in Minnesota is already counting the patients it will lose. The numbers do not work, and the hospital closures will not be reversible.
By Kai Brighton · 3 min read
The federal government just told 50 medical schools to teach nutrition. The embarrassing part is that it took this long for anyone to demand it. 40 hours is a floor, not a finish line.
By Dr. Alex Chen · 3 min read
ACA enrollment fell 1.2 million in 2026 after enhanced subsidies expired. One in 10 previous enrollees went completely uninsured. This is not a complicated mystery about fraud or inflated numbers. It is what happens when you raise the price.
By Maya Okafor · 3 min read
My HRV climbed from 61 to 69 after I stopped chasing 10,000 steps and started targeting 7,000. Turns out March 2026 data backs this up completely. The goal everyone tracks is the wrong one.
By Kai Brighton · 3 min read
Antibiotic-resistant infections killed 1.27 million people in 2019. Cancer killed roughly 10 million. The gap is real, and anyone collapsing it is misreading the data. But resistance rose in over 40% of monitored pathogen-antibiotic combinations between 2018 and 2023, and the broken economics of antibiotic development mean we are watching a slow catastrophe with the wrong urgency.
By Dr. Alex Chen · 3 min read
Health aid dropped 40% in two years. Polio eradication just cut its budget by 30%. The people making these decisions are betting nothing goes wrong. That bet has a poor historical track record.
By Maya Okafor · 4 min read
My flu shot last fall was roughly 40% effective. I know because I checked. The mRNA platform we were building could have done better, and we just stopped building it.
By Kai Brighton · 3 min read
Australia recorded 60 measles cases since January 2025, with 8 showing no known exposure source. The country eliminated measles in 2014. What changed was not the virus; second-dose coverage dropped to 89.5%, just below the threshold where herd immunity holds.
By Dr. Alex Chen · 3 min read
The FDA released a new rare disease drug framework the same week advocates staged a funeral protest outside its doors. That timing tells you everything about where the agency actually stands.
By Maya Okafor · 3 min read
A 1,747-person randomized trial just killed the case for vitamin D against acute COVID. The long COVID signal in the same data is borderline and unconfirmed. The depression evidence is actually interesting. These are three different conclusions, and the wellness industry will treat them as one.
By Dr. Alex Chen · 3 min read
Sleep alone won't fix your health. But skipping it makes everything else harder, and the newest research shows pairing sleep with movement produces results neither delivers on its own. The answer is simpler than the wellness industry wants you to believe.
By Maya Okafor · 3 min read
The 2026 AMR Benchmark Report identified 7 late-stage products targeting the most dangerous resistant pathogens. Seven, for the entire planet. This is not a biology problem that got away from us; it is a funding structure that was never built to solve it.
By Kai Brighton · 3 min read
A single course of the wrong antibiotic can reshape your gut microbiome for up to 8 years. A Nature Medicine study of nearly 15,000 adults has the receipts. The cold it was prescribed for? Still viral. Still unaffected.
By Dr. Alex Chen · 3 min read
When a rural emergency room in New Jersey tells its nurses to call 911 for incoming trauma patients, that is not a staffing shortage. That is what Medicaid cuts look like in practice. Over 750 facilities have already closed or cut services, and the replacement program is nowhere near enough.
By Maya Okafor · 4 min read
The U.S. just dismantled large portions of the surveillance system that catches outbreaks before they reach American airports. Polio is resurging in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The Global Fund is $5 billion short. Blind is not the same as safe.
By Kai Brighton · 3 min read
The 2025-2030 Dietary Guidelines for Americans are asking schools to cook differently. The problem is that 99% of school nutrition directors say they cannot afford to. Science without infrastructure is not a nutrition policy.
By Dr. Alex Chen · 3 min read
South Carolina has recorded 993 measles cases since October, and 927 of them were in unvaccinated people. The 2026 outbreak is spreading through 30 states, and the reason it keeps growing is not complicated. The protection already exists.
By Maya Okafor · 3 min read
Fifteen states are moving to ban fluoride from tap water, powered by a misread study and an EPA assessment that the pediatric dental community says excludes health benefits by design. The science on community fluoridation at 0.7 mg/L is not ambiguous. The politics are.
By Dr. Alex Chen · 3 min read
The average U.S. medical school gives students 1.2 hours of nutrition education per year. Fifty-three schools just pledged to fix that. The pledge is real progress, and the politics around it are genuinely complicated.
By Maya Okafor · 3 min read
A 24% higher cholesterol risk in kids who had COVID-19. No symptoms, no warning signs, just a metabolic shift quietly building toward long-term cardiovascular damage. Most families have no idea this is happening.
By Kai Brighton · 3 min read
The FDA rejected Moderna's flu vaccine on February 10, then reversed itself on February 18. No scientific explanation was offered for what changed. That kind of regulatory theater has a downstream cost, and it lands directly on your health coverage.
By Dr. Alex Chen · 3 min read
The 10,000-step target came from a 1960s Japanese pedometer ad. The science shows real benefits kick in around 4,000 steps, and your pace matters more than your total. The goal was never the right goal.
By Maya Okafor · 3 min read
