Medicine Canada

A US study has found a 70% drop in hospital admissions and days off from work or school when people with poorly controlled asthma had their gas stove and hob replaced with electric.

Ohio’s publicly owned MetroHealth began the study in December 2024 but funding was terminated early by the incoming Trump administration. It had been designed to investigate if replacing gas cooking improved asthma for 1,200 people living near Cleveland, Ohio.

Prof Ash Sehgal of Case Western Reserve University, the project’s leader, said: “We had completed the project at fewer than 100 households. As a result, over 1,100 households were unable to benefit. We also had to lay off about 20 project staff.”

The team finished the stove replacements that were under way and closed the project, but to the researchers’ surprise, the benefits could be clearly detected even in the scaled-down study of 72 homes.

Sehgal said: “We were surprised when we analysed the results and found a very large effect size. The improvements in asthma symptoms following stove change were similar to – or even greater than – those reported in clinical trials of commonly used asthma medications.”

Air pollution was measured in 44 of the homes. On average, nitrogen dioxide dropped 70%.

Sehgal A, Schuellerman P, Dolata J, et al. Asthma Control Before and After Changing Gas Stoves to Electric Stoves. The Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology: In Practice, 2026. link

At a recent appointment, Emily’s physical therapist (who knows some about her research) said, “Before we get started, there’s something I want to ask you about.” The something was an automatic “scribing” system their office is trialling for two weeks and deciding whether to purchase. These systems take in a (presumably audio-only) recording of the patient encounter and then output a draft patient note for the chart.

So what’s the big deal with “AI” charting? Here are nine reasons why we recommend refusing to consent to the use of scribing tools in healthcare settings:

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Neuropathologists across Canada are urging the federal government to revive autopsy services for people suspected of having Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, the fatal brain illness best known for its links to mad cow disease.

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The Canadian Cancer Society urges provinces and territories to provide fecal immunochemical tests (FIT) to everyone 45 to 74 years of age.

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Public spending on prescription medications in Canada grew by more than 9 per cent in 2024, with one drug driving the increase more than any other: Ozempic.

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The number of adults in Ontario who started taking stimulants, mainly to treat ADHD, more than doubled in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a new study that found women were the most frequent new consumers of medications once taken mostly by hyperactive boys.

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Since Donald Trump’s election in 2016, popular entertainment has struggled with how to reflect the resulting upheaval in American politics and culture. Many Hollywood projects have taken a heavy-handed approach: Think of how often you’ve been told that a certain movie or TV show is “exactly what we need right now.” During Trump’s first term, these direct, if unsubtle, approaches felt like honest reactions to the moment. Now nearly 10 years later—and one year into Trump’s second term—audiences are savvier and more suspicious about such transparent messaging.

Perhaps sensing this wariness, the creators of some of the more politically compelling movies and TV shows of the past year have instead explored how being alive feels during a tumultuous period. They capture the atmosphere, the mood, the ambient existence of everyday people who are living through a transformative time in history, whether or not they recognize that they are doing so.

Consider James Blaine “J.B.” Mooney, the museum-robbing protagonist of Kelly Reichardt’s The Mastermind, which is set in suburban Massachusetts in 1970. Played as both a careful schemer and a lazy layabout by Josh O’Connor, J.B. is not pushed into a life of crime—he chooses it because he’s just that bored. This wayward boredom is more striking when you consider what he ignores: Whenever the news is on, J.B. listens nonchalantly, apathetic about the war in Vietnam. He behaves as though current events are so far beyond his control or influence that participating at all is utterly pointless. He may as well try robbing an art museum if nothing matters.

Toward the end of the movie, he joins an anti-war protest—but only accidentally, as he’s attempting to blend into the public after stealing an older woman’s purse. But the police can’t tell the difference, and when the protest is broken up, J.B. is thrown into the back of a paddy wagon all the same. His experience may be identifiable to many in the audience: the feeling that you are separate from the news, until it slaps you in the face. We are left to wonder whether he will finally be able to appreciate the world around him now that he has been implicated in it.

One Battle After Another is another example of a film that adroitly channels modern anxieties. Set in a vaguely familiar United States, the story focuses on a man named Bob Ferguson (played by Leonardo DiCaprio), a former member of a far-left revolutionary group called the French 75. When an enemy from his past reemerges to kidnap his daughter, Bob must tap back into his old network and relocate her to safety. The movie is purposefully ambiguous about details within its version of American reality: Although white supremacists scheme in hidden conference rooms about controlling the nation’s population, we never learn anything about the government in power.

Many of the film’s standout sequences, though, engage with this alternate world from the ground up. Benicio del Toro earned an Oscar nomination for his role as Sergio St. Carlos, a local activist who is deeply involved with his undocumented-immigrant neighbors as ICE-like agents search for them in the streets of Baktan Cross, a city that strongly resembles Los Angeles. Sergio is One Battle’s beating heart and its hero, someone who is focused on helping out where he can. The film is not concentrated on who or what is responsible for society’s militarized turn, but audiences get an intimate feel for how people like Sergio have decided to respond.

[Read: The misunderstanding of Perfidia]

These recognizable universes, in which characters attempt to make meaning for themselves amid jarring headlines, can be seen across contemporary media. Eddington takes place in a small southwestern town during the early pandemic: Sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix) butts heads with Mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal) over mask mandates and the encroachment of data centers, while the town itself is met with Black Lives Matter protests, supposed antifa agitators, child-trafficking pedo cults, and clout-chasing influencers. Rather than stake out any specific stances, Eddington convincingly depicts the confounding environment that its characters—and many of its audience members—are forced to interpret.

Tim Robinson’s The Chair Company is likewise uncomfortably adept at depicting how navigating our immensely complicated, interconnected society can feel. Robinson plays an average man who, upon probing the origins of a poorly made chair that collapses under him at his job, is swept into a convoluted conspiracy that grants him a monomaniacal sense of destiny. Like The Mastermind, the show may not outwardly seem like a response to the current moment, but it taps into a desire—a compulsion, even—to understand how the world really works amid the conflicting, overwhelming phenomena shredding any shared sense of normalcy. Robinson’s protagonist has no idea what’s going on, but he’s desperate to find out.

Of course, Hollywood hasn’t entirely abandoned more obvious takes on the Trump era—and in particular, its starring character: Bong Joon Ho’s first film since he won a Best Picture Oscar for Parasite is Mickey 17, a wacky sci-fi tale about clones facing off against a braying tyrant who seems very clearly a figure modeled in part on Trump (although the director has claimed otherwise). Mark Hamill shows up in The Long Walk as a cartoonishly fascist major barking about boosting the economy through grotesque violence, a character easily perceived to be a caricature of Trump. Tune in to Saturday Night Live, and almost every week you’ll get James Austin Johnson’s dutiful imitation of the president. But after a certain point, you get the idea. None of these examples seem particularly invested in what the audience, whatever its political persuasion, is actually feeling or experiencing in Trump’s America.

More intriguing are the honest and intentional stories about how regular people move through landscapes defined by entropy and division but also community. Such works treat their characters as political beings with complex lives worth interrogating. They leave behind obvious targets, let new figures emerge, and keep moving forward.

*Illustration sources: Warner Bros; A24 Press; MUBI / Everett Collection; Sony Pictures Entertainment Inc.

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The federal government is scrapping a program that performed autopsies on the brains of people suspected of having Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, the fatal neurodegenerative disorder that came to public prominence during the mad cow crisis of the late 1990s and early 2000s.

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Good morning. Canada could become the first country in the world to get generic Ozempic, so we are launching a series to explore the medical and cultural shifts in how we treat weight loss. More on that below, along with mass arrests in Iran and negotiations at the White House. But first:

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The Edmonton Oilers are building their sense of belief.

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Ontario has expanded public coverage of five cancer treatments more quickly than in the past, thanks to a pilot project launched last fall to speed up access to oncology breakthroughs.

The Progressive Conservative government will announce Thursday the names of five cancer drugs that recently qualified for its Faster Access to Specialized Treatments (FAST) program, The Globe and Mail has learned.

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