Heading toward the tail end of Breast Cancer Awareness month, it’s natural to reflect on the state of cancer in America. Despite the advancements scientists have made in cancer detection and the incredible effort organizations have put into increasing awareness, you’re likely still left wondering why we don’t have a cure by now. The answer, as one infographic by NowSourcing lays out, is a lot more complicated than you might think. Mainly we don’t have a panacea for cancer because cancer isn’t a singular disease. Rather, it’s a network of related diseases that cause damaged cells to divide and multiply past their normal lifecycle, causing fatal abnormalities that go undetected by our immune system.
On top of the cancer cell stealth factor is the fact that each unique type of cancer requires an equally unique method of treatment, making a cure-all virtually impossible. Diet and genetics play a role too, so your chances of getting cancer could be mitigated somewhat by healthy lifestyle choices. Check out the infographic below for all the details on the current state of cancer research, and if you want to see a cure sooner than later, don’t forget to support the non-profits leading the way.
As Americans increasingly report feeling overwhelmed by daily life, many are using self-care to cope. Conversations and social media feeds are saturated with the language of “me time,” burnout, boundaries and nervous system regulation.
To meet this demand, the wellness industry has grown into a multitrillion-dollar global market. Myriad providers offer products, services and lifestyle prescriptions that promise calm, balance and restoration.
Paradoxically, though, even as interest in self-care continues to grow, Americans’ mental health is getting worse.
I am a professor of public health who studies health behaviors and the gap between intentions and outcomes. I became interested in this self-care paradox recently, after I suffered from a concussion. I was prescribed two months of strictly screen-free cognitive rest – no television, email, Zooming, social media, streaming or texting.
The benefits were almost immediate, and they surprised me. I slept better, had a longer attention span and had a newfound sense of mental quiet. These effects reflected a well-established principle in neuroscience: When cognitive and emotional stimuli decrease, the brain’s regulatory systems can recover from overload and chronic stress.
Obviously, most people can’t go 100% screen-free for days, much less months, but the underlying principle offers a powerful lesson for practicing effective self-care.
Chronic disease patterns mirror this strain. When daily stress becomes chronic, it can trigger biological changes that increase the risk of long-term conditions like heart disease and diabetes. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that 6 in 10 U.S. adults live with at least one chronic condition, and 4 in 10 live with multiple chronic conditions.
How people try to cope
Many Americans say they actively practice self-care in everyday life. For example, they describe taking mental health days, protecting personal time, setting boundaries around work and prioritizing rest and leisure.
The problem lies in how they use that leisure time.
Over the past 22 years, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ American Time Use Survey has consistently found that watching television is the most popular leisure activity for U.S. adults. Americans spend far more time watching TV than exercising, spending time with friends or practicing reflection through activities like yoga. Other common self-care activities include watching movies and gaming.
Modern leisure time increasingly includes smartphone use. Surveys suggest that mobile phones have become the dominant screen for many Americans, with adults spending several hours per day on their phones.
For many adults, checking social media or watching short videos has become a default relaxation behavior layered on top of traditional screen use. This practice is often referred to as second screening.
Although many people turn to screen-based activities to wind down, these activities may have the opposite effect biologically.
Why modern screen use feels different
Pre-internet forms of leisure often involved activities such as watching scheduled television programs, listening to radio broadcasts or reading books and magazines. For all of these pastimes, the content followed a predictable sequence with natural stopping points.
Today’s digital media environment looks very different. People routinely engage with multiple screens at once, respond to frequent notifications and switch rapidly between several streams of content. These environments continuously require users to split their attention, engage their emotions and make decisions.
Modern digital platforms are designed to maximize engagement. Algorithms tend to prioritize emotionally arousing content, particularly anger, anxiety and outrage. These feelings drive clicks, sharing and time spent on platforms. Research has shown that this design is associated with higher stress, distraction and cognitive load.
When ‘rest’ doesn’t restore
Against the backdrop of daily hassles and competing demands, it can feel like relief to flip on the TV. Practices such as streaming or so-called bed-rotting – spending extended periods in bed while scrolling – often are framed as a form of radical rest or self-care.
Other common coping behaviors include leaving the television on as background noise, scrolling between tasks throughout the day or using phones during meals and conversations. These strategies can feel restful because they temporarily reduce external demands and decision-making.
However, pairing rest with screen use may undermine the very restoration that people are seeking. Digital media stimulate attention, emotion and sensory processing. Even while people are sitting or lying still, being onscreen can keep their nervous systems in a heightened state of arousal. It may look like downtime, but it doesn’t create the biological conditions for restoration.
Unwind with analog or low-novelty activities, such as reading print, journaling, gentle movement or device-free walking. These pastimes allow mental engagement without overload.
The goal is to intentionally reduce mental load, not to abandon all digital devices.
To improve well-being in our overstimulated society, it’s important to understand the difference between feeling as though you are unwinding and actually allowing your brain and body to recover. In my view, fewer screens, fewer inputs, fewer emotional demands and more protected time for genuine cognitive rest are important components of an effective wellness strategy.
Imagine going to the hospital for a bacterial ear infection and hearing your doctor say, “We’re out of options.” It may sound dramatic, but antibiotic resistance is pushing that scenario closer to becoming reality for an increasing number of people. In 2016, a woman from Nevada died from a bacterial infection that was resistant to all 26 antibiotics that were available in the United States at that time.
Bacteria naturally evolve in ways that can make the drugs meant to kill them less effective. However, when antibiotics are overused or used improperly in medicine or agriculture, these pressures accelerate the process of resistance.
As resistant bacteria spread, lifesaving treatments face new complications – common infections become harder to treat, and routine surgeries become riskier. Slowing these threats to modern medicine requires not only responsible antibiotic use and good hygiene, but also awareness of how everyday actions influence resistance.
For decades, treating bacterial infections has involved a lot of educated guesswork. When a very sick patient arrives at the hospital and clinicians don’t yet know the exact bacteria causing the illness, they often start with a broad-spectrum antibiotic. These drugs kill many different types of bacteria at once, which can be lifesaving — but they also expose a wide range of other bacteria in the body to antibiotics. While some bacteria are killed, the ones that remain continue to multiply and spread resistance genes between different bacterial species. That unnecessary exposure gives harmless or unrelated bacteria a chance to adapt and develop resistance.
In contrast, narrow-spectrum antibiotics target only a small group of bacteria. Clinicians typically prefer these types of antibiotics because they treat the infection without disturbing bacteria that are not involved in the infection. However, it can take several days to identify the exact bacteria causing the infection. During that waiting period, clinicians often feel they have no choice but to start broad-spectrum treatment – especially if the patient is seriously ill.
For clinicians, better tests could help them make faster diagnoses and more effective treatment plans that won’t exacerbate resistance. For researchers, these tools point to an urgent need to integrate diagnostics with real-time surveillance networks capable of tracking resistance patterns as they emerge.
Diagnostics alone will not solve resistance, but they provide the precision, speed and early warning needed to stay ahead.
2. Expanding beyond traditional antibiotics
Antibiotics transformed medicine in the 20th century, but relying on them alone won’t carry humanity through the 21st. The pipeline of new antibiotics remains distressingly thin, and most drugs currently in development are structurally similar to existing antibiotics, potentially limiting their effectiveness.
To stay ahead, researchers are investing in nontraditional therapies, many of which work in fundamentally different ways than standard antibiotics.
One promising direction is bacteriophage therapy, which uses viruses that specifically infect and kill harmful bacteria. Others are exploring microbiome-based therapies that restore healthy bacterial communities to crowd out pathogens.
Researchers are also developing CRISPR-based antimicrobials, using gene-editing tools to precisely disable resistance genes. New compounds like antimicrobial peptides, which puncture the membranes of bacteria to kill them, show promise as next-generation drugs. Meanwhile, scientists are designing nanoparticle delivery systems to transport antimicrobials directly to infection sites with fewer side effects.
Many of these options remain early-stage, and bacteria may eventually evolve around them. But these innovations reflect a powerful shift: Instead of betting on discovering a single antibiotic to address resistance, researchers are building a more diverse and resilient tool kit to fight antibiotic-resistant pathogenic bacteria.
3. Antimicrobial resistance outside hospitals
Antibiotic resistance doesn’t only spread in hospitals. It moves through people, wildlife, crops, wastewater, soil and global trade networks. This broader perspective that takes the principles of One Health into account is essential for understanding how resistance genes travel through ecosystems.
Researchers are increasingly recognizing environmental and agricultural factors as major drivers of resistance, on par with misuse of antibiotics in the clinic. These include how antibiotics used in animal agriculture can create resistant bacteria that spread to people; how resistance genes in wastewater can survive treatment systems and enter rivers and soil; and how farms, sewage plants and other environmental hot spots become hubs where resistance spreads quickly. Even global travel accelerates the movement of resistant bacteria across continents within hours.
Together, these forces show that antibiotic resistance isn’t just an issue for hospitals – it’s an ecological and societal problem. For researchers, this means designing solutions that cross disciplines, integrating microbiology, ecology, engineering, agriculture and public health.
4. Policies on what treatments exist in the future
Drug companies lose money developing new antibiotics. Because new antibiotics are used sparingly in order to preserve their effectiveness, companies often sell too few doses to recoup development costs even after the Food and Drug Administration approves the drugs. Several antibiotic companies have gone bankrupt for this reason.
To encourage antibiotic innovation, the U.S. is considering major policy changes like the PASTEUR Act. This bipartisan bill proposes creating a subscription-style payment model that would allow the federal government up to US$3 billion to pay drug manufacturers over five to 10 years for access to critical antibiotics instead of paying per pill.
Still, the bill represents one of the most significant policy proposals related to antimicrobial resistance in U.S. history and could determine what antibiotics exist in the future.
The future of antibiotic resistance
Antibiotic resistance is sometimes framed as an inevitable catastrophe. But I believe the reality is more hopeful: Society is entering an era of smarter diagnostics, innovative therapies, ecosystem-level strategies and policy reforms aimed at rebuilding the antibiotic pipeline in addition to addressing stewardship.
For the public, this means better tools and stronger systems of protection. For researchers and policymakers, it means collaborating in new ways.
The question now isn’t whether there are solutions to antibiotic resistance – it’s whether society will act fast enough to use them.
Using an in-home HEPA purifier for one month spurs a small but significant improvement in brain function in adults age 40 and older. That’s the result of a new study we co-authored in the journal Scientific Reports.
We analyzed data from a study of 119 people ages 30 to 74 living in Somerville, Massachusetts. Somerville sits along Interstate 93 and Route 28, two major highways, resulting in relatively high levels of traffic-related air pollution. This makes it an especially good location for testing the health effects of air purifiers.
We randomly assigned participants to one of two groups. One used a HEPA air purifier for one month and then a sham air purifier – which looked and acted like the real thing but did not contain the air-cleaning filter – for one month, with a month-long break in between. The second group used the real and sham purifiers in reverse order.
After each month, participants took a test that measured different aspects of their mental capacity. The test probed people’s visual memory and motor speed skills by measuring how quickly they could draw lines between sequential numbers, and it tested executive function and mental flexibility by asking them to draw lines between alternating sequential numbers and letters.
We found that participants 40 years and older – about 42% of our sample – on average completed the section testing for mental flexibility and executive function 12% faster after using the HEPA purifier than after using the sham purifier. That was true even when we accounted for factors like differences in the amount of time participants spent indoors, with either filter, as well as how stressful they found the test.
This improvement may seem small, but it is similar to the cognitive benefits that people experience from increasing their daily exercise. While you may not experience a sudden increase in clarity from a 12% boost, preventing cognitive decline is vital for long-term well-being. Even small decreases in cognitive functioning may be associated with a higher risk of death.
Why it matters
Air pollution can negatively affect mental function after just a few hours of exposure. Studies show that air purifiers are effective at reducing particulates, but it’s unclear whether these reductions can prevent cognitive harm from ongoing pollution sources like traffic. Research has been especially lacking in people living near major sources of air pollution, such as highways.
Our study shows that HEPA air purifiers may offer meaningful health benefits under these circumstances.
What still isn’t known
Research shows that air pollution begins to affect cognitive function especially strongly around age 40. These effects may become increasingly prominent as people age.
HEPA air purifiers may therefore be especially beneficial for older adults. Our study did not explore this possibility, as fewer than 10 of our 119 participants were over the age of 60.
Also, our participants only used a HEPA air purifier for one month. It’s possible that longer durations of air purification may sustain or even increase the improvement in cognitive function we observed in our study.
We plan to study whether reducing particulate matter by using air purifiers is indeed protecting the brain’s white matter, and whether it could reverse some cognitive decline. We will explore that possibility by studying how levels of molecules called metabolites, which cells produce as they do their jobs, change in response to breathing polluted air and air cleaned by a HEPA filter.
![Why Isn’t There a Cure for Cancer? [Infographic]](https://www.healthgrad.com/files/2016/10/why-no-cancer-cure-yet.png)
