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The people who called into the help hotlines and domestic violence shelters said they felt as if they were going crazy. One woman had turned on her air-conditioner, but said it then switched off without her touching it. Another said the code numbers of the digital lock at her front door changed every day and she could not figure out why. Still another told an abuse help line that she kept hearing the doorbell ring, but no one was there. (Bowles, 6/23)

Piles of dead bodies. Decontamination zones and overstretched hospitals. It’s the stuff of nightmares: the physical indicators of a pandemic associated with outbreaks of diseases such as Ebola in countries such as the Congo. But what if one of those pandemics — yellow fever, perhaps, or an emerging pathogen scientists don’t even know about yet — landed in the United States? It’s not a matter of if, writes Ed Yong in a long-form feature for the Atlantic, online and on newsstands, it’s when. In “The Next Plague Is Coming. Is America Ready?”, Yong takes a clear-eyed view of the worst-case scenario: a public-health system caught off guard by a pandemic that spirals out of control. (Blakemore, 6/24)

Earlier this year, an ambulance brought a man in his 80s to the emergency room at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. He had metastatic lung cancer; his family had arranged for hospice care at home. But when he grew less alert and began struggling to breathe, his son tearfully called 911. “As soon as I met them, his son said, ‘Put him on a breathing machine,’” recalled Dr. Kei Ouchi, an emergency physician and researcher at the hospital. (Span, 6/22)

New advances in medicine also tend to come with a hefty dose of hype. Yes, some new cancer drugs in the hot field of precision medicine, which takes into account variables for individual patients, have worked remarkably well for some patients. But while many patients clamor for them, they aren't currently effective for the vast majority of cancers. This stubborn fact has become a sticking point for an equally stubborn cancer doctor. At just 35 years old, Dr. Vinay Prasad has made a name for himself by calling out the hype surrounding precision medicine and confronting other examples of hype in his field. (Harris, 6/24)

The list of things you're supposed to avoid when you're pregnant (like I am) is comically long. Hot baths. Alcohol. Soft cheeses. Tuna and lunch meat. Sprouts. So it felt a little odd to be offering up my arm for a vaccine a few weeks ago, at the start of my third trimester. Really? No ibuprofen or Pepto, but yes vaccines? The shot was to protect against whooping cough, among other things, and doctors at the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists or ACOG recommend it for all women, in every pregnancy. (Simmons-Duffin, 6/25)

Glenn Sears returned to his native Honolulu seven years ago to retire, but living in a condo on the 35th floor with his “perfect wife of 58 years,” he didn’t meet many people, and many of his old friends had either moved to the mainland or died. The 83-year-old former civil engineering professor was bored and lonely. Then he read about an international program called Men’s Sheds. It is sort of like a Boy Scouts for adults, a place where men can learn new skills and work together on community projects: building park benches, making toys for children’s hospitals or volunteering at food drives. (Fallik, 6/24)

Robotic-assisted procedures have now become ubiquitous in some kinds of surgeries. What once was seen as a technological marvel is commonplace in many hospitals. But studies in recent years have shown robotic surgery performs no better than traditional surgery — even though it comes at a steeper cost to the overall health-care system. The latest comparison study was published in the medical journal Lancet on Thursday and shows there were no major differences in outcomes or complication rates in operations for bladder cancer. (Wan, 6/22)

Diane A. Bates lay on the floor of her bathroom in the middle of the afternoon — weak, disoriented and afraid that she might die before someone found her. Bates had been battling what she had been told was a bad case of the flu for weeks. She hoped a bath might make her feel better, but she had felt wobbly and then passed out while getting out of the tub. Alone in her Seattle-area home, she managed to crawl to her bedroom, grab her cellphone and dial 911. (Boodman, 6/23)

First, it appeared as a tiny blemish under the eye. But over the next two weeks, the 32-year-old woman watched it move — snapping photos as it formed bumps above her eye before it made its way down into her lip, forcing her mouth to swell. It was a parasite — and it was living inside her face. (Bever, 6/22)