HEALTH & WELLNESS

Millions of Americans believe aromatherapy works – but for many doctors, it still doesn’t pass the smell test. The history of using essential oils and their aromas to improve health and well-being dates back thousands of years. Like today, patients would inhale or topically apply these oils, which were typically extracted from plants – from leaves to flowers to roots to bark. But not until the 1930s was this form of therapy considered to have true potential in mainstream health care. That was when Rene Maurice Gattefossé, a French chemist who coined the word aromatherapy, wrote extensively about the properties of essential oils. Today, depending on whom you talk to, aromatherapy comprises anything from pleasant odors associated with personal hygiene and cleaning products to a serious t...

Lack of access to health care is partly to blame for skyrocketing HIV rates among gay Black men. Over the past 20 years, people living with HIV in the United States have seen a drastic improvement in their overall quality of life. But the medical achievements that have made those lives better and created longer life expectancies have not benefited all communities. In fact, some communities still have higher rates of new cases of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. This is especially true for Black gay and bisexual men. Black queer men are six times more likely to die as a result of HIV-related complications when compared with queer men of different races. In addition, in the most recent available data, Black queer men made up 26% of all new cases of HIV in 2019 despite making up less than 3...

The potential of psychedelics to heal our racial traumas. Clinical psychologist and professor Monnica Williams is on a mission to bring psychedelics to therapists’ offices to help people heal from their racial traumas. To do this, she’s jumping over some big hurdles.   Judging from the colourful signs advertising mushrooms that we are seeing on our streets and the presence of psychedelics in pop culture, we are in the middle of a psychedelic renaissance. For example, in the TV program Transplant, a Syrian Canadian doctor experiencing trauma is treated by his psychiatrist with psilocybin therapy. On a more official front, this month, the Canadian Senate recommended the federal government fast-track a research program into how psychedelics can help veterans suffering from Post Trau...

Racism produces subtle brain changes that lead to increased disease risk in Black populations. The U.S. is in the midst of a racial reckoning. The COVID-19 pandemic, which took a particularly heavy toll on Black communities, turned a harsh spotlight on long-standing health disparities that the public could no longer overlook. Although the health disparities for Black communities have been well known to researchers for decades, the pandemic put real names and faces to these numbers. Compared with white people, Black people are at much greater risk for developing a range of health problems, including heart disease, diabetes and dementia. For example, Black people are twice as likely as white people to develop Alzheimer’s disease. A vast and growing body of research shows that racism contri...