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Miami Herald
5 days ago
- Business
- Miami Herald
Popular breakfast fast-food chain quietly leaks new summer menu
Although some might claim they aren't breakfast eaters, few can resist a good fast-food breakfast run before work. Just think about how many people arrive late to the office with a to-go bag in hand. Because of the increased revenue that opening for a few extra hours in the morning can generate, more chains are beginning to introduce breakfast menus. Don't miss the move: Subscribe to TheStreet's free daily newsletter Fast-food giants like McDonald's (MCD) and Starbucks (SBUX) have used this strategy to their advantage for decades, and other chains like Portillo's are starting to enter the breakfast market by testing it in select locations for a limited time. This week, the second part of the Dunkin' Summer 2025 menu was leaked, and this drop might be one of its largest - not just beverage-wise but also regarding food. It seems like a savvy move, as more chains are adding breakfast items to their menus. Related: Dunkin' launches surprising summer beverages to outdo Starbucks In addition to its beverage offerings, Dunkin' is introducing the new Chipotle Hash Brown Wake-Up Wrap. This wrap is similar to its original Bacon Egg & Cheese Wake-Up Wrap, but is stuffed with hash browns and topped with smoky chipotle aioli. The coffee chain is also adding two pastry items: the new Braided Apple Pie and the Ham & Cheese Croissant Stuffer. The Dunkin' fandom is intense, so to keep its loyal members in mind, the coffee chain is rewarding them with a new in-app exclusive, Bacon Egg & Cheese on a plain bagel with Chipotle Aioli. These new menu additions will drop beginning June 25 and be available at all participating Dunkin' locations nationwide until August 19, as reported by @markie_devo on Instagram. Image source: Corbis/Getty Images In December of last year, Dunkin' introduced its new $5 Meal Deal, which includes a hot or iced coffee and a selection of two Wake-Up Wraps. This value meal was launched to replace its popular $6 Meal Deal and give customers new options for a dollar less. However, it's impossible to please everyone, and the substitution sparked backlash from customers, who thought the $6 Meal Deal was a better offer. Related: McDonald's menu adds experimental new items fans will love For the first part of its summer menu release at the beginning of May, Dunkin' returned the $6 Meal Deal due to popular demand, offering a medium hot or iced coffee, hash browns, and a Bacon, Egg & Cheese Sandwich. Now that the second part of its summer menu has been leaked, Dunkin' will return the $5 Meal Deal. Switching this offering every few months could be a strategic move to please more customers. As if all the new additions weren't exciting enough, Dunkin' is getting patriotic and celebrating the 4th of July by launching the new Spangled Donut, which is filled with vanilla buttercream, dipped in blue icing, and topped with 4th of July sprinkles. The coffee chain will also add three 4th of July Takeover Donuts. These patriotic treats will be available from June 25 to July 22. More Retail News: Taco Bell menu adds more items customers demandedMcDonald's menu adds new twist on popular, discontinued itemMcDonald's to close all its CosMc's experimental spin-off locations To get into the summer spirit, Dunkin' is also releasing the new Summer Beach Munchkins Bucket from June 25 to August 19. These seasonal buckets are always very popular and will only be available while supplies last. Related: Veteran fund manager unveils eye-popping S&P 500 forecast The Arena Media Brands, LLC THESTREET is a registered trademark of TheStreet, Inc.
Forbes
5 days ago
- Business
- Forbes
Why States Must Stop Treating Your Smartphone Like A Dumb Rotary Phone
Woman Talking on Telephone (Photo by Library of Congress/Corbis/VCG via Getty Images) Plain old telephone service (POTS) has been dying a slow death in the United States since the turn of the century. The number of POTS lines peaked at 192.5 million in 2000; by June 2024, only 7.6 million residential POTS lines remained. For much of the 20th century, almost every American household used only POTS to make a phone call. Now, only 1.3% of households rely on POTS to do so. What happened? Consumers flocked to mobile and Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) – advanced platforms that did not exist during the heyday of POTS's monopoly reign. The total number of mobile telephone lines in the U.S. surpassed POTS in 2004. Today, there are more than 388 million mobile lines in service. The number of VoIP lines passed POTS in 2013. There are now more than 64 million VoIP lines in service. This is not news to the tens of millions of Americans who cut their telephone cord years ago and embraced mobile telephony or VoIP and all the advanced features they offer, like nationwide calling and the go-anywhere convenience of a cellphone. Unfortunately, for some state policymakers, the horse and buggy that is POTS continues to loom large, shaping their misinformed view of the advanced communications sector. Worryingly, some states have not only resisted removing outdated POTS laws from their books; they are actively seeking to extend those rules to new communications technologies, which have thrived in a competitive marketplace governed by a deregulatory framework. By doing so, states will undermine investment in new networks, increase prices, and ultimately harm consumers. None of this is good for America. Backwards-looking, heavy-handed regulation never has been. Go Your Own Way…Or Maybe Not? When it comes to applying old rules to new communications technologies, California has been in the vanguard. It has refused requests to roll back POTS-era rules; sought to regulate VoIP like POTS; and is finalizing rules that would hold competitive offerings like mobile and VoIP to a more punitive version of service quality standards originally devised for Ma Bell. At the same time, though, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), along with dozens of other states, have been actively engaged in regulatory modernization aimed at removing POTS rules to incentivize and accelerate the deployment of modern networks. California's approach is misguided and fails to put customers first. States sometimes choose to forge their own path on certain issues. This seems to happen more often in California than elsewhere. Indeed, the state has a history of choosing an alternate path on issues like vehicle emissions and data privacy. In many of those instances, however, California framed its actions as necessary to either fill a perceived gap left by federal inaction, as it did when it passed a privacy law after years of failure by Congress to do so, or to go above and beyond existing federal rules, as it has done with vehicle emissions (California's federal waiver allowing it to impose stricter emissions standards is at risk of being revoked). On issues of national importance, outlier approaches create collective action problems, which stifle progress towards achieving a shared federal goal. Assuring an orderly and timely transition away from POTS has been a national imperative since the early 2010s, when the Obama-era FCC began taking steps to relieve POTS providers of monopoly-era obligations so they could invest in modern networks and improve the services that consumers are actually using. Each subsequent FCC, under both Republican and Democratic leadership, has taken additional steps down this path. This reflects and furthers the country's bipartisan light-touch approach to regulating advanced communications platforms at a national level. Consistency and predictability are critical to maximizing investment, innovation, and overall consumer welfare gains. California has lost its way. Its proposed service quality rules illustrate just how far outside the mainstream the state is on these issues and how continued pursuit of its unique – and highly regulatory – agenda for communications services could impede national transition efforts. Welcome To The Hotel California The notion of service quality rules might sound innocuous, but the rules proposed in California are incredibly exacting and could end up harming consumers rather than protecting them. In a nutshell, California seeks to regulate voice service quality by applying standards governing how providers of all ilk – POTS, mobile, and VoIP – address almost every aspect of service, including how quickly they act in response to an installation request; reporting on and fixing outages; crediting customers for service disruptions; and how long it takes for a customer service rep to pick up the phone. In many cases, the proposed rules are stricter, and the penalties more punitive, than the rules devised just for POTS, the antiquated technology deployed and governed as a natural monopoly service. Where's the beef? Numerous stakeholders of all sizes have faulted regulators for failing to provide compelling data demonstrating actual negative trends in service outages or degradation in service quality. For example, many have argued that the outage data cited by regulators in support of their rules generally fail to account for the underlying cause of the disruption. Oftentimes, a mobile or VoIP outage is attributable to a loss of electric power, a common occurrence in California that is beyond the control of communications service providers. For these reasons, the FCC has rightfully forged a different approach, one that supports investment in network reliability and encourages collaboration among communications providers and electric utilities to restore service. At the same time, there appears to have been little effort by regulators in California to weigh the compliance costs for providers against the benefits the proposed service quality rules purport to deliver to customers. This is especially relevant in the context of POTS, the user base of which is rapidly shrinking. Per the latest FCC data, there are less than 600,000 residential POTS subscriptions in California (population: 39.4 million). POTS prices will inevitably rise as service providers pass through some portion of their higher compliance costs to a smaller number of customers. Meanwhile, the compliance costs for newly imposed standards on mobile and VoIP providers will also likely be passed through in part to customers, resulting in higher prices for them as well. To the extent some of these costs cannot be recouped, there will be less capital available to service providers to invest in next-generation networks or to invest in the same customer service tools the rules claim to incent. This ultimately harms consumers and frustrates timely realization of an overarching goal to move on from POTS so that new platforms are not burdened, directly or indirectly, by monopoly-era rules. What's Next California is not alone in dragging its feet on the transition away from POTS. Numerous states still have POTS-era rules in effect. Some, following California's lead, are also exploring whether to regulate broadband, VoIP, and mobile like traditional telephone service. Inevitably, these actions will trigger lawsuits, with service providers arguing that federal law limits state authority to regulate non-POTS services. Even in the context of POTS, arguments could be made that state efforts impeding fulfillment of national goals for the POTS transition might also be susceptible to preemption. A sounder approach would be for state policymakers to listen to what consumers are telling them about their communications preferences and react accordingly. In the case of voice communications, consumers have been voting with their feet for years. Unlike 50 or 100 years ago when POTS ruled the world, there is no shortage of options for people to communicate with each other. And now with satellite 'direct to cell' technology rolling out alongside grant funds via the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program, which will facilitate universal broadband availability, there are few parts of the country where some form of non-POTS communications platform is unavailable. In this new environment, providers are aggressively competing on service quality, speed, latency, price, and a host of other service parameters. Regulation is not a bad word, but in the advanced communications arena, the type of regulation being considered by California and others is simply not necessary. If a customer feels let down by one voice or non-voice service, they can easily switch to another. And that is exactly what they are doing. Any action that impedes these dynamics should be flatly rejected because unnecessarily regulating a competitive marketplace will only harm consumers. States might also take a page from the FCC and adopt a 'delete, delete, delete' mindset and begin to actively review and repeal antiquated regulations. Regulators can do their job if they deregulate. There is no requirement that they must regulate just for the sake of regulating. Finally, the spate of recent regulatory actions in California only adds to the urgency for Congress to update federal communications law. This is long overdue and critical now that the Supreme Court has made clear that administrative agencies like the FCC can only act according to specific Congressional delegations of authority. An update that empowers the FCC to facilitate a smooth transition from POTS by allowing it to preempt burdensome and backward-looking regulatory actions like those in California is needed.
Forbes
6 days ago
- Business
- Forbes
From Service To Success: Making Veterans Feel Welcome On Campus
Combined Forces Color Guard stands atop the Vietnam Veterans War Memorial during Veterans Day ... More ceremony. Washington DC. November 11, 1990 (Photo by Mark Reinstein/Corbis via Getty Images) During the recent Memorial Day weekend, in addition to enjoying holiday barbecues, many Americans remember the sacrifices of our veterans in fighting for freedom and democracy. To honor those who have served the country, the US has provided generous benefits for higher education for Veterans. The original Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944, popularly known as the 'GI Bill,' was intended to remedy the problems of returning veterans by providing tuition and fees for college, stipends, loans for homes and businesses and counseling. By 1947, veterans comprised nearly 50% of college enrollments, and from 1944 to 1956, nearly half of the 16 million World War II veterans participated in education and training programs, with over 2 million attending colleges and universities. The GI bill was updated in 1984 and again in 2008 to increase support for veterans to include not only full tuition for public colleges but additional funds for housing and books. By 2020, 54% of eligible veterans had taken advantage of these benefits personally, with thousands more transferring their benefits to a spouse or child. Despite generous funding levels for the GI bill, amounting to $108 billion between 2009 and 2020, many gaps exist in fully supporting veterans as they navigate through the complicated federal documentation requirements. In recent years the number of beneficiaries has been dropping, decreasing by 22% between 2016 and 2021. In addition, the utilization of the benefits varies by military branches, with some branches such as the Air Force seeing less than half of the veterans using their GI Bill benefits. Another problem many veterans have is choosing among a vast array of higher education providers, which include many for-profit institutions that target veterans with aggressive marketing tactics. Some of these institutions have been shown to have questionable business practices such as raising costs on veterans once they are enrolled and misleading veterans into large amounts of student debt. In 2017, seven of the 10 colleges receiving the most GI funds spent less than one-third of the tuition they charged the VA for educating the veterans, and for those schools, only 28% of veterans completed a degree. Some of the more ruthless institutions faced legal action and prosecution, slowing but not stopping these practices. By 2021, the for-profit institutions still served 18% of GI bill beneficiaries, with lower completion rates, lagging by 15% compared to non-profit public colleges, even after controlling for the student's characteristics. To reduce the incentive among for-profit providers to target veterans, the US federal government in 2021 revised the cap that for-profit institutions could receive from federal funding to include veterans' benefits, reducing some of the ruthless practices among some of these institutions. And while these reforms have reduced some of the fraudulent practices, the government has created a vast and complicated regulatory system to certify eligibility to receive benefits. Many military veterans struggle with opaque and burdensome rules for documenting and certifying their status and eligibility, and often face delays in benefits, with inadequate lines of communication between institutions and the federal government making it extremely difficult to get help. The result is that many veterans are caught in the middle between large and slow bureaucracies on university campuses and at the federal government. To help solve this problem, a new company known as MilVet Navigator is working to streamline the processes for both veteran and military-connected students and staff within the higher education institutions. MilVet's goal is to improve student experience and outcome, and institution efficiency, bandwidth, and compliance. MilVet's mission was founded to empower the higher education military community. Dr. Mahdi Omar and Paul DeCecco, founded the company in 2023. Dr. Omar spent more than 20 years in higher education and technology fields and Mr. DeCecco is a 29-year Army veteran followed by 8 years working in higher education. After witnessing the ordeal that many military-affiliated students suffered in using their benefits, Dr. Omar and his team created a new scalable, cost-effective, and highly secure Software-as-a-Service solution that lessens the burdens on both the veteran and military-connected students, and higher education institutions. In an interview, Omar noted that Student Information Systems were not built with the VA and DoD benefits in mind. Such systems have modules to meet the business needs of multiple administrative offices such as admissions, financial aid, enrollment, advising, and others, but offer nearly nothing in the way of VA/DoD benefit management or functionality, failing to address the unique challenges faced by this population. Thus, institutions are forced to rely on spreadsheets, disconnected databases, and manual workarounds leading to fragmented and labor-intensive processes that introduce errors, slow down approvals, and create compliance risks. The problem is both a lack of staffing and a lack of modern systems, according to Omar. For a university to manage a veteran and their benefits, the veteran and military-connected student has to work with a 'certifying official' who is a specialist in getting the students to provide the complicated paperwork for getting their benefits and then managing the communication with the federal government to release the funds for the student. Omar notes that 'the VA recommends that for every 125 students, you need at least a single school certifying official.' Omar added, 'we have done a survey, and the average ratio is 570 and some schools have 700 to one.' The thicket of federal regulations is just one of 'two baskets' of problems facing a veteran student, according to DeCecco, who says 'the first basket is their regular support in terms of their transition from military life to civilian life and their needs in the process,' while 'the second basket is their benefits and the processing of their benefits.' Instead of having a modern system for managing benefits, most universities 'do everything in a spreadsheet and sticky notes' according to Omar. MilVet Navigator system, by contrast, offers a system that automatically tracks a student as they enroll in courses and help complete certifications, calculates tuition and fees, and communicates proactively with students by email and even SMS messages to help them effortlessly update their status with the university and the federal government. The result is that the documentation workload of the certifying officials has reduced substantially, making it possible for them to better support the students with the other problems they might face. Mr. DeCecco, understands the problems of veterans deeply, having completed his graduate degree and with deep roots in the military. DeCecco says that 'the GI Bill is utterly amazing as a tool for veterans to be able to use - but it was not designed for people to be able to both live and pay for college.' DeCecco describes how a veteran will 'get out, maybe try and get a job, with all the stresses of family life, and then they're sitting in classrooms with 18, 19, 20-year-olds.' As DeCecco describes it, the student is asking 'how do I do this in the civilian world? I've spent 4,8, 20 years in the military community, military culture away from normal civilian life. And now I'm being asked to completely reintegrate into that.' The good news is that with these new systems like MilVet Navigator, colleges and universities can focus on helping our veterans and military-connected students do this reintegration. MilVet team is currently working on additional features and functionalities to facilitate student communities and student connections and mentorships. These new tools will help foster social and support communities among students, veteran staff, advisors and others noted DeCecco. Staff can also use these tools to facilitate events, such as barbecues for veteran and military-connected students. These efforts, when made possible by streamlined information systems, allows for a university to 'build that sense of community to have an event like a barbecue be the catalyst so that people feel welcome.' DeCecco adds, 'I can't understate the importance of that feeling and building that sense of community in working with military veterans and their family members.'
Vox
26-05-2025
- Health
- Vox
Does medicine have an over-diagnosis problem?
covers health for Vox, guiding readers through the emerging opportunities and challenges in improving our health. He has reported on health policy for more than 10 years, writing for Governing magazine, Talking Points Memo, and STAT before joining Vox in 2017. A new book argues doctors are too quickly and too confidently diagnosing their patients with too many medical problems. Corbis via Getty Images Patients in the 21st century are pretty lucky. Medical science and technology have advanced so much that we can diagnose many thousands of distinct conditions, and we can even take genetic tests that scour our DNA for signs of a disease that may not materialize for decades — offering us a peek into our own future. And with these advances, we are being diagnosed more and more. The number of people diagnosed with chronic health conditions and mental health disorders is at an all-time high — at least partly, most experts agree, because we have simply catalogued more diseases to catch. Yet we are also increasingly anxious, anxious about our health — even anxious that we're too anxious about our health. Our ability now to understand our bodies and put a name on what's wrong with them does not always provide comfort; instead, it can create new fears and impose new constraints on us. Some health care leaders, including Donald Trump's health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., argue that we are becoming over-medicalized — too ready to take a pill for something, just for the sake of taking something. The reality is nuanced because medicine is, to put it mildly, complicated. But we should in fact be careful about doling out diagnoses, says Dr. Suzanne O'Sullivan, an Irish neurologist and the author of a new book, The Age of Diagnosis: How Our Obsession With Medical Labels Is Making Us Sicker. In her book, O'Sullivan argues that our eagerness to diagnose, preemptively screen, and otherwise push these new tools to their limits is creating problems that deserve to be taken more seriously. She describes mutually reinforcing trends — the patient's insistence on certainty and the doctor's desire to avoid being blamed for missing something — that are driving clinical practice toward overdiagnosis. The phenomenon is even leading to more instances of doctors diagnosing certain cancers by 50 percent or more, due to the availability of new imaging tech that can detect even minuscule traces of abnormal cells. Overdiagnosis can cause real harm. And so O'Sullivan advocates for 'slow medicine,' in which doctors and patients take time to develop a relationship, monitor symptoms, and take a great deal of care before naming a condition — an approach that may sound quaint in an era of rapid-testing but something she says is actually more in tune with the reality that diagnosis is partly an art. 'Most diagnoses come with a huge amount of uncertainty. That covers asthma, diabetes, cancer, autism. Diagnosis is a clinical skill,' she told me in a recent interview. 'Now, the difficulty, I think, with modern medicine is a lot of people don't understand that and that they feel that the test — the blood test or the brain scan — makes the diagnosis, when actually a diagnosis is made on understanding the story in the context of the tests that are done.' There is a tension here. Slowing down could, at least in theory, risk missing an aggressive disease early at the most crucial time — when it can still be treated. And in the United States, simply getting a doctor's appointment can be more challenging than it should be. Each individual case is unique, O'Sullivan acknowledges, which is why a relationship with your own primary care doctor is so important. But she argues that, on the whole, doctors have erred too far in the other direction, toward diagnosing conditions too quickly and too confidently and creating a different set of problems for patients. During our conversation, we spoke about how to balance our tremendous new technological abilities with a more measured approach to clinical practice and how she would respond to critics who argue her advice would lead to people's health problems being missed. Our conversation has been edited for clarity and length. First, let's clarify something basic. What do you mean by overdiagnosis? How do you define it? I think of overdiagnosis as measuring the point at which a medical diagnosis ceases to be useful. A diagnosis may be right or it may be wrong, but it isn't always beneficial in a certain situation. Overdiagnosis is trying to ask when a diagnosis is genuinely a useful way of conceptualizing someone's difficulties, and when it is not. The first chapter is about Huntington's disease. Why did you start there? There's a genetic test available for Huntington's disease. If you happen to have the gene for Huntington's disease, you are destined to get Huntington's if you live long enough. If you have the genetic test, you can find out ahead of time that you have that at some point in your future. I needed people to understand the power of a diagnosis to make you sick even when you actually don't have much physically wrong with you. I tell the story of a patient named Valentina, who didn't have the gene but believed that she did because of her family history. Because of her strong belief that she had the gene, she developed all the symptoms. When we take on a medical label, when we are told that we are sick in some way, we inadvertently search ourselves for the symptoms and signs of the label that we've been given. Our bodies are very noisy engines. There's all sorts of things to notice if you are given reason to notice. The Huntington's disease community is in this incredible situation where they have the opportunity to find out they have a diagnosis 20 years before the disease starts. And in most countries, only 10 percent to 20 percent of people actually have the genetic test that will advise them of the disease. They do that because they are a community who has given a great deal of thought to what it's like to live with the label of an impending disease. Once you discover you have a positive test, it completely changes your relationship with your body. It changes how you think about your health. And once you know, you can't unknow. I spoke to loads of people with Huntington's, and they all said the same thing: that living with the hope that you are negative and that everything is okay is a way better life than living with the knowledge that you're positive and waiting for the disease to start. One of the most interesting themes in the book is this idea that people want and have come to expect concrete answers from modern medicine. Black or white: You have a disease or you don't. But you cover chronic Lyme disease, long COVID, and autism, these conditions where the boundaries are fuzzier. What problems does that create? Most diagnoses come with a huge amount of uncertainty. That covers asthma, diabetes, cancer, autism. Diagnosis is a clinical skill. It requires a good clinician to be able to put the patient's story in the context of tests and findings. Now, the difficulty, I think, with modern medicine is a lot of people don't understand that and that they feel that the test makes the diagnosis, the blood test or the brain scan, when actually a diagnosis is made on understanding the story in the context of the tests that are done. That means that diagnosis is hugely subjective. I hear a lot of stories of people going to different doctors who said I didn't have a diagnosis, but then the 11th doctor said I did have it. There is an inherent subjectivity that doctors will manage differently. I'm a doctor in a highly specialized center, and I deliberately err on the side of slight underdiagnosis. I do that because I'm aware that when I make a diagnosis of a brain disease, I am changing that person's future forever. I'm not just changing their relationship with their body. I'm also changing their mortgage payments, their insurance, their confidence in themselves, their ability to get health insurance. I'm changing their finances, their practical future. I'm changing their ability to drive. There's so many things that come with the diagnosis that people don't think about. What many, many doctors do is they err on the side of overdiagnosis because that['s an easier place for a doctor to be. Because you're never going to come back to me and say, 'Listen, I don't really believe I had asthma when I was a child.' You'll say, 'Well, listen, I had it. You treated it and now I'm better.' It protects us against someone coming back and saying we missed something. I came into this book thinking that something like cancer would very much be more of a yes or no. You either have it or you don't. And if you do, you really would want to know about it — as soon as possible. And yet, after reading your book, I felt like you had complicated that story. How do we risk overdiagnosing cancer? Within the medical community, this has been well-known for a long time, but it just doesn't leak into the general conversation. The bottom line is if you screen healthy people for an illness, any illness, be it cancer or high blood pressure, diabetes, then you will be picking up borderline cases and overtreating them. In the case of cancer, I try to remind people we've only had MRI scans in regular clinical use in doctors' offices since the 1990s. They've only been as good as they are now in the last 10 years, as sensitive at picking up things. As we get these newer tests, we're finally seeing inside the healthy body of people. What we find when we screen people for things like cancer is we find abnormal cells. But not all abnormal cells go into cancer. Lots of people live out their lives having these abnormal cells. They never spread. They never do anything. They never grow. They would never threaten health. But our difficulty as doctors is because we're so new to finding all these irregular abnormalities that when we find them, we don't know which ones will turn into malignant cancers and which ones won't. So what we do is we treat them all as if they will inevitably turn into malignant cancers. One Cochrane Review estimated that if you screen 2,000 women for breast cancer, you will save one woman's life from breast cancer and treat 10 women for breast cancer who never needed to be treated. I think sometimes we're very in love with all of our access to screening tests and scans and health checks. A lot of that care is not only unnecessary, but actually doing us harm. One estimated that if you screen 2,000 women for breast cancer, you will save one woman's life from breast cancer and treat 10 women for breast cancer who never needed to be treated. Obviously being able to better more precisely diagnose conditions and to test samples at a genetic level represents advancement in science and an improvement in our understanding of our own body. How do we encourage that kind of development while mitigating the problems that you're writing about? I work with people who've got rare brain diseases. The advancement in genetics and the ability to diagnose rare genetic conditions is amazing. I don't want to in any way detract from what a phenomenal kind of medical advancement that is. I have no doubt that going forward in 20, 30, 40 years, it will continue contributing to science and to medicine in very positive ways. How to talk to your doctor about 'slow' medicine O'Sullivan's book is not a self-help guide, but after reading it, it's easy to come up with some strategies that could help each of us bring a 'slow-medicine' sensibility to our next doctor's appointment and potentially avoid overdiagnosis. Such as: • Set expectations with your doctor. Make clear that you don't want to be quick to judgment or treatment. • Press your doctor to get a better sense of how confident they are in a diagnosis, what could change their mind, what additional steps could be taken to double-check. • If you're really worried about something, speak up. Slow medicine means being thoughtful — not ignoring what your body is telling you. But something being modern and expensive and cutting-edge doesn't mean it's always better medicine. We need to be a little bit more open with the general public about the uncertainties. We'll never understand the meaning of different genes to healthy populations if we don't test them, so we need to do the population-based testing. But we need to be careful before we begin offering genetic tests to unsuspecting members of the public who probably think we understand them a great deal better than we do. We're really on a learning curve at the moment. A little bit more clarity and honesty with the public would go a long way. How would you respond to somebody who hears we should be testing less and diagnosing less and immediately thinks, 'Well, you're just going to put my health at risk.' Listen, I don't want a diagnosis missed in myself. I don't want to be the doctor who misses things either. So I completely understand people's fear of dialing back. It's not about replacing all these tests with nothing. It's really advocating for this concept of slow, thoughtful medicine with good clinicians that we invest in good doctors, good nurses, good diagnosticians, and we don't feel the need to be compelled to jump into tests and diagnosis at that first meeting. We have time to spend with our patients and meet them again to discuss the problem. That's how you come to both a good understanding between patient and doctor. A quality diagnosis is made with time and understanding.
Newsweek
25-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Newsweek
Why Frank Ocean Fans Think a New Album Is Coming
Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources. Newsweek AI is in beta. Translations may contain inaccuracies—please refer to the original content. Frank Ocean fans have been waiting nearly ten years for a third album from the elusive star, and now some believe it may finally be due to be released, following clues linked to both Ocean and The Wizard of Oz. Ocean was hailed as a once-in-a-generation talent when his debut album Channel Orange was released in 2012 and he was named as one of the most influential people in the world the following year. Newsweek has reached out to a representative for Ocean via email outside of regular working hours for comment. Why It Matters Ocean is something of an enigma, and rumors of his third project have circulated for so long, they now have an almost mythical quality. Since 2011, he has released two studio albums, Channel Orange (2012) and Blonde (2016), a mixtape (Nostalgia, Ultra released in 2011), and a visual album Endless (2016). Frank Ocean performs at The Parklife Festival 2017 at Heaton Park on June 11, 2017 in Manchester, England. Frank Ocean performs at The Parklife Festival 2017 at Heaton Park on June 11, 2017 in Manchester, England. Visionhaus#GP/Corbis via Getty Images In 2023, Ocean headlined Coachella in what marked his first live performance since 2017. He began his first set nearly an hour after the scheduled start time, and the performance was criticized by fans and critics alike. He canceled his performance at the second weekend, citing a leg injury. Two years after this performance, rumors started to circulate that Ocean was making a foray into film, with his directorial debut confirmed in January 2025. What To Know So, what's got fans' hopes up that a new release could be on the horizon? A series of very cryptic clues have been dropping over the past week, hinting that the Grammy-award winning artist could be up to something. On Thursday, May 15, the Instagram user @tedchildish posted an Instagram story with the text: "how have i just seen people putting up Frank posters in Tokyo." Said posters included a QR code which linked out to an Instagram page with the name @franciswupperman. Francis Wuppermann was best known as actor Frank Morgan, who played the title role in The Wizard of Oz, the 1939 classic starring Judy Garland On May 22, @franciswupperman shared their first post on Instagram, where the name 'frank' appeared against different colored backgrounds on different slides. The font echoes the one used on Blonde. The caption reads: "FRANK a tale of three parts … begins next week." Outlander Magazine posted about the account on Instagram on May 20, reporting that the accounts' bio at that time was "FRANK: May 22nd." The post speculated that the account belonged to Ocean and was connected to a film release, though this is unconfirmed. As of reporting, the account's bio reads "Wonderment and joy are retained, heartaches and nightmares are lost," a quote from the 1900 introduction to the original book in the Oz series, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, by Baum. The account has garnered over 75,000 followers and only follows one account: Frank Ocean's Blonded account. The assumption has been that these hints are about new music; but it is unclear how, if at all, this account is connected to Ocean, something which fans have highlighted and the account could be linked to Ocean's reported upcoming directorial debut, rather than an album. In January of 2025, following prolonged rumors, it was reported that Ocean would be directing a film starring the actress and model, Taylor Russel and that shooting had begun in Mexico City. What People Are Saying @ commenting on @franciswupperman Instagram post: "frank i have loved u since i was 13 pls understand how crucial this is." @utkarshoncoke commenting on @franciswupperman Instagram post: "Istg bro if this is some prank." What's Next Any details of a potential upcoming musical release, along with the title, plot and cast of Ocean's directorial debut, are unconfirmed.
