Trixie is a young woman in her mid-20s who recently left an abusive relationship with a boyfriend. She came to my workplace, Walnut Avenue Family & Women’s Center in Santa Cruz, seeking help from our restorative justice program, Space for Change. What she was looking for wasn’t an accountability...

California and Canada have about the same number of people – 39 million in California, 35 million in Canada. Both jurisdictions legalized medical aid in dying in 2016. Both have similar medical systems – many older people are entitled to mostly free medical care, physicians are free to choose their patients and the services they provide. Yet in 2022, 13,241 Canadians took advantage of medical aid in dying, while only 853 Californians did so. Why the big difference?

All Nirmal Singh and his wife, Daljit Kaur, wanted were a few groceries from Walmart. But as the older couple drove in circles around the suddenly unfamiliar streets of Fresno, Singh feared they’d be spending the night in their car. Singh, 72, had struggled with bad eyesight for years....

Gov. Gavin Newsom and the state legislature have committed to a series of rate increases for businesses and professionals who make community life possible for over 400,000 Californians with developmental disabilities. This has been years in coming and my organization, the Association of Regional Center Agencies, along with the vendors we contract with are deeply grateful for this critical funding. But what comes next?

I spent a recent afternoon querying three major chatbots — Google Gemini, Meta Llama 3 and ChatGPT — on some medical questions that I already knew the answers to. I wanted to test the kind of information that AI can provide. “How do you go surfing while using...

See the person, not their disease. While this teaching — originating from Canadian physician Sir William Osler — has been a foundation of medical training since 1850, medicine has failed to follow this principle when it comes to our own doctors. To practice in California, physicians must apply for a license in a process that asks invasive questions about our mental health history. Any affirmative answer could lead to devastating penalties.

Gov. Gavin Newsom’s recently released budget proposal for the 2025-26 fiscal year aims to address a $27.6 billion deficit, in part by cutting aging and disability-focused programs. This approach to balancing the budget threatens progress made under California’s Master Plan for Aging — a 10-year blueprint to guide policy, program, and funding decisions to support aging well in California. The proposed cuts disproportionately impact communities of color, people with lower incomes and undocumented immigrants, and therefore undermine the state’s commitment to health equity.

It’s been nearly two years since the U.S. Supreme Court eliminated the right to legal abortion in this country. The litany of tragic stories feels endless: patients forced to wait until they are sufficiently close to death to access necessary medical care; young victims of assault forced to continue pregnancies against their will; and countless others traveling across multiple states to access basic health care that ought to be easily accessible close to home. Recent news from Florida indicates that it’s about to get much worse.

The numbers are irrefutable — Black women are three times more likely than white, Asian and Hispanic women to die during or immediately after pregnancy, according to the CDC. The California Department of Public Health reports Black mothers account for only 5 percent of pregnancies in the state but make up 21 percent of pregnancy-related deaths. Investigations determine that more than half of these deaths are preventable.

California’s about to bail programs overboard as it works to keep the state afloat amidst a huge budget deficit. It’s a problem, and I’m concerned for some programs that help children with special health care needs. But I wanted to take a moment to talk about something...

Last year, a youth advocacy organization in San Diego called Social Advocates for Youth began a pilot program that placed community health workers in a handful of pediatric offices that serve families with limited English proficiency. The doctors in these clinics had been having trouble connecting high-needs families to necessary social services, and sometimes even just getting them something as simple as access to a food pantry or adequate transportation.

Eliana Ramirez was initially delighted when doctors switched her 2-year-old daughter, Lexi, to a new ventilator last year. The machine, a Trilogy Evo made by Philips Respironics, was more modern, lightweight and portable than the ventilator Lexi had used since birth because of a rare brain condition that causes her to stop breathing when she’s asleep or concentrating.

A first step toward improving health in California is making sure mothers and their children have enough to eat. The Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children program, commonly referred to as WIC, is designed to meet that aim. The program is associated with reduced infant deaths, fewer...

Marisol Pantoja Toribio found a lump in her breast in early January. Undocumented, uninsured, and without her family, the usually happy-go-lucky 43-year-old quickly realized how limited her options were. “I said, ‘What am I going to do?’” she says in Spanish, quickly getting emotional. She immediately worried that she might...

For the past five years — ever since her son, Marc, was diagnosed with cerebral palsy at 2 months old —Denise Williams of Adelanto has been trying to schedule doctor’s appointments. Week after week, she calls specialists, begs for referrals from Marc’s other doctors or sometimes just shows up at clinics, hoping the doctors there will agree to see her son.

Lead poisoning is often treated as if it’s a problem of the past. But its harmful legacy lingers today, particularly in the soil of urban centers in California and across the United States. One in every two American children under the age of 6 tested between late 2018 and...

When Anaheim resident Daisy Chavez lost her job in 2018, she knew she’d lose her health insurance too. She also knew that, without health insurance, she wouldn’t be able to afford the medical care and prescriptions she needed to manage her diabetes. “I remember being concerned taking my...

Modern medical technology makes it possible for medically fragile, technology dependent children to live at home with their families. Most people think of ventilators in the context of sickness: A ventilator is a machine that breathes for a person who is very sick, usually in a hospital intensive care unit. But for children and adults with breathing disabilities, a ventilator is a long-term tool for getting through life.

In 2022, an undocumented LGBTQ+ person arrived at the Los Angeles LGBT Center in Hollywood looking for help. He had fled his home country to escape a gang that was persecuting him because of his sexual orientation. Law enforcement in his home country refused to protect him. And after a difficult journey to the U.S., he experienced severe sexual violence in Los Angeles. He arrived at the Center after experiencing these severely traumatizing events, looking for support.

It’s still dark when Claire Hernandez has her first meal of the day. In fact, the 3-year-old is often still sleeping. Her father, John Hernandez, tiptoes into her nursery and, gently, so as not to wake her, attaches a feeding tube to her stomach. The vitamins and medications that flow through the tube help Claire, who has a rare genetic condition, survive. So does the love and dedication of her parents. Without their commitment and round-the-clock care, Claire would live in a hospital or institution, or possibly, tragically, not be here at all.