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For every U.S. woman who dies as a consequence of pregnancy or childbirth, up to 70 suffer hemorrhages, organ failure or other significant complications, amounting to more than 1 percent of all births. The annual cost to women, their families, taxpayers and the health care system runs into billions of dollars. (Ellison and Martin, 12/22)

Roughly half of all adults in the U.S. have one or more chronic illnesses, with 25 percent suffering from two or more such conditions. These people navigate a medical system of widely variable quality, an ever-shifting insurance landscape, and real-world considerations like broken cars, broken marriages, and bad jobs that can shape the patient journey as much as the latest medical discoveries. (Tedeschi, 12/22)

With Manhattan skyscrapers as a backdrop, Roscoe and Sharon Fawcett celebrated their 29th anniversary with a meal of steak, corn and baked potatoes. “She finally got a New York skyline wedding anniversary dinner,” said Mr. Fawcett, a firefighter in Stamford, Conn. “But I’d rather not have had to give it to her that way. ”That’s because Ms. Fawcett, 53, has end-stage liver disease, and the celebration took place in a ninth-floor family lounge at Mount Sinai Hospital, though she was too sick to eat very much. (Alcorn, 12/22)

Lots of things look different when you step into a small Green House nursing home. The bright living and dining space, filled with holiday baubles at this season. The adjacent open kitchen, where the staff is making lunch. The private bedrooms and baths. The lack of long stark corridors, medication carts and other reminders of hospital wards. (Span, 12/22)

Xylitol, a popular sweetener in sugarless gum, and probiotics are sometimes recommended as remedies for sore throat, but a randomized trial has found that neither works better than a placebo. Researchers assigned 1,009 people with sore throats to one of three groups: no chewing gum, xylitol gum, or sorbitol gum without xylitol. Half of each group was also given capsules containing either probiotics (lactobacilli and bifidobacteria) or a placebo. (Bakalar, 12/21)