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The messages, many deeply personal, focus on the regional boundaries that divide life from death for patients with liver disease. “My partner passed away waiting for a liver transplant in Chicago,” one commenter wrote in support of a proposal to change the nation’s system of allocating livers. “Any move that can make access to transplant more equitable is a move in the right direction.” (Ross, 10/2)

Cancer researcher Jim Allison stands at the edge of a small stage, fiddling with his harmonica, his unruly gray hair hanging almost to his shoulders. Soon, surrounded by eight other cancer experts who also happen to be musicians, he’ll be growling out the classic “Big Boss Man” before a boisterous crowd at the House of Blues. It’s a fitting number, says Patrick Hwu, who plays keyboards for the band and is Allison’s colleague at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. “When it comes to immunotherapy, he is the big boss man.” (McGinley, 9/29)

Anne McBrearty Giotta doesn’t remember much of what happened on that August morning in 2013. One moment she was cursing her older son, Michael, who was supposed to have picked her up for a long-planned beach weekend, but was late and not answering his phone. The next moment, the police were at her door in River Vale, N.J., saying that Michael, 51, had been found dead in his home of an apparent heart infection. (Span, 9/29)

A Michigan woman said she will “most likely” go to jail this week if she refuses a court order to vaccinate her 9-year-old son. And Rebecca Bredow, it seems, is willing to take that risk. “I can’t give in against my own religious belief,” she told The Washington Post on Saturday. “This is about choice. This is about having my choices as a mother to be able to make medical choices for my child.” (Phillips, 9/30)

It seems obvious that there would be more injuries, and more serious ones, among high school and college athletes in football or soccer or lacrosse than, say, in running or tennis. But, how many more, and at what economic cost? Those figures turned out to be hard to come by, researchers at Yale discovered, but, using the best data available, they calculated that if contact sports could be made noncontact — like flag football, for example — there would be 49,600 fewer injuries among male college athletes per year and 601,900 fewer among male high school athletes. (Kolata, 9/29)

College involved "many anxiety attacks and many trips home" for Daniel Share-Strom, an autistic 27-year-old motivational speaker in Bradford, Ontario. It wasn't just the challenge of organizing his assignments and fighting the disability office for the extra time he needed for tests. It was also managing all the aspects of daily life that most people not on the autism spectrum take for granted. "Relationships are so much harder to understand or initiate when by default you don't really know what certain facial expressions mean or what certain actions mean," Share-Strom says. (Haelle, 10/1)

Health organizations are emphasizing that ME/CFS is not a psychological disorder and that standard forms of exercise do not help. Instead, they're acknowledging that exercise can make the disease much worse unless doctors and patients are very careful. The Centers for Diseases Control and Prevention has already revised its patient guidelines on ME/CFS and is currently revising the ones for physicians. (Doucleff, 10/2)

Just before 8 on a Thursday morning, orthopedic surgeons Dennis Cardone and Joe Bosco sit in a tiny, dimly lit studio in a far corner of the NYU Langone Medical Center lobby, a thoroughfare to New York University’s school of medicine and hospital on Manhattan’s East Side. The hosts of “Sports Medicine” on SiriusXM’s Doctor Radio channel have been on-air since 6 a.m., helping listeners and bantering like old friends. (Vander Schaaff, 10/1)

In 2007, a few days after participating in a two-day sailing race, Cathy Helowicz began feeling dizzy. It was as if the floor and walls were moving. A decade later, “it’s never gone away,” she says. “Sometimes I wake up at 4 a.m. and feel like I’m in a washing machine. ”Helowicz, 57, a former government computer scientist who lives in Jupiter, Fla., suffers from mal de débarquement syndrome (MdDS), a puzzling neurological disorder that leaves patients feeling as if they are rocking, swaying or bobbing when they are actually still. (Cimons, 9/30)

The U.S. State Department ordered more than half its diplomats in Cuba to leave the island and warned Americans against traveling to the Caribbean nation after a series of health “attacks” on its officials injured 21 people. U.S. and Cuban investigators still haven’t determined the source of the attacks, which left some staff with injuries from hearing loss and cognitive issues to difficulty sleeping, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said in a statement Friday. While no private U.S. citizens are known to have been attacked, the incidents continued as recently as late August, according to two State Department officials who spoke to reporters condition of anonymity. (Faries, 9/29)

For most people, buying a "fragrance-free" or "hypoallergenic" moisturizer that turns out to be neither, might be frustrating, but not harmful. But for people with sensitive skin or conditions like eczema or psoriasis it can be a big problem. "I will start to itch and I have to get it off my body right away," says 62-year-old Kathryn Walter, who lives in Ann Arbor, Mich. (Neighmond, 10/2)

Purple is Catt Gallinger’s favorite color.Pictures of the Canadian model often showed her sporting purple hair or purple lipstick, or the purple tinge of her numerous tattoos peeking out from beneath a tank top. So when the already heavily inked Ottawa resident had the opportunity to “tattoo” her eyeball — a procedure called sclera staining, in which ink is injected into the white part of the eye — she chose the color purple. (Wang, 9/30)