The Global Pulse

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I am a high school student looking to change the future of medicine.
    • Why Guys Need to Talk About Mental Health More

      Why Guys Need to Talk About Mental Health More

      There’s a pattern in mental health that’s hard to ignore once you see it. According to the Jed Foundation, boys are about four times more likely than girls to die by suicide. At the same time, guys are way less likely to reach out for help. The same research found that 74% of teens believe asking for help is a sign of strength, but 48% said they’d only do it as an absolute last resort. So a lot of us know the right move and still won’t make it.

      I see this in real life. In sports culture and gym culture, the whole vibe is “be tough, don’t complain, handle it.” Which is fine for a hard workout. But somewhere along the way that turns into guys feeling like they can’t say when something’s actually wrong in their head, so they just sit on it until it gets way heavier than it needed to be.

      Here’s how I’ve started thinking about it. You wouldn’t play an entire season on a torn muscle without telling anyone, just hoping it fixes itself. That’s not toughness, that’s just making the injury worse in silence. Your mind works the same way. Saying “I’m not okay” early is the strong, smart move, not the weak one. And the good news is treatment actually works when people get to it.

      If you’re struggling, talk to someone you trust, or in the US you can call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline anytime. Asking for help is one of the bravest things a person can do.

    • Energy Drinks Are Not the Move, Especially Before a Workout

      Energy Drinks Are Not the Move, Especially Before a Workout

      Energy drinks are everywhere: gyms and high school cafeterias. They’re marketed hard, usually with athletes and influencers, like they’re basically required if you want to perform. I did some research and the picture isn’t great.

      According to Johns Hopkins Medicine, the American Academy of Pediatrics says energy drinks aren’t appropriate for kids and teens at all. The guideline is that people ages 12 to 18 should stay under 100 mg of caffeine a day. The problem? A single energy drink often packs 100 to 200 mg or more in one serving. And about a third of teens drink them regularly.

      The risks aren’t just “you’ll be a little jittery.” We’re talking raised heart rate and blood pressure, anxiety, wrecked sleep, and in some cases irregular heart rhythms. The CDC found energy drinks were tied to more than 1,400 emergency room visits among teens in a single year. That’s not a vibe, that’s an ambulance.

      The cruel irony is the pre-workout angle. People slam these before training to lock in, but you’re basically revving an engine in neutral. You get a spike, your heart works overtime, and then you crash, and the caffeine messes with the sleep that you actually need to recover and grow. As somebody who cares about getting stronger, that trend makes no sense.

      Water and real food do the job without making your heart do something weird. Energy drinks let you borrow energy from tomorrow, and the interest rate is rough.

    • My Shoulder Injury Taught Me Why Rest Is Part of the Plan

      My Shoulder Injury Taught Me Why Rest Is Part of the Plan

      I joined the weightlifting team in my sophomore year, and I had to stop because of a shoulder injury. That stung, because I love getting stronger and I’d put in serious work going to the gym almost every day. But going through it taught me something I wish I’d understood earlier.

      According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, about half of all sports injuries in young athletes come from overuse. Just doing too much with not enough recovery, over and over, until something breaks down. There’s even a name for the bigger version of it: overtraining syndrome. It’s when you train so hard with so little rest that your body actually performs worse, your sleep gets bad, your mood tanks, and you get hurt more easily.

      That hit me because I’d always thought of rest as the lazy option, the thing you do when you’re not committed enough to grind. I had it completely backwards. Here’s the truth that took me a while to get: you don’t actually get stronger during the workout. You get stronger during the recovery afterward, when your body rebuilds. The lift is just the signal. The growth happens when you rest.

      So skipping rest days isn’t being tough, it’s sabotaging your own gains and basically asking for an injury. The AAP’s advice is honestly pretty simple: take real rest days, sleep enough, don’t play the same sport every single day all year, and listen when your body is telling you something’s wrong.

      I learned that one the hard way, through a shoulder I can’t load the way I used to. Recovery isn’t a break from the program. It is the program.

    • Your Brain Doesn’t Bounce Back Like a Muscle Does

      Your Brain Doesn’t Bounce Back Like a Muscle Does

      There’s a brain disease called CTE that’s linked to repeated hits to the head, not just the big concussions but also the smaller impacts that don’t even give you symptoms. The CDC found that kids playing youth tackle football, ages 6 to 14, take about 15 times more head impacts than kids playing flag football. Those little hits add up over a season.

      Then there’s the stat that really got me. An NIH-funded study looked at the brains of contact sport athletes who died before age 30, and more than 40% of them had signs of CTE, found in people as young as 17. These weren’t 50-year-old retired pros. Some were basically my age.

      Here’s the thing that makes the brain different from the rest of your body. If I tweak my shoulder lifting, it heals, and if I pull a muscle running, it comes back. Your brain doesn’t work like that. It’s more like a phone screen. One drop might be fine, but every crack adds to the last one, and you can’t un-crack it.

      I’m not saying quit sports. But take head injuries seriously, sit out when you’re supposed to instead of being a hero, and wear the right gear. You get exactly one brain for your whole life. There’s no trade, no transfer, no second one. That’s worth protecting.

      Read more: About Repeated Head Impacts — CDC

    • Heat Is Dangerous for Athletes, and It’s Getting Worse

      Heat Is Dangerous for Athletes, and It’s Getting Worse

      I run track in Florida. High jump and triple jump. So practicing in serious heat isn’t a hypothetical for me. That’s why this one matters to me more than most.

      Here’s the fact that shocked me. According to sports medicine experts, exertional heat stroke is the leading cause of preventable death in high school athletics. More than 9,000 high school athletes get treated for heat illness every single year. And climate change is making hot, humid practice days more common, which only raises the risk.

      But here’s the part that actually gives me hope. Exertional heat stroke is close to 100% survivable if people recognize it fast and cool the athlete down right away, usually by getting them into cold water within about 10 minutes. The difference between a tragedy and a kid being totally fine often comes down to how quickly the people around them react.

      Think of your body like a phone or a laptop. Push it too hard with no way to cool off and it overheats and shuts down to protect itself. The fix isn’t magic, it’s just paying attention: water breaks, easing into the heat early in the season instead of going full speed day one, and coaches and trainers knowing the warning signs.

      I think we treat being tough and “pushing through” like it’s always the right call. With heat, it just isn’t. Knowing when to stop and helping a teammate who’s in trouble is the actual strong move here. This is one where being informed literally saves lives.

    • Climate Change Is a Health Problem, Not Just a Weather Problem

      Climate Change Is a Health Problem, Not Just a Weather Problem

      People usually file climate change under “environment” or “politics.” But the more I read, the more I think it’s actually a health story, and a big one.

      The World Health Organization straight up calls climate change “the single biggest health threat facing humanity.” That’s strong language from a science agency. They estimate it could cause around 250,000 extra deaths per year between 2030 and 2050, from things like malnutrition, malaria, diarrhea, and heat stress. Those are slow, preventable problems getting worse.

      The word the WHO uses that stuck with me is “threat multiplier.” Climate change doesn’t usually invent brand new diseases out of nowhere. Instead it takes the health problems we already have and cranks them up. Hotter weather means more heat illness. Shifting rain and temperature patterns let mosquitoes spread diseases like malaria and dengue into new areas. Floods and droughts mess with food and clean water.

      If you’ve ever bumped a video game up to a harder difficulty, you know the feeling. The map is the same, the enemies are the same, but everything just hits harder and faster. That’s what climate change does to global health.

      Living in Florida, I feel one piece of this personally. The summers are brutal, and I’m at track practice I notice when the heat gets dangerous instead of just uncomfortable. That’s a small, local version of something happening everywhere. Climate and health aren’t separate subjects. They’re the same conversation.

      Read more: Climate Change and Health — World Health Organization

    • HIV Went From a Death Sentence to Manageable, and That’s Huge

      HIV Went From a Death Sentence to Manageable, and That’s Huge

      Most of my posts are about problems. This one’s about a win, because I think we don’t celebrate those enough in health.

      Not that long ago, getting diagnosed with HIV was basically a death sentence. People were terrified, and for good reason. Now look at where we are. According to global data tracked by UNAIDS, around 40.8 million people are living with HIV today, and in 2024 about 630,000 people died from AIDS-related illnesses. That’s still way too many, but it’s down roughly 70% from the peak of 2.1 million deaths back in 2004.

      The reason for that drop is treatment access. About 31.6 million people are now on antiretroviral therapy, which keeps the virus under control. In 2010 that number was only 7.7 million. So in about 15 years, the world went from millions of people having no real options to tens of millions getting daily medicine that lets them live full, normal lives and even keeps them from passing it on.

      If you follow sports, this is the equivalent of a team that was down 30 points clawing all the way back into the game. It’s one of the biggest comebacks in the history of human health, and it didn’t happen by accident. It happened because of science, funding, and a global decision to actually go after it.

      For me, HIV is proof of the whole point of this blog. When public health and medicine work together and the world actually invests, even the diseases that once seemed unstoppable can be turned around. That’s not naive optimism. It’s literally what the data shows.

    • Measles Is Making a Comeback, and That’s Actually a Big Deal

      Measles Is Making a Comeback, and That’s Actually a Big Deal

      Here’s something I didn’t expect to be writing in 2026: measles is back. This is a disease the US basically beat in the year 2000. We “eliminated” it. And now it’s spreading again.

      According to the CDC, the US had more than 2,200 measles cases in 2025, the worst it’s been in decades, and there were deaths, all in people who weren’t vaccinated. The reason is simple and pretty scary. Vaccination coverage among kindergartners dropped from about 95% a few years ago to around 92.5%, which left roughly 286,000 little kids unprotected. That gap matters more than it sounds.

      This is where a concept called herd immunity comes in, and it’s basically a team-defense idea. Measles is one of the most contagious diseases on the planet. One sick person can infect 12 to 18 other people. The only way to stop it is for almost everybody to be covered, because that protects the people who can’t get vaccinated, like newborns and kids going through cancer treatment. The CDC says you need over 95% of a community vaccinated for that wall to hold. Drop below that and gaps becomes bigger.

      Think of it like a zone defense in basketball. If everybody covers their spot, nothing gets through. But if even a few people stop boxing out, suddenly there’s a lane straight to the rim. The good news is the MMR vaccine is about 97% effective with two doses. The tool works, and we just have to use it.

      Volunteering in a hospital made this real for me, because I’ve seen that the people most at risk are usually the ones who can’t protect themselves. Herd immunity is how the rest of us cover for them.

      Vaccines only work as a team. Herd immunity holds the line, but only if enough people show up.

    • My Actual Game Plan

      My Actual Game Plan

      My grandmothers are the reason I started caring about prevention. One of my grandmothers smoked, and she also lived with obesity, high blood pressure, and diabetes, and she died from pancreatic cancer. My other grandmother is still alive but also battles obesity and high blood pressure. When I lined all of that up, it hit me that almost every single one of those is something public health works to prevent. That’s not a coincidence, and it stopped “prevention” from being a boring word for me. It made it personal.

      I keep seeing the same lesson everywhere I go. Volunteering on a hospital floor at a local hospital, working on the public health internship in Nigeria, helping younger kids at the local community rec center, and learning at my research program at UCF this summer. Over and over, it’s clear that it’s better, cheaper, and honestly kinder to stop people from getting sick than to only treat them once they already are.

      I’m a sports and music kid first. I’d rather be at the gym or making beats than doing almost anything. But I want to point that same energy at public health, because the questions I can’t stop thinking about are the big ones: why do some communities get sicker than others, and what can we change before anyone ends up in a hospital bed?

      Bottom line: Stopping disease before it starts is the whole game, and that’s what I want to spend my life on.

    • Ultra-Processed Foods Are Kind of Taking Over

      Ultra-Processed Foods Are Kind of Taking Over

      Since I’m trying to gain weight the right way, I read nutrition labels a lot now. And once you start reading them, you realize a huge amount of what’s on the shelf is barely food. It’s ultra-processed.

      Ultra-processed foods are the heavily manufactured stuff: packaged snacks, sodas, sugary cereals, a lot of fast food. A big 2024 review in the BMJ that pulled together 45 studies and around 10 million people linked ultra-processed foods to 32 different health problems, including about a 50% higher risk of dying from heart problems and a higher risk of type 2 diabetes and mental health issues. That’s a lot of risk attached to convenient food.

      Bulking actually taught me this in a hands-on way. There’s a massive difference between calories from real food (rice, chicken, fruit, eggs) and the same number of calories from packaged junk. Your body responds completely differently.

      And it’s not just an American thing anymore. These foods are spreading worldwide, which is making it a global health issue. You don’t have to eat perfectly, but knowing what you’re putting in is half the battle.