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 4 times more likely than girls to die from 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 a last resort. So a lot of us know the right move and still won’t do it.

      I see this in real life. In sports culture and gym culture, the whole vibe is “be tough, don’t complain, just 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 worse than it needs to be.

      You wouldn’t play an entire season on an injured shoulder telling anyone and hoping it fixes itself. That’s not toughness, that’s just making the injury worse. 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 with your mental health, 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, like 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’ve been reading about it recently 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. A single energy drink often packs 100 to 200 mg or more in one serving. And about 1/3 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, bad sleep, and irregular heart rhythms. The CDC found energy drinks were tied to more than 1,400 emergency room visits among teens in one year.

      People slam these drinks to lock in at the gym, but you’re basically revving an engine that is 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 get stronger. As somebody who cares about getting stronger, this trend makes no sense.

    • 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 stunk, 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 until something breaks down. The term for it is overtraining syndrome. It’s when you train so hard with 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. You don’t actually get stronger during the workout. You get stronger during the recovery, when your body rebuilds. 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 use the way I used to. Recovery has to be part of your routine.

    • 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 between the ages of 6 to 14 playing youth tackle football take about 15 times more head impacts than kids playing flag football. Those little hits add up over time.

      An NIH-funded study looked at the brains of contact sport athletes who died before they were 30 years old, 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 of these people were basically my age.

      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 though. 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 and sit out when you’re supposed to Make sure to also wear the right gear. You get exactly one brain for your whole life.

      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, so practicing in the afternoon with all the heat is a real thing for me. That’s why this topic matters so much to me.

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

      Exertional heat stroke is close to 100% survivable if people recognize it fast and cool the athlete down right away though, usually by getting them into cold water within 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. If you push it too hard with no way to cool off it overheats and shuts down to protect itself. The fix isn’t magic, it’s just paying attention and listening to your body. 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, but with heat, it just isn’t. Knowing when to stop and helping a teammate who’s in trouble is the actual best move. 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

      The World Health Organization calls climate change “the single biggest health threat facing humanity.” That’s strong language! 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 term 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 makes them worse. Hotter weather means more heat illness. Shifting rain and temperature patterns let mosquitoes spread diseases like malaria and dengue. 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 know what bad heat feels like. The summers are brutal, and at track practice I notice when the heat gets dangerous instead of just uncomfortable. That’s a small, local version of something happening everywhere.

      Read more: Climate Change and Health — World Health Organization

    • HIV Went From a Death Sentence to Manageable

      HIV Went From a Death Sentence to Manageable

      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 2.1 million deaths back in 2004.

      The reason for that drop is access to treatment. 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 normal lives and even keeps them from passing it on to others.

      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 taken care of.

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

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

      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. 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 little gap matters more than it sounds.

      This is where a concept called herd immunity comes in. 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.

      The good news is the MMR vaccine is about 97% effective with two doses. The tool works, so we just have to use it.

      Volunteering in a hospital made this real for me, because I’ve seen that the people 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. and people need to show up.

    • My Actual Game Plan

      My Actual Game Plan

      My grandmothers are the reason I became curious about prevention. One of my grandmothers smoked and died from pancreatic cancer. My other grandmother is still alive but also battles obesity and high blood pressure. When I think about it, 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.

      I keep seeing the same lesson everywhere I go. Volunteering at Orlando Health, working on the public health virtual internship in Nigeria, helping younger kids at the local community rec center, and learning at my medical research program at UCF this summer. Over and over, it’s clear that it’s better and cheaper 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 learn more and more about.

    • 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.

      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 junk food. The way your body responds completely different.

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