The people whose bylines you see at the top of a Wellness Wire piece, and the ones whose judgment you never do — the editors, the writers, the clinicians who review, and the contributors who file from their corners of the beat.
Edited, in their own words, for this issue.
S writes this week about the decade of patients she titrated by hand before the drug became a headline. She wants you to know she is still titrating; the conversation, she argues, should have followed. Trained as an endocrinologist at UCSF; runs the desk from San Francisco.
M is the person who can read a Phase II supplementary appendix at one in the morning and tell you whether the effect is the molecule or the crowd. This week he is writing about retatrutide, and about why the obesity pipeline in 2026 is a crowded, mostly Lilly-shaped room.
P edits the features desk from Brooklyn, which means she is the person who decides whether a 9,000-word piece on rapamycin readers is a 9,000-word piece or a 2,400-word one. She is almost always right, and occasionally wrong in interesting ways. Trained at the Broad Institute.
E is the last adult in the room. Every piece marked Reviewed by Clinicians passes through her inbox before it passes through yours. She still practices one day a week at a federally qualified health center in East Austin. A preventive cardiologist by training, an editor by the other six.
A came to journalism from the bench. She spent most of her PhD on incretin receptor structural biology, and most of her first year here unlearning how to write like a scientist. Half her job, she says, is translating a binding constant into a sentence that does not condescend to the reader.
J covers the part of the industry that does not issue press releases. Four years at ProPublica before he landed here, and a cardboard box of FDA 483 letters at his desk that he treats like primary source material. Files from Berlin when the FOIA requests go quiet in Washington.
D is a practicing geriatrician who covers a field that sometimes forgets old people exist. The point of longevity medicine, he will remind the reader, is not living longer — it is what you can still do at 80. Files from Baltimore, where he still rounds two afternoons a week.
R writes about compounded medicine from the pharmacy-counsel chair she used to sit in. She reads 21 CFR the way the rest of the desk reads pre-prints. The interesting question, she argues, is almost never whether a practice is legal — it is how the legality is being tested, and by whom.
Every piece marked Reviewed by Clinicians is signed off by a practicing physician on our masthead. Authors disclose any financial relationship with a manufacturer, a platform, or a pharmacy in-line at the top of the piece.