Bri, who asked The Post to publish only her nickname for fear of being branded a bigot and doxxed by transgender-rights activists, was horrified — not only by the insinuation her teen would commit suicide if she didn’t transition, but also the fact that the general practitioner issued the warning in front of them both.

But some experts now question the threat that they say is commonly used by medical professionals. They believe many doctors are so scared of the label “transphobe” that they automatically present skeptical parents with a doomsday scenario: “Would you rather have a dead son or a living daughter?” or vice versa.

By contrast, a 2011 study spanning three decades by the respected Karolinska Institute in Sweden found that people who underwent sex reassignment were 19 times more likely to die by suicide than the general population. In the US, a yearlong survey by the National Center for Transgender Equality concluded that those who had transitioned were more likely to have attempted suicide than trans people who had not had medical or surgical treatments.

Erin Mims was celebrating her birthday at a local restaurant with her husband on Tuesday in Houston when she noticed a napkin handing on the car door handle while they were leaving...

Water is cheap and healthy. And drinking H2O is an effective way for most people to stay hydrated. The National Academy of Medicine recommends that adult women and men drink at least 91 and 125 ounces of water a day, respectively. (For context, one gallon is 128 fluid ounces.) But pounding large quantities of water morning, noon and night may not be the best or most efficient way to meet the body’s hydration requirements.

“If you’re drinking water and then, within two hours, your urine output is really high and [your urine] is clear, that means the water is not staying in well,” says David Nieman, a professor of public health at Appalachian State University and director of the Human Performance Lab at the North Carolina Research Campus. Nieman says plain water has a tendency to slip right through the human digestive system when not accompanied by food or nutrients. This is especially true when people drink large volumes of water on an empty stomach. “There’s no virtue to that kind of consumption,” he says.

Many healthy Americans take a baby aspirin every day to reduce their risk of having a heart attack, getting cancer and even possibly dementia. But is it really a good idea?

Results released Sunday from a major study of low-dose aspirin contain a disappointing answer for older, otherwise healthy people.

"We found there was no discernible benefit of aspirin on prolonging independent, healthy life for the elderly," says Anne Murray, a geriatrician and epidemiologist at Hennepin Healthcare in Minneapolis, who helped lead the study.

Dr Gregory Poland, epidemiologist for the Mayo Clinic and is editor-in-chief of the scientific journals 'Vaccine' and one of the nation's top experts on vaccination and immunology, said this week that the virus could be affecting humans for the next century.

Today, members of the millennial generation are ages 23 to 38. These ought to be prime years of careers taking off and starting families, before joints really begin to ache. Yet as a recent poll and some corresponding research indicate, there’s something missing for many in this generation: companionship.

A recent poll from YouGov, a polling firm and market research company, found that 30 percent of millennials say they feel lonely. This is the highest percentage of all the generations surveyed.

Of course, it’s the people-have-lost-their-everloving-minds incidents that make the news, but they are also a reflection of a deeper trend; Americans appear to have forgotten their manners, especially with those whose job it is to assist them. Lawyers are reporting ruder clients. Restaurants are reporting ruder clients. Flight attendants, for whom rude clients are no novelty, are reporting mayhem. (FAA fines for unruly behavior have already exceeded a million dollars this year.) So legion are the reports of discourtesy that some customer-facing businesses have been forced to play Miss Manners.

We all messed up the relationship with our parents at least once. Remember that time when dad didn’t talk to you for weeks? What about mom? Did she try to fix it up with a family dinner?

Well, you might not be that young, but what difference does this make. Most adults have a somewhat challenging relationship with their parents. While parents neglect the fact that you are a responsible grown-up, you are hiding behind their wisdom. How many times have you asked your parents for their advice regardless of their experience level? Hopefully, not too many times. We all make that mistake because we neglect that our parents don’t know it all.

Two out of three (66%) of adolescents age 12–17 live with both parents, 24% with their mother only, 5% with their father only, and 5% with neither parent [1]. The quality of parents’ relationships makes a difference to children in many ways. — Act for Youth

I know this is going to sound like a nonproblem at first, but there is a deeper issue that troubles me. Our 16-year-old son is an amazing kid: intelligent, hardworking, and athletic. He is a straight-A student who juggles multiple AP classes with a demanding sports schedule. He is one of the top three students in his class and is also being recruited by college coaches for his sport. But ever since he was in elementary school, we’ve had the same experience at the end-of-year awards ceremonies: He’ll occasionally get recognized for the “objective” awards, like honor roll or scoring the highest on foreign-language tests, but he has never won a single “subjective” award, the ones selected by teachers/coaches or voted on by his peers. When he was little, we would console him by saying “Don’t worry, just keep working hard and maybe you’ll get one next year!”

But after several years of that, we changed our message, instead emphasizing that hard work is its own reward, and that we are proud of him for his diligence and work ethic. I suspect one of the reasons he gets so little recognition is his personality: He is extremely quiet, introverted, and serious. He has a handful of close friends but gets along with everybody; his school tends to be a bit “clique-ish,” but he is one of the few students who has good friends among both the “smart kids” and the athletes.

I’m not concerned about the awards themselves or about him impressing anyone else. Now that he’s older, he tends to brush it off as no big deal. But I just watched him sit through yet another awards ceremony with a forced smile on his face and tears in his eyes as every one of his friends at the table got a special award from one of the teachers or coaches. He sometimes comments about feeling “invisible” because he doesn’t have the charm and charisma of some of his peers. We’ve tried telling him that sometimes teachers like to reward students for their effort since the students who excel in class already get the reward of good grades. But this doesn’t feel right either, especially after seeing him come home exhausted from a three-hour sports practice and then stay up till 1 a.m. studying.

After 10-plus years of this, I can’t help worrying that maybe we should be giving him different advice—instead of preaching self-acceptance, perhaps we should be telling him to adjust his personality, so he is a bit more likable? He is headed to college soon, so maybe I should do nothing and let him figure it out himself?

—Mom of the Invisible Man

The scientific concept that life could organically spread from one planet to another is called panspermia, and it’s not nearly as wild as it might sound. We already know that rocks from Mars have made it to Earth because we’ve found them here, but if ancient Mars did host life, what are the odds that life on Earth is a direct result of life forms being yanked from Mars and sent speeding toward Earth?

The events that would lead to a planet like Mars sending life to Earth are actually very straightforward. A strong impact from an asteroid hitting the surface of a life-rich Mars could send rocks into space. Some of those rocks could eventually find themselves on a collision course with Earth and, if those rocks hold microbial life, those tiny life forms could potentially survive an impact on Earth, thus seeding our planet with life.

I am currently in the very shady shitty midst of a divorce. Our marriage ended for a lot of valid reasons (incompatibility, mutual depressions, denial, etc.) that truly don’t have much to do with the following bit of info. My husband had a very (very!) close friendship with a female mutual friend of ours. They’d been friends since childhood (20+ years) and she subsequently became a really good friend of mine in the 10 years of our relationship. BUT in the last eight months of my marriage they engaged in an “emotional affair.” It was very unsubtly inappropriate and disrespectful. The extent of which I may never fully know because, they, obviously, both turned out to be disappointing, dishonest, and shitty people.

He moved in with her (sorry, “rented a room” from her) six weeks after we decided to end our marriage and now three months later is in a public relationship with her. This has been a fully awful and emotionally devastating experience for me. I’ve been heartbroken, angry, humiliated, stressed the fuck out.

My actual question revolves around how I can express my feelings about this devious gash. My husband will pay (a fucking lot) in our divorce settlement, and he has enough self-awareness to know he is a bad man and a miserable shit. His personal shame kind of settles my animosity towards him.

But her! I am a sex positive person who is pro-sex-work and loudly disparages people who attempt to besmirch strippers, porn actors, or prostitutes. YET, all I want to do is call this dumb bitch a stupid whore. Ditsy hoe. Dirty slizz. Etc.

How can I reconcile my feminism with my need to hate on this horrid bitch? Especially since now that I am single af, I am ‘bout to hit up all the dick?

Signed,... Not So Feminist

If you’re prone to doom-scrolling Twitter, or can’t take yet another stressful headline in the news, Oprah Winfrey has some suggestions on what books to read next.

Winfrey recently suggested seven books that are perfect to read right now, or during any stressful moment in life. She values these books “for their ability to inspire and comfort and enlighten,” she said in a video on her Instagram Monday.

“During these times, I know it’s hard sometimes to focus on anything because we’re so distracted by the roar of the news, not to mention the steady hum of our own anxiety,” Winfrey said.

But research has shown that reading can reduce your stress levels as effectively as other relaxation methods. Just six minutes of reading can lower your blood pressure and decrease other stress-related bodily responses, a 2009 study found.

From poetry to spirituality, here are the books that Oprah likes to “revisit time and again.”

Dr. Medina Culver is proof that you’re never too sexy to save lives. But her detractors don’t always see it that way.

When the now-successful family practice doctor was interviewed for a place at medical school at the start of her career, the interviewer bluntly asked her whether she had cheated on her Medical College Admission Test.

“Usually we don’t see women with your hair color score this well,” he pronounced.

The then-22-year-old blonde was shocked, but she held her head high and replied: “No, I didn’t cheat — I worked very hard to achieve that score.”

Nine years on, successfully employed as the only female partner in a Las Vegas family health practice, the doctor is still being undermined because of her gorgeous looks and figure.

“I’ve been told countless times that I am too pretty to work in the medical field,” Culver, 31, told The Post. “People say I should be doing something else with my life, like modeling or acting. It’s sexist, hurtful and shows the double standard regarding the appearance of men and women.”

Appalled at being hounded for being both beautiful and brainy, she has turned to social media to defend herself and spread the word that the two qualities are not mutually exclusive.

Early on in the pandemic, parents joked about encasing their kids in bubble wrap, but seven months in, that seemingly over-the-top idea is now looking pretty practical. In fact, Under the Weather — a brand best known for the pop-up "WeatherPods" that can be seen on the sidelines of kids' outdoor soccer and baseball games during rainy days — is now introducing a child-size "ShieldPod" after it successfully launched a line of Safety Pods designed to help protect healthcare workers on the front lines from possible COVID-19 exposure earlier this summer.

The original ShieldPod generated so many requests from families that Under the Weather modified the design to accommodate anyone looking for, according to the site, "extra protection, added peace of mind, or social distancing solutions."

I have been married to my wife for almost 20 years. It was a second marriage for both of us. A year into the marriage, I contracted an STD and found out she had it since her teens. At parties with her friends, I started hearing about how promiscuous she had been in her younger years, and I just accepted that it was before me. We have always had a real good sex life and discussed how great it has been, but now, she wants to practically stop having sex. I’m handsome, in great shape, and a very understanding and sensitive lover. She is still beautiful, attractive, and has no serious medical conditions. She explains that she had so much sex in her teens and early 20s that she can take it or leave it. In this case, it’s leaving it, and being the person who married her, I am now starting to pay a price for her early wild times. Is this a common rationale for writing off sex? I’m now convinced this may be a reason not to be so promiscuous in younger years.

—Horny History