Alex Smith

It took years for advocates to get medical marijuana legalized in Missouri, but when it’s finally available in 2020, they may face an even tougher challenge: paying for it.

Ashley Markum of Rogersville, Missouri, the mother of a young son who takes CBD to control seizures, was heavily involved in the legalization push. This year, she helped start a charity called Ayden’s Alliance to help families like hers take on what’s likely to be the high costs of treatment. 

This year’s catastrophic flooding has created hard times for many people in Midwest, but it’s created a nirvana for mosquitoes.

Kansas City and the surrounding region could potentially become a hotbed for mosquito-borne viruses like West Nile virus in the coming years due to increasing temperatures and more frequent flooding, which are predicted by climate experts.

Vaccinations not only protect your health, they protect the health of the community by slowing or stopping the spread of illness.

But Missouri now has some of the lowest measles vaccination rates in the nation, and that’s especially troubling for families with children who can’t get the shots for medical reasons.

When Porter Hall of Raymore, Missouri, was a year old, he broke out in hives after eating a spoonful of peanut butter. It led to a scary night in the emergency room and a diagnosis of peanut allergy.

But today, Porter, who’s now five, is giving peanuts another shot with the help of Kansas City doctors, who have been giving him tiny doses of peanuts over the course of months.

This oral immunotherapy treatment isn’t a cure, but doctors say these tiny exposures may help to reduce or prevent severe reactions – although some critics are warning families to consider the risks. 

There’s a do-it-yourself movement that’s been spreading across the United Kingdom, but it’s not led by artisan hipsters or first-time homeowners.

It’s part of the country’s nationwide campaign to address loneliness, and experts think it may hold some important clues for fixing a tricky and potentially life-threatening problem.

As experts in the Midwest and around the world work to address loneliness, one tricky question keeps popping up: even if loneliness is bad for our physical and mental health, what if people just don’t want to be social?

To a lot of people in the U.S., the idea of a government loneliness program sounds like something out of a free-spending European dreamland, like locally sourced organic school lunches in Italy or months of paid paternity leave in Sweden.

Nice, if you don’t mind high taxes.

But in the United Kingdom, just such a campaign was introduced by a Conservative British prime minister whose government has been scaling back public spending for years, and that’s led critics to call loneliness a self-inflicted wound.

Hundreds of young German football fans in blue jerseys dance and sing in the streets before a soccer match in Manchester, England.  

This rainy northwestern city is the third largest in the United Kingdom. Known for its music scene and soccer, it’s a city brimming with young people .

But for many of those young people, like 17-year-old Lee Smelhurst-Hudson, life in Greater Manchester can be tough.

In the heart of London, at Buckingham Palace, the daily changing of the guard reminds crowds of tourists that the United Kingdom is a country with staying power.

Over the centuries, the British have fought off famine, plague, economic depression and the Nazis. More recently, a few blocks away at Ten Downing Street, Prime Minister Theresa May announced plans to take on a new threat to the lives of Britons.

Health care advocates in Kansas and Missouri are hopeful that 2019 will be the year that hundreds of thousands of people can get health care coverage through expansion of Medicaid.

It’s been blocked in both states by Republicans who question the price tag, but now that many states have had expanded Medicaid for several years, there’s a small but growing body of evidence about its actual costs.

Doctors generally agree that opioids are not a good choice for treating most chronic pain. But scientists have struggled to develop safe pain treatments that provide the same level of relief as opioids.

Now there's hope that might change. New research supports the use of a treatment method that’s lurked for years on the fringes of medicine. The question is whether it will remain stuck there.

Shivering outside her home on a freezing day in Park Hills, Loretta Boesing explains that weather in eastern Missouri can be all over the map.

“It’s crazy,” Boesing says. “We sometimes experience temperatures like they would feel in Arizona. Sometimes we experience temperatures like they would feel up north.”

Boesing worries about how those temperature extremes affect the prescription drugs that many people receive via mail-order delivery.

The Buck O’Neil Bridge just north of downtown is one of more hectic traffic spots in Kansas City, Missouri, and for Shari H, a car accident here in 2012 turned out to be life-changing.

She didn’t have any major injuries, but after days and weeks passed, she realized that her post-accident soreness wasn’t going away.

Long before Eric Kirkwood of Kansas City, Kansas, had his first sickle cell crisis at age 17, he knew about the pain caused by the disease. His uncle and sister had the genetic disorder, which causes blood cells to clump together and cut off circulation, leaving many patients with pain they describe like being squeezed in a vise.

“I’ve been in so much pain that I’m like ‘Why am I not dying?’” Kirkwood said. “It’s really like torture.”

Legalization of medical marijuana has won widespread public support in the United States, driven at least in part by enthusiastic health claims made by its advocates.

“We see a wide variety of patients dealing with all sort of ailments. Anywhere from Crohn’s, diabetes, neuropathy, fibromyalgia and chemo and cancer patients, absolutely,” says a worker at a medical marijuana dispensary in a video that has drawn more than 9 million views on YouTube.

A once-obscure health insurance buzzword — pre-existing conditions — is taking over the U.S. Senate race in Missouri. And the seemingly narrow issue could have a wider effect on the federal health care law, depending on whether Republicans maintain control of the Senate after the Nov. 6 midterm election.

It’s late summer, and the drone of insects is a sound that Lonnie Kessler has come to dread. A similar chirping means he’s minutes away from another seizure.

“It sounds like a thousand crickets all at once in my head. And so that really alerts me this is going to happen right now,” Kessler said. “And then I lose consciousness.”