A 48-year-old seronegative woman with type 2 diabetes, hypothyroidism, hypertension, and atrial fibrillation presents with chest pain and dyspnea. What’s your diagnosis? How best would you manage this patient?
In Northern Ghana, hundreds of women accused of witchcraft live in exile.
Their voices are at the center of the exhibition 'Ghana: Branded for Life'. As many of them say: “I’m not a witch.”
Explore their stories and experiences through this virtual exhibition.
Today, a 2nd-year med student asked me why we can't completely clear HIV from the body like other viruses and the answer is the closest thing to a horror movie in modern medicine
In 1879, a British/Scottish medical student named Robert Felkin watched an African healer in Uganda perform a caesarean section.
Clean incision. Banana wine as anaesthetic and antiseptic. Bleeding cauterised with hot iron. Wound closed with iron pins and herbal root paste.
Mother recovered fully. Baby survived.
Felkin noted in his journal that the technique was SO REFINED, it was clearly standard practice, performed routinely long before any European arrived.
At that same moment, hospitals in London and Edinburgh were still debating whether caesarean sections could ever be justified on a living woman.
European surgeons were operating in street clothes, rarely washing their hands, and losing most patients to post-operative infection.
The Africans had already solved anaesthesia, anti sepsis, haemostasis, and wound care.
Felkin went home and presented his findings to the Edinburgh Obstetrical Society in 1884.
The knife used in that surgery still exists.
It is now housed in the Science Museum in London.
A silent artifact of a surgical tradition they called primitive.
They didn't discover our medicine.
They witnessed it, wrote it down and forgot to mention where it came from.
There is a tablet making rounds in this town. White, small, innocent - looking and inscribed with the word Cosmos.
It starts at the miraa joints ( baze ya veve or muguka). One tablet to "boost the buzz." Then another.
Then you’re three days deep, eyes wide open, watching the sun rise and set without blinking. You haven’t eaten. You haven’t bathed. You haven’t slept.
And when you finally crash? You don’t wake up for 72 hours.
They call it “ulevi wa siku tatu.”
You chew miraa, pop a Cosmos, and suddenly you’re invincible.
You don’t feel hunger. You don’t feel cold. You don’t feel anything except the high.
Then you come down, drink tea… and the high comes back. Because tea reactivates it. Every cup is a ticket back to the trip.
This is not a drug. This is a trap.
There’s a man they call Doc at Asian Quarters. Allegedly a thin Somali guy. Every miraa chewer in Nanyuki knows him. He supplies the tablets that turn young men into zombies.
Walk into any Cushite wedding, and the story is the same. The food is laced. The juice is spiked. The water is not water. Guests swallow without knowing. By nightfall, they are wild, intoxicated, doing things they won’t remember until the wedding video comes out.
Now, even strict Muslim communities have resorted to daytime nikah only; sign papers, go home before night.
Because weddings have become drug dens disguised as celebrations.
The signs are everywhere.
When you see those mogoka chewers carrying water bottles, don’t dare sip. That water is not for thirst. It’s a delivery system for Cosmos.
Users lose interest in the opposite sex. They’d rather spend hours with men, in dark rooms, chasing a high that kills everything else.
Families are broken. Wives are beaten. Children are neglected. Because Cosmos turns men into time bombs; angry, unpredictable, violent when they don’t get their dose.
Some traders have started spraying it on crops. “Shamba ya Babu ndo nataka.” Yes. They’re now feeding it to the earth, to the plants, to whoever consumes them.
This is not a joke. Cosmos is not a party pill. It’s not a "mood enhancer." It’s a chemical cage. Three days awake. Three days asleep. Months of your life stolen, replaced with rage and emptiness.
Young men are dying. Not from overdose. From the life it steals. From the marriages it destroys. From the minds it erases.
If you are using, stop. If you know someone who is, speak. If you see that white tablet, crush it, flush it, burn it.
The dealers don’t care about your future. Doc doesn’t care about your family. They only care about the money you bring.
Your female contacts wanagonja ukuwe successful ndio wakuongeleshe "waah aki uliamuaanga kuninyamazia. It's been long time naonanga tu status zako , kumbe uko UK na hutuambii" alafu anangoja wewe fala ujitrap mwenyewe ukireply..
My coworker used to take the long way home every night. Two extra bus stops, more walking, more money, more time. One day I asked her why she didn’t just take the shortcut alley behind our building.
She laughed and said, “Oh, because a guy followed me there once and told me he could ‘do whatever he wanted’ and no one would hear me scream.”
So now, every night, she calls a male friend and pretends she’s on the phone with her “boyfriend.” Sometimes she even laughs loudly and says things like, “Yeah, I’ll see you in five minutes, babe,” even when she’s completely alone.
Not because she wants attention.
Not because she’s dramatic.
Because sounding “taken” and “protected” is safer than sounding like a woman by herself.
Men cannot even begin to understand the calculations women make every day just to get home alive.