Welcome to Wellness on Mass. I'm Dr. Nicole Sapphire, and this is your Wellness on Mass Weekly Rundown.

Let's start with the FDA's urgent move this week to restrict 7 Hydroxy Mitrogynine, also known as 70H, much easier to say.

It's a powerful synthetic derivative of kratom, often marketed in innocent-looking gummies, shots, and drink powders. But do not let that

colorful packaging fool you. 70H can be up to 13 times more potent than morphine. It's not your

grandma's herbal tea. It's more like legal morphine for sale at the gas station. So the FDA has officially

recommended scheduling 7-0-H as a Schedule 1 controlled substance, meaning it has no approved medical use, essentially like heroin, because it has such a high potential for abuse.

Now, this doesn't affect natural kratom leaf products, although I can tell you that I think that these are a little bit risky as well, but it's a line in the sand for these

lab enhanced versions being marketed as wellness supplements. Now, here's why this matters.

These products are completely unregulated, aggressively marketed to young people and sold

online and in stores with zero oversight. And let's be honest, many people consuming them have no idea what

they're actually taking. I applaud the FDA for stepping in, but the fact that these products

were allowed to flood the market in the first place shows us just how broken our whole regulatory

framework still is when it comes to these synthetic health trends. Now I want to pivot from fake drugs to real

tech. This week, the White House announced a bold new initiative. On the surface, it sounds exciting.

AI and healthcare, interoperability, data transparency, and streamlining medical coding and reimbursement,

and all of that. They have all of the tech companies, Amazon, Google, Apple, and all these others who are voluntarily stepping

up to be a part of this initiative. But if you've been on long enough, you know this isn't the

first time Washington has promised tech is going to fix health care. Remember the whole Affordable Care

Act's push for electronic medical records? Well, that mandate led to bloated software,

clunky workflows, and data breaches we're still recovering from. Not to mention, it forced

out a lot of physicians from private practice and a lot of people just left medicine altogether.

So yes, innovation is good, but let's not forget the side effects of it.

...