2025-03-02
24 分钟Hi, my name is Eli Saslow, and I am a writer at large for the New York Times.
Under this new presidential administration, there has been a lot of talk about chronic disease.
And Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
The country's new health secretary,
has promised that this will be one of his biggest priorities when he's in office.
And for as divisive as many of his ideas have been,
the one fact that is inarguable is that chronic disease has become an epidemic in the United States.
More working age people in America are dying of preventative chronic diseases like diabetes,
obesity, kidney disease, hypertension, than in any other similar country.
And this is a major crisis for the United States.
Nobody understands that epidemic better.
Nobody is seeing it at a more intimate level than Sam Runyan,
a nurse in rural West Virginia who is treating patients who are sick and getting sicker.
Instead of seeing patients in an office,
what her job is is she has 31 people on her caseload, all of whom have several chronic diseases.
And she goes and visits each one of them every week
and spends about an hour with with each person in their house.
She takes their blood pressure, she checks their medications, she bandages their wounds.
But she also talks to them about their lives and about the psychological impact of chronic illness.
I wanted to go and understand this crisis through her eyes,