A Letter From Today's Guest Editor

Last year I found myself with a three-day case of fatty liver disease. I caught it from Google; it's a long story. More recently, I realized I have a zinc deficiency, a heart condition, and asymptomatic scarlet fever, mumps and pneumonia. I know this because I have a horizontal groove in my right thumbnail, which is one of Seven Fingernail Problems You Should Never Ignore. Speaking of things you shouldn't ignore, you might want to get that mole checked out because it looks just like something I saw in a Skin Cancer Warning Signs slideshow. 

I'm not so much a hypochondriac as I am a human living with a chronic wifi connection, same as the other 72% of Americans who get health information online. I'm also the editor-in-chief of Tonic, VICE's new health channel. So it's my job to think a lot about health and the internet. In combination they often go wrong, as evidenced by my own recent battles with imagined diseases. In this age of clickbait, hot takes, and alternative facts, there's never been a more important time for well-reported, carefully vetted health coverage that's fun and frank and steers clear of grandiose claims and janky studies.

And thankfully, courtesy of a vast and growing human curiosity about our physical and mental existence, a new wave of health content has arrived. Health has come to refer to so much more than the lifestyle stuff (juicing, CrossFit, weight loss fads, yadda yadda). These days, and largely thanks to Digg and sites with similarly good taste, we can spend our time delighting in the broader things the word has come to be associated with: the tragedies, triumphs and wonders of being alive today. That amounts to a lot of fun stuff—you know, like, deep-dives into poop customs around the world, inquiries into why some bodies have multiple orgasms and others don't, and Tom-Brady-pseudoscience debunkers. It also encompasses some deeper big-picture issues; to name a few: what it means to go to the doctor while black, the hidden struggle of trying to get off anxiety meds, and a look at the moral challenges involved in editing our genes (that last story was written by Tonic's editor-at-large, cancer doc and Pulitzer-prize-winner Siddhartha Mukherjee). Throw in a regularly-updated explainer of the Trump administration's impact on our health and wellbeing, plus what follows naturally from that—a first-aid guide for the apocalypse, of course—and you've got quite the picture of our current culture of living. 

Here at Tonic we hope you'll enjoy these stories as much as we have, and that they might give you temporary respite from worrying about your fingernails. That's what they've done for me, anyway.