Mental health suffers from a major image problem. One in every four people experiences mental health issues -- yet more than 40 percent of countries worldwide have no mental health policy. Across the board it seems like we have no idea how to talk about it respectfully and responsibly. Stigma and discrimination are the two biggest obstacles t...

More than a billion people in the world lack access to basic health care. It’s a hard truth that Raj Panjabi pointed to as he accepted the TED Prize in 2017 — globally, there’s a shortage of accredited health workers, and many people living in remote areas are all but cut off from care. There’s a proven way to making sure they get it: Train l...

Drones are the sexy, mysterious tech craze that are often a butt of a joke, a vague solution or an ominous threat. But no matter how flashy, good technology should still solve concrete problems. Amid the hype of getting packages and pizzas delivered in half the time, what if drones could revolutionize transportation networks, connecting peop...

Session 4 of TED2017 kicked off with an interview with perhaps the greatest athlete of all time, Serena Williams, and closed with the potentially world-changing announcement of this year's TED Prize wish from Raj Panjabi. In between, the session saw a surprise talk directly from the Vatican by His Holiness Pope Francis -- the culmination of a ye...

Today, infectious diseases race across the world, and one country’s health problem can affect the entire global economy. For these and other reasons, Alanna Shaikh says global health is a matter of “mutual survival.” While working her day job at an international aid organization, Alanna moonlights as a (refreshingly frank) blogger on internati...

A vast gulf in care Vikram Patel asks us to imagine two men who live in the same town. They have the same education, the same jobs, and everything else the same. Both present at a hospital with chest pains -- but one is treated and one is not. Why? The second one has a mental illness. That is one of the biggest reasons people with ment...

The barbershop is a safe haven for black men, a place where they don't have to worry about how they're perceived by the outside world, says physician and men’s health advocate Joseph Ravenell. “It’s a place where we don’t feel threatened -- or threatening,” he says. Ravenell recalls his first experiences at the barbershop as being filled ...

Physicians Raj Panjabi and Seth Berkley are on a mission to ensure that every person in the world has access to decent medical care. In a conversation, they discuss the obstacles standing in their way and the bold ideas that could help overcome them. Around the world right now, more than one billion people don’t have access to basic health care...

A photographer's lovely visual thank you to some often overlooked medical professionals. “Sometimes I feel like I don’t make a difference, and it’s great to be reminded that I do.” That quote is from one of the hundreds of heartfelt notes that photographer Carolyn Jones (TED Talk: A tribute to nurses) received after she published a book of p...

Prosthetics as sculpture, the maternal benefits of breast milk, Cuba’s radical approach to free medical education. These are just a few of the subjects tackled at TEDMED 2014: Unlocking Imagination, hosted last week simultaneously in San Francisco and Washington, DC, with a stage program directed by TED Fellow, physician, novelist and activi...

In the past decade, we’ve changed the way we collectively view the health of the 7 billion people who occupy this planet. Health issues were once seen as an isolated national or regional problem; now they are a global concern. In What's Killing Us: A Practical Guide to Understanding Our Biggest Global Health Problems, 2011 TED Senior Fellow ...

Julian Treasure cares very deeply for your ears. That’s why he’s given TED talks like “The 4 ways sound affects us” and “Why architects need to use their ears.” Treasure is on a mission to make policymakers, engineers, architects and, well, everyone think more about what they hear around them -- because the way things sound have a tangible, me...

We spend about a third of our lives asleep -- a figure that may make all that time spent in bed seem like a waste. But according to neuroscientist Russell Foster, it is quite the opposite. In today’s talk, given at TEDGlobal 2013, Foster explores why we sleep, a question which no one has been able to definitively answer. We know that it is vi...

On the TEDGlobal 2012 stage this summer, guest curator Sarah Caddick hosted the session “Misbehaving Beautifully,” a deep dive into a near-taboo subject: mental health and mental illness. Today, Oct. 10, happens to be World Mental Health Day, and TED.com is premiering the final talk Sarah curated for the stage, Ruby Wax’s “What’s so funny ab...

“Women's health is an equal rights issue as important as equal pay.” When Paula Johnson uttered this sentence on the TEDWomen 2013 stage, the audience broke into spontaneous applause. “At that moment, it said to me they got it,” she says. Johnson has been working for decades to raise awareness about how diseases behave differently in w...

In the past 30 years, major advances have been made when it comes to treating several serious diseases. Today, there are 85% fewer deaths from leukemia and 63% fewer fatalities from heart disease than there were then. Meanwhile, while AIDS was once considered a death sentence, people with the disease can now live to old age. Not to mention that ...

It sounds simple enough: If you’re sick, you make an appointment with a doctor, and if it's an emergency, you head to the nearest hospital. But for more than a billion people around the world, it's a real challenge -- because they live too far from a medical facility. Where Raj Panjabi’s nonprofit, Last Mile Health, operates in Liberia, p...

Engineer and health entrepreneur Zubaida Bai is passionate about improving women’s lives. Through her company AYZH, she develops health products -- such as the $2 Clean Birth Kit -- designed to reduce maternal and infant mortality in underprivileged communities around the world. AYZH is about to launch an Indiegogo funding campaign to produc...

At TEDMED 2012, Rebecca Onie stunned the audience with her blockbuster talk on a new vision for health care. She is the founder of Health Leads, an organization that brings an elite, competitive team of college volunteers into hospitals and clinics -- a team that connects patients to services that help provide food, housing, insurance and ot...

By Paul Farmer At the end of almost a decade spent in teaching hospitals and clinics, most (we hope all) physicians have honed their clinical acumen by focusing on the care of the patient who is right in front of them. Perhaps this is as it should be: as patients, we don't want our doctors (or nurses or social workers) distracted by "outs...

A single gram of poop contains 50 diseases, one million bacteria, 1,000 parasites, 100 worm eggs and 10 million viruses, by journalist Rose George’s tally. For people who have flushing toilets, this is something that they rarely have to think about. But for the 2.5 billion people in the world who have no toilet at all, feces is to blame for a de...

Sometimes it seems as if the Internet has created a bold new era of openness. But if there is one place where openness appears to be lagging, it would be scientific research. The scientific community is full of intricate (and often little-known) systems that regulate and control it, sometimes to great purpose, but sometimes to its own detrim...

If you look at mortality data across the United Kingdom, a striking correlation materializes: the higher the latitude, the greater the relative risk of death. This is true even when controlling for risk factors like smoking cigarettes and eating bad food. So, what’s going on? The answer may lie in sunlight—there’s more in the south than there i...

By Michael Painter.  For some of us, it's easy to choose to be healthy. We can’t control whether disease or accidents strike, but we can decide where we live and what we eat, as well as if, when and how much we’ll exercise. Some of us live in a culture of health — a time and place where, for the most part, we have the real hope and opportu...

Making this TED-Ed video required (a) a lot of knitting and (b) a ton of boxes of Nerds. When it came time to animate the lesson “How do cancer cells behave differently from healthy ones?” from educator George Zaidan, our TED-Ed animators had a crazy idea for how to make cell division come alive -- using seeds and beans to animate what hea...

Intriguing reads from around the Internets this week: Two journalists on why the red line on chemical warfare is necessary. [Foreign Affairs] The story of Sara Josephine Baker, a doctor who saved 90,000 inner-city children by the time she died in 1945. [NYRB] "You can't defend the humanities by declaring it off limits to amateurs." ...

Global health expert Alanna Shaikh gave an unexpected and moving talk at TEDGlobal 2012, called “How I’m preparing to get Alzheimer’s.” In it, she told the story of her father’s struggle with the disease, and outlined some strategies she'd devised in case dementia struck her later in life, too. The TED Blog was curious: How is her experiment...

It may be the age of big data, but it’s still very hard to know how many children were born in Bolivia or Botswana last year, or to know something as simple as which clinics in the developing world have medicine and which don’t. Until recently, there was only one way to find answers to questions like these -- to send a group of workers out i...

To kick off TED2020, leaders in business, finance and public health joined the TED community for lean-forward conversations to answer the question: "What now?" Below, a recap of the fascinating insights they shared. Kristalina Georgieva, Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) Big idea: The coronavirus pandemic shatt...

Raj Panjabi was your typical science- and soccer-loving 4th grader in Monrovia, Liberia. But when a brutal civil war erupted in the country, normal life was upended. On the TED2017 stage, Panjabi recalls his mother knocking on his door, telling him to pack his things. They had to flee. One image from that day has stayed etched in his memo...