This week we're deviating from the norm, because as this episode airs, Melissa has defended her dissertation and is officially Dr. Melissa Anne DuBois.

To mark the occasion, Jamie went and got nerdy about where the PhD actually comes from — and it turns out the history is contested, medieval, and extremely useful the next time someone tells you nurses shouldn't use the title "doctor."

Nursing PhD enrollment has declined for the eleventh consecutive year, to 4,077 students in a workforce of 5.6 million. That's less than a tenth of a percent of all nurses in the US! We need more nurses with a PhD in nursing science, so contact us if you are a nurse considering this — we'd like to talk with you about it.

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An executive order from July 2025 calls street homelessness a psychiatric problem and prescribes involuntary commitment. In this episode, Jamie and Melissa break down EO 14321 Ending Crime and Disorder on America's Streets.

They discuss what the HUD data actually shows, how grant money becomes leverage, why defunding harm reduction and Housing First backfires, and what the June 2026 DOJ memo narrowing the interpretation of Olmstead v. L.C. means for community-based care.

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The views and opinions expressed on Nursing the Nation are our own and do not represent those of our employers, academic institutions, or any organization we're affiliated with.

The President calls TrumpRx "the most transformative healthcare initiative of all time." So what does it actually do? In this episode, Jamie and Melissa pull apart the branded drug-discount rollout — and find a website that links you to manufacturer coupons, not a pharmacy.

To understand why the same generic pill can cost $4 at one store and $19 at another, they follow the money through pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) — the middlemen who now control roughly 80% of the market through rebate games, spread pricing, and the conflict of interest baked into companies that own the insurer, the PBM, and the pharmacy all at once.

They break down the structural fights that could actually change things (the bipartisan Break Up Big Medicine Act; Tennessee's Fair Rx Act and the CVS lawsuit that followed), why TrumpRx explicitly locks out Medicaid patients and won't count toward your deductible, and the now-infamous claim that prices were cut "600%" — a number that's mathematically impossible and rated Pants on Fire.

TLDR: A nurse's-eye view of what TrumpRx does for most Americans: basically nothing.

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The views and opinions expressed on Nursing the Nation are our own and do not represent those of our employers, academic institutions, or any organization we're affiliated with.

We close our four-part nursing analysis of the Make Our Children Healthy Again MAHA Strategy Report with its thinnest pillar on paper — and its most consequential in practice. Pillar 4 rests on one word every nurse knows intimately: voluntary.

Jamie and Melissa unpack the retreat from a promised food-dye ban to a toothless voluntary tracker, the "precision agriculture" drone promises that have not materialized, and the arithmetic that defines the pillar: ~$700M into a new MAHA program while $1B+ in conservation commitments get clawed back. Then we ask the nursing questions: why a strategy obsessed with what's in kids' food stays silent on whether they have enough, and why "faster chemical approvals" is the opposite of upstream thinking.

Follow the labor. Follow the money. Sources and the FDA dye tracker are in our show notes: nursingthenation.substack.com

Nursing the Nation is hosted by Jamie Bourgeois and Melissa Anne DuBois. The opinions expressed are our own and not representative of any employer, institution, or organization.

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In the second half of our deep dive into the MAHA Strategy Report's third pillar, Jamie and Melissa take on pediatric mental health, screen time, vaping, substance use, and the report's favorite move: naming a youth crisis and then handing the responsibility to individual kids and families while quietly cutting every structural support that might actually help.

We unpack what the research really says about screens and mental health (spoiler: "screen time" as a single number is nearly meaningless), why the federal government's own data shows teen substance use at historic lows even as the report frames it as a worsening crisis, and what's actually worth watching — nicotine pouches, addiction hardening, and the push to bring back flavored vapes.

Then we get to the part that makes us angry: a strategy that claims to care about youth anxiety and depression while defunding the 988 Lifeline's LGBTQ+ youth service, omitting gendered and LGBTQ+ disparities from CDC data, attacking social-emotional learning, and moving to restrict psychiatric medications and gender-affirming care. As nurses, we call it what it is — a lethal contradiction. You don't get to break the safety net and then prescribe a walk in the park as the cure.

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The opinions on this podcast are our own and not representative of any employer, institution, or organization we may be affiliated with.

HHS calls the third pillar of the MAHA strategy "Increasing Public Awareness and Knowledge"—a plan to empower parents and restore trust in public health. Jamie and Melissa Anne read the fine print and find the bootstraps myth woven throughout: sixteen-plus awareness campaigns built almost entirely on individual behavior change, with the upstream social determinants of health conspicuously missing.

We cover the well-documented way awareness campaigns can widen health disparities rather than close them; the "Make American Schools Healthy Again" push landing on an unequal delivery system of overstretched school nurses and gutted PE programs; a dietary campaign promising healthy eating "regardless of budget or location" in a world of SNAP cuts and time-poverty; and the fight over community water fluoridation, from its 1901 origins to the state-level bans spreading in 2026. Plus: the still-empty Surgeon General's office and what to know about nominee Nicole Saphier.

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The MAHA Commission's September 2025 Strategy Report laid out four pillars for tackling childhood chronic disease. Today Jamie and Melissa Anne are digging into Pillar 2: "Realigning Incentives" — a sprawling grab-bag of food labeling, sunscreen modernization, dietary guidelines, synthetic dye phase-outs, and the still-undefined "ultra-processed food."

What's actually been accomplished? We unpack why U.S. sunscreen regulation lags behind Europe and Asia, why the new upside-down food pyramid is a confusing step backward, who really profits from the petroleum-based dye phase-out (hint: not the oil industry), and why a federal definition of "ultra-processed food" keeps slipping its deadline. Underneath it all: a movement skilled at capitalizing on parental fear while ignoring the structural drivers of children's health: hunger, poverty, healthcare access, pollution, and gun violence.

You can take red dye out of Swedish Fish, but it won't help a kid who comes home to an empty fridge.

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SINCE TAPING: The FDA announced June 9, 2026 that they have approved an additional sunscreen ingredient.

Season 2 is here, and we're opening with a topic that has been a frequent flyer: the MAHA Strategy Report. If you followed our MOCHA series in Season 1, you already know the diagnosis — poor diet, chemical exposures, physical inactivity, and overmedicalization. Now the MAHA Commission is back with their so-called playbook. Today we're putting Pillar One — Advancing Research — under the nursing microscope.

Spoiler: "gold standard science" is doing a lot of heavy lifting for a document with little meat and zero citations.

We break down the 14 research priorities the Commission laid out, explain why several of them function as dog whistles for the health freedom crowd, and track what has actually happened since the Strategy dropped. From the reinstatement of a long-disbanded vaccine safety task force to the quiet dismantling of the very agencies designed to protect us from chemical exposures, the gap between the promise and the reality is… wide.

We also introduce you to Andrew Downing — and no, he is not from Hamlin, Hamlin & McGill.

This is Part 1 of a multi-part series. Subscribe to our show so you don't miss what comes next.

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