News & Issues

Lenexa man’s exercise obsession underscores eating disorders’ gender neutrality

At one point when he was in college at Kansas State University, Jon Smith would jog as many as 20 miles a day. “If I wasn’t in the library and not in class,” he said, “I was running.” But Smith was far from healthy. His over-the-top regimen was a manifestation of an eating disorder known…

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Piper Wilcher

Blue Cross picket highlights insurance conundrum with eating disorders

The business day was ticking away as Sarah Wilcher waited on the phone. She was an hour into a desperate protest of an insurance decision about her seriously ill daughter, Piper. By around 5:10 p.m., she realized everybody was gone. “They just left me on hold,” Wilcher recalled recently of that day four years ago….

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John Smith, walking

Kansas City-area supporters strive to reopen eating disorder clinic

Approximately 30 million Americans – two-thirds of them women – battle a clinically significant eating disorder during their lifetime, and hundreds of thousands of these people live in Missouri or Kansas,

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Photo of man looking at his cell phone.

Ebola crisis hits home for KC’s West African community

Peteh Jalloh lives in Kansas City, but he lived in Sierra Leone until 1995. Lately, he has limited his communication with friends and family in Africa who are dealing with the Ebola crisis to messaging back and forth on Facebook. He says talking on the phone has become too painful. “Every day I get Facebook…

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At harvest, corn huskers still pick by hand

Dick Humes squinted and sweat as he moved down a row of corn. He sliced through the husk with a metal hook in his right hand, snapped the ear from its stalk with his left and threw it over his shoulder into a wagon rolling alongside him. Every other second, the corn hit the floor…

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