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More and more doctors are being prosecuted for murder, for inappropriately prescribing opioids to patients, resulting in death. How is it determined when a physician's actions have gone beyond malpractice?

Did a kid get poisoned from fentanyl on a supermarket shopping cart? Can a kid get poisoned from fentanyl on a supermarket shopping cart? All the teeth-gnashing aside, these are both easy to answer.

As our care improves, more patients have end-of-life concerns and issues. But sadly physicians are not necessarily meeting those needs.

From the data that told you vegetarian mothers create drug-addled children, we now learn that vegetarian fathers are depressed. Is it the kids or the diet?

It’s that time of year again. People around you are getting the sniffles and experts are beginning to speculate on this year’s prevalent strains of flu.

The mustaches are the symbolic equivalent of the pink ribbons associated with breast cancer awareness. Let's help the men in our lives take control of their health – and fight against preventable diseases. 

Upon seeing what he deemed a poorly-constructed paper by a colleague in physics, Wolfgang Pauli is apocryphally said to have, "This isn't right. This isn't even wrong."

Women with hormone receptor-positive breast cancers are commonly treated post-surgery for five years with drugs that interfere with the hormone-tumor interaction. But sometimes the cancer reoccurs, and the initial tumor and lymph node status seems to be important in determining who would be at the greatest risk of recurrence.

Senator Rand Paul's medical difficulties evolve after being assaulted while mowing his lawn.

Science struggles in a regulatory environment that increasingly puts the precautionary principle over benefit, and regulators that cater to environmental groups that view science as some corporate conspiracy.

Dr. Hawking's recent turn toward morbid pessimism is unfortunate. He is saying things that, if they weren't coming from him, most scientists would laugh at. It's sad that such a great physicist and science communicator is tainting his legacy with nonsense.

The research, which actually was being conducted for a different purpose – to learn more about treating epilepsy – revealed that neurons fire more slowly for someone's operating on less sleep, resulting in delayed responses time to stimuli. And the more sleep lost, the worse the condition became.

Testosterone replacement therapy is now a multi-billion dollar business. Treating a condition, propagated by marketers as "low T" or "manopause," carries the risk of serious adverse cardiovascular outcomes and other concerning side effects.

An Englishwoman named Laura Plummer is in jail in Egypt on suspicion of drug trafficking 290 tramadol tablets. The tablets (available on prescription in the UK) were found in her suitcase when it was examined at Hurghada international airport on Egypt’s Red Sea coast on October 9.

Over the past few years the whisky-drinking world has been introduced to several new products that claim to produce high-quality liquor in just a fraction of the time usually required to age single malt spirits. Instead of maturing the whisky for a decade or more in oak barrels, some distillers say they can replicate the quality and taste in a matter of weeks.

Warfarin, a drug that prevents blood from clotting, has long been used for those at high risk of clots, and thus at an increased risk of stroke and other ills. A recent study indicates that not only is warfarin effective for that purpose, its use might also protect against cancer.
 

Australia’s health system is an information industry – it is awash with data. Tragically, though, the data is not well collated, not put into the hands of the people responsible for acting on it. Nor is it shared with patients.
Multiple “data sets” measure the safety of hospital care in Australia, but they are rarely linked, sometimes incomplete, and almost always delayed. We have lots of data about hospital safety, but it’s not used to make us safer when we have to go to hospital.

Volunteer tourism, or voluntourism, is an emerging trend of travel linked to “doing good”. Yet these efforts to help people and the environment have come under heavy criticism – I believe for good reason.
Voluntourists’ ability to change systems, alleviate poverty or provide support for vulnerable children is limited. They simply don’t have the skills. And they can inadvertently perpetuate patronizing and unhelpful ideas about the places they visit.

Whether your goal is to increase strength, decrease body fat or improve overall performance, adding supplements to your daily regimen can give you that extra edge. But with thousands of products on the market, choosing the ones that are right for you can be overwhelming.
That said, here are some of the more popular supplements on the market today, separated into three categories:

Person-centered counseling is one of the most popular treatments for mental health problems. Often just shortened to “counseling”, the approach focuses on how patients view themselves in the here and now, rather than how a therapist interprets their unconscious thoughts. And the patient takes the lead in finding solutions to their own problems.

The International Agency for Research on Cancer is suffering through a period of critical upheaval, with ethical breaches of one of its environmental activists having been exposed. Meanwhile, IARC's posturing may get its funding pulled.

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.” - Alice in Wonderland
Science is, above all, a methodology designed for discovering objective “truths” about the natural world. All lawyers and politicians speak quite highly of Truth, and all routinely claim that it is on their side, rather than their opponents’, however, the real function of legal and political debate is not to discover truth, but to win. And, whenever “winning” is the prime directive,

The world of interventional cardiology was rocked recently when optimal medical management was found to be as effective as opening the artery with a stent. Yet a significant factor in the study – that went overlooked by the media – was that the patients serving as controls underwent sham surgery. It included all of the cutting and none of the cure.

Arthritis is not only for old folks. If you badly injure your knee, regardless of age, you stand a significant chance of being afflicted with the condition, too. Based on new research soon to be published, the chance of developing arthritis within a decade of tearing a tendon or a ligament is greater than 50 percent.

The American Council on Science and Health, since 1978 America's premier pro-science consumer advocacy non-profit, is pleased to announce the fall edition of our Priorities magazine.