Disease

Tinnitus is a perceived sound that only you can hear. It might be a ringing, buzz, or tone. It arises not in your ear but in your brain. And because only you can hear it, it is subjective, a symptom, not a sign, so diagnosis can be challenging.

Depending upon when you are reading this, Laurie Engel, a long-time chronic pain patient, may or may not be alive; she has been given about six months to live because of an aggressive, deadly cancer that has now invaded her spine.

Hypertension is a leading medical problem in the U.S., and except in the very extremes, it is asymptomatic. It is a disease with a specific finding.

Aging has never been a more discussed and, at times, contentious issue.

Prostate cancer is a much-discussed form of cancer in the medical literature.

How do we hear?

The data comes from the National Youth Tobacco Survey (NYTS), an annual, repeated cross-sectional survey of 186,000 US middle and high school students providing the current snapshot.

We have learned a lot about the SARS-CoV-2 virus during the four years of the COVID-19 pandemic. Because the virus replicates its RNA and mutates in every infection, its spike proteins keep changing.

During my lifetime, there have been several seminal breakthroughs in medicine that greatly changed our ability to prevent or treat disease. Part 1, below, describes several of them. I have a good idea of what some of the next ones will be.

End-of-life care is an uncomfortable topic for many if not all of us. Many individuals express a preference for dying in their own homes, providing a sense of control, privacy, and the ability to be surrounded by family and friends.