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The perils of Thanksgiving! Hellish traffic, Aunt Gertrude's bunions, and a whole bunch of toxic chemicals. We are all doomed.

Much published science and the "knowledge" resulting from it is likely wrong and sends researchers chasing false leads. Without research integrity, we don’t know what we know, so it is incumbent on the scientific community to find solutions.

The Fourth Turning and Complexity
Can a medication change our brain’s anatomy?
Are colonoscopies helpful?
Can the value of chicken soup be quantified?

The pandemic’s successful expansion of pharmacists’ scope of practice to include vaccinations has given some people the idea that pharmacists can fill other gaps in primary care, like prescribing medications for our greatest comorbidity, high blood pressure, or hypertension. A new, deeply flawed analysis of the economic benefits suggests savings of money and lives.

On November 11th, America honors and celebrates our veterans. November 11th was originally Armistice Day to commemorate the cease-fire of the Great War, World War I, that took place at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month.
I know many veterans personally. Lots of family and friends served. Most honorably left their military service unharmed. Some left the service with deep wounds and scars. And some did not make it back alive. On Veterans Day, we thank them all for their service.

The uptake of the current COVID vaccine is running at about 7% of the U.S. population. Pfizer is taking a significant write-off. After the pandemic, our trust in vaccinations has reached a nadir. It's a far cry from our behavior concerning smallpox in 1947 when, over eight days, over 4 million New Yorkers were vaccinated. Or compared to 1961, when 90% of the at-risk population got vaccinated against polio.

Last year, Congress passed the Mainstreaming Addiction Treatment (MAT) Act, seeking to expand access to buprenorphine, a proven treatment for opioid use disorder. However, a recent proposal by the Drug Enforcement Administration threatens to undermine Congress' intention. Now, some members of Congress appear ready to push back.

While largely ineffective medications for the treatment of Alzheimer’s Disease have gotten a great deal of press, an “orphan” disease – sickle cell disease – is in a similar situation. It is a devastating disease, and there seems to be a gene treatment on the horizon, one that comes with risks and benefits. How do patients calculate what to do?

The U.S. Government doesn't want to hear the message: The Centers for Disease Control and the Veterans Administration published practice guidelines on the prescription of opioid pain relievers in 2022 that they knew were unsupported by science and harmful to public health. The Department of Health and Human Services is stone-walling repeated demands for a senior staff review of these issues.

Answer: It could be. Stress kills. Rarely, but not never. And then there is anxiety, which subsumes a host of related diagnoses. The terms are often co-mingled, with the latter tending to diffuse the dangers of the former. Let’s take a deeper look.

VUCA?
Race in science
Pass the ammo
Sushi and lateral transmission

This could be big. All physicians or cancer researchers have been taught forever that a certain class of cancer drugs works by stopping mitosis, hence cancer cell division. However, a group at the University of Wisconsin discovered that everything we thought we knew about drugs like Taxol and vincristine - decades of textbooks - is wrong. The ramifications could reshape cancer drug research.

Roadside drug tests are unreliable, so why are they so widely used in the U.S.? Meanwhile, researchers who make "health disparities" the focus of their work sometimes misrepresent their results. Here's a textbook example from a study that used pulse oximetry to measure disparities in COVID-19 treatment.

At the beginning of the year, the CDC and FDA noted “a preliminary safety signal for ischemic stroke among persons aged ≥65 years” who had received the COVID bi-valent vaccine, as well as a similar but "higher" signal in individuals receiving the influenza vaccine at the same time. Now, a study has confirmed that safety signal.

Curiosity is the insatiable hunger for knowledge and understanding that fuels our exploration of the world. Each of us has curiosity to varying degrees, often for one topic more than another. Curiosity, as with many of our biological drives, has a dynamic quality: waxing and waning. Some researchers were curious.

In order to accurately capture the nuance of an article, especially those about scientific and medical matters, headline writers and editors should read the piece before composing a headline.

It seems like a bit of common sense: the higher the viral load – in this case of COVID – the greater chance you have to transmit the disease to another. As it turns out, one of the ways we may characterize “infectivity” is when viral load peaks. Omicron infections peak later, and that has clinical implications.

Cato Institute's Dr. Jeffrey Singer, in an opinion piece in USA Today, writes that for years we've been buying and using an ineffective, potentially dangerous decongestant. Why? Just another futile attempt to restrict access to illegal drugs, in this case, methamphetamine. With phenylephrine off pharmacy shelves, the ACSH advisor explores what this means.

A recent, bizarre murder case in Minnesota involved a physician (a poison expert) accused of poisoning his wife with a toxic gout drug called colchicine. The fact that she didn’t have gout, and that he had taken out a $500,000 life insurance policy, won’t help Dr. Connor Bowman‘s defense much. And a little lesson on the risks of using toxic drugs therapeutically.

Tracking our health is all the rage. Advancements in technology have catapulted our understanding of how our bodies work and continue to provide new opportunities for healthcare. But while constant monitoring of our physical health sounds great, there may be drawbacks to our mental health and how we relate to our bodies and other people.

Check it out: Our Life with Self-checkout
Short, fat, juicy ones
Regulating guns
Want to make some money? Consider horror films

Garlic is an enormously popular spice and food ingredient. But have you ever noticed that hours after someone eats it, their breath starts to smell strangely funky? And there's no sense in grabbing for the mouthwash; it won't do a thing. What is going on here?

Many cancers are treated with DNA-damaging drugs. But one, testicular cancer, responds so well to the drug cisplatin that the cure rate for early-stage disease is about 100%. Even if the cancer has spread to nearby lymph nodes, there is a five-year survival of 74%. What makes this combination of a particular drug and cell type so unique?

The COVID-19 pandemic has virtually – but not entirely – disappeared from public concerns. Nevertheless, new variants are being examined, as are new vaccines intended to counter them.

Over the last decade, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) launched several initiatives tied to incentives to “providers” to improve care. A peer-reviewed study spins out to interested clinicians the clinical benefits and financial costs of an initiative to reduce cardiovascular disease. The full report to CMS spells out the failures.