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On February 22, 2022, Kensey Dishman died. She was thirteen years old. Doctors believe Kensey, a high-risk patient, died of COVID-19-related causes.  Kensey had asthma, a condition for which vaccination is recommended. Yet, despite her asthma, she wasn’t vaccinated and wasn’t masked. A week before her death, her school district removed mask mandates. Her choice was to refuse vaccination; her divorced parents were conflicted. Her mother and step-dad, vaccinated themselves, urged Kensey to get vaccinated. Her biological father agreed with her choice not to vaccinate. Normally thirteen-year-olds aren’t allowed to make significant health-related decisions for themselves. So, what happened here?

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently came out in support of "regenerative" farming as a solution to climate change. There is little evidence to justify her advocacy.

Anti-pesticide activist Carey Gillam recently moderated a panel discussion about the weed killer glyphosate. I attended and took notes. Here's what I saw.

Tracking cookies, those bite-size snippets of code that log your internet behavior come in as many forms as recipes for chocolate-chip cookies. Let us make a few quick distinctions. Some “session” cookies are bound to your browser and expire when you close the browser. Other cookies can have “best-by” dates or may last forever, like Twinkies. More importantly to this study, some cookies are issued by the site you are visiting, first-party cookies; others, ghostwritten by obscure code, serve the need of external third parties. Those are the subject of some new research.

Since 2020 Dr. Roneet Lev has been doing podcasts called High Truths, most often about addiction and drugs. So, I was happy to participate in an episode about fentanyl. It turned into quite a bit more.

Ferdinand the Bull’s real-life model, Civilón
Geomythology pairing our cultural myths with geologic findings
What will food be like in the future, more like Soylent Green or Impossible Burgers – Oreos may foretell our food future.
Woke words

I am a child of the cold war. I remember being in second or third grade and hearing the teacher yell, “Drop,” as we were expected to take cover under our desks. I can remember the surging interest in bomb shelters and when I was old enough to laugh at the idea that “duck and cover” would have any value. Why the nostalgia? Because last week New York City released a public service announcement about how to survive a nuclear attack – valuable information in case one were to occur.  

Lock up your gummy bears, mom, and barricade the hash brownies, pop. Medical centers worldwide report an alarming increase in emergency department visits for young children poisoned by unwitting cannabis exposure. Easy procurement of cannabis goodies where marijuana is legalized or medicalized seems to be driving the increase. So, what’s to be done?

Dr. Chuck Dinerstein and Cameron English recently joined Dr. Jay Lehr and Tom Harris on The Other Side of the Story radio show to discuss the controversial claim that "obesity acceptance is ruining our health." Is that true, or has the public health establishment actually exaggerated the dangers of being overweight?

The activist group GM has attacked gene-edited crops by alleging that they're designed to increase pesticide use. Is there any truth to this allegation? With millions of COVID vaccine doses administered since December 2020, what have we learned about the risks associated with the shots?

One of our readers asked why we only emphasize marijuana’s downside? In the continuing effort to rid the healthcare system of opioids, cannabinoids, the active components in marijuana, have been mentioned with increased frequency. A recent article in the Annals of Internal Medicine looked at the accumulated evidence as researchers performed a meta-analysis and systemic review of the literature. Here is what they found. Spoiler alert: patients with chronic pain will have to “toke on a lot more blunts” before we have less ambiguous data.

There is some truth to the urban myth that those high on marijuana tend to drive more slowly and at greater distances from other cars. Whether out of an old-time fear of being pulled over or because of some impairment of their perceptions. [1] With eighteen states (and the District of Columbia) with recreational pot sales, and an inability to determine the presence of marijuana as an intoxicant, as we do for alcohol, there is rising concern about marijuana’s impact on traffic accidents and fatalities. Here is the latest data.

A unanimous Supreme Court decision is a good first step for getting law enforcement out of prescription decisions. Drs. Jeffrey Singer and Josh Bloom in Reason Magazine.

AI. Blah blah blah. You can’t turn on the news without hearing about it constantly. So I decided to see if it knew chemistry. With a few exceptions, it did very well. Even when I tried to trick it.

It's the end and beginning of an era. With this in mind, I provide a retrospective of blogs going back over a decade.

While they could have gone even further, Senators Markey and Paul, and Representatives Norcross and Bacon deserve praise for stepping outside the box to address opioid addiction and overdoses.

A few years ago, I consciously decided to forgo eating octopus because it was "too intelligent.” But I continue to eat pork, arguably as intelligent because it is “so tasty.” That led – tongue firmly in cheek – to the taste-to-intelligence ratio test.

Long COVID will take a toll on the nation's healthcare system for the foreseeable future, but we can reduce new cases by treating acute COVID infections with a commonly prescribed, inexpensive medicine.

Whenever I think of Teddy Roosevelt, I imagine a hyper-talkative exuberant extrovert. He was known as an environmentalist, historian, and writer, but sadly his contributions to public health are obscured by his “larger than life” personality.

The New York Times devoted most of an opinion column to this ill-posed question. That's because concerning an airborne virus such as COVID-19, there are more relevant questions: How do masks work? When should they be used?

With much fanfare, the EPA announced the proposed drinking water regulations for two “forever chemicals,” PFOA and PFOS. EPA Administrator Michael Regan said, “Communities across the country have suffered far too long from the ever-present threat of PFAS pollution. That is why President Biden launched a whole-of-government approach to aggressively confront these harmful chemicals, and EPA is leading the way forward.”

There is little doubt that Candida auris (C. auris) infections are a growing threat. But the yeast is not resulting in the Zombie Apocalypse, nor is it a pressing problem for most of us. Let’s unpack the heated rhetoric.

He invented the thermos and smokeless gunpowder.
Rising angst
Right to repair
What are we drinking

When on a diet, especially one that requires 25% fewer calories, time seems to go so slowly between meals. Does that perception of time result in a slowing of our aging? A new study considers the relationship between calorie reduction and the clocks that measure our biological, rather than chronological, aging.

For many of us, COVID vaccination reduced the severity of illness, but not our becoming infected. We have a hybrid immunity now, tempered by that injectable mRNA of the spike protein and our exposure to real-world COVID. A new study suggests that we, of the hybrid immunity, have a reshaped and more enhanced immune response.