Every scientific paper should be required to answer a simple question before it's published. So prior to considering whether ingesting too many polyunsaturated fats (e.g., fish and foods cooked with vegetable oil) will make women lazy, TV-watching diabetics, an elementary-school query must first be asked: Does that even make sense?
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Several years after Obamacare was approved, healthcare costs continue to rise in America. The question of why – and, perhaps more importantly, how much of these costs should be covered by the government – continue to spark intense political debate. New research may shed some light on this issue.
Is there gender discrimination in payments made to physicians? Not by Medicare, Medicaid or insurance companies. So why does Doximity, a social network of physicians, say it exists? It all depends on what you're measuring.
With warm weather, it's necessary to be aware of the usual tick-transmitted suspects, Lyme disease and the West Nile virus. These are nasty enough, but there's a bad boy out there that makes them look like creamed spinach. Meet the Powassan virus. It is pure evil.
Leishmaniasis, transmitted by a sandfly bite, causes 500,000 cases of visceral disease and 1.5 million cases of cutaneous disease – resulting in 50,000 deaths annually. The drugs to treat it are terrible. If the parasite doesn’t kill you, the treatment may make you wish it had.
The IARC monograph program on Evaluation of Carcinogenic Risks must be reformed and brought into the 21st century – or it should be abolished
The weekly report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on the dead and dying is morbidly fascinating. In both men and women, heart disease and cancer are #1 and #2 killers, respectively. However, everything changes after that.
It's very common for people who eat right, watch their weight and don't smoke to ignore a smart sleeping regimen. The proper amount of nightly sleep is essential to ward off illness and maintain overall good health. And sustained lack of sleep is linked to a myriad of significant health problems.
Pancreatic cancer is the most aggressive, least treatable form of the disease, and in a large majority of cases it reduces the victim's life expectancy to a matter of months. German researchers say they've discovered why it's so ravenous, and they've traced the cancer's aggressiveness to a key factor in its earliest growth and composition.
It's one year after Berkeley, CA instituted a tax on sugar-sweetened beverages, and the results are in. Among them: there was no significant drop in caloric intake, even using self-reports and their known limitations. So consumers paid a bit more and saw no benefit.
How does a physician medically disqualify someone from serving on a jury? One potential consideration might include those who have a profound disability or illness. However, the guidelines vary from state to state.
The Trump Administration has convened a panel to address America's opioid epidemic. Its first mission should be to find convincing data to identify the actual cause(s) of the problem. That will be much harder than it sounds, since ideologues are always in plentiful supply.
Metabolomics is an emerging field that studies the "unique chemical fingerprints that specific cellular processes leave behind." In this case, it's applied to what we eat. And coupled with machine learning, this may well give us very personalized diets to improve our health.
One in 10 have a major depressive disorder during their lives, which makes depression the most common mental illness. Women are twice as likely as men to suffer from depression. Depression has both a genetic component and it's connected to environmental factors. But the genetic component has been difficult to determine.
Poor people are forced to eat junk food because of cost, and that's why they are obese. Right? That's a great narrative, but it's simply not true. Here's how it really is.
High-profile incidents in which a mentally ill person commits a violent crime has led to the stereotype that these struggling people all pose a dire threat to society. But a team of researchers, studying data from more than 75,000 patients, has developed a model that accurately predicts which patients are unlikely to become violent.
Immunology studies the way we maintain our body’s integrity – “immunity’s central motif” – as well as our definition of self. Differentiating our self from "other" has many scales, and it's been used to separate tribes, ethnicities, nations. So in addition to cells, can immunology also help us understand the interactions of humans?
Following the multi-year drought in the west and northwest, the question being raised is whether the mighty sequoia – which requires massive amounts of water – has been weakened or otherwise compromised. While there's no precise answer to that now, arborists are seeing signs that water depletion could be a real threat.
By demonizing biotechnology and conventional agriculture, Whole Foods has profited handsomely. But with its recent financial struggles, it would be nice if the sales downturn was the result of Americans waking up to the fact that the chain has been lying to them for years.
NYU physicist Alan Sokal thought very little of the research performed by his colleagues in the social sciences. To prove his point, he wrote a paper that used plenty of trendy buzz words but made absolutely no sense. As he later explained, Dr. Sokal wanted to find out if a humanities journal would "publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions."
Whole Foods lies 9 different times, and that is just on the landing page of its Organics section.
Energy emissions are in the news, but some claims are just more politicization of science. To paraphrase Virgil, Americans should beware environmental Greeks bearing expensive gifts.
The meme that "natural is safe" can get you into trouble in many ways. It's one that's appropriate at this time of year, when gardens and flowers are on our minds, since some plants are naturally deadly. Here are a few commonly found in our gardens and often available from nurseries, as well.
Childbirth is an unpredictable, sometimes traumatic event – in even the best of situations. Fortunately, most babies do quite well. Now, imagine having a condition where the act itself causes innumerable bones to break, making it life-threatening.
There's been enough devastation on the street caused by fentanyl replacing heroin. Now there's a new twist to the story: Fentanyl, with or without other drugs, is showing up in the form of copycats of Vicodin and Percoset. They're coming from Mexico, manufactured by cartels, which have reportedly produced overdoses and deaths.
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