An eye-opening TV report that aired recently featured a service dog that guards its owner from a severe drop in blood pressure, while preventing the resulting falls that can cause concussions. After learning about this wonderfully-skilled dog, it's hard not to reevaluate one's views on the cynical culture surrounding support dogs and their owners.
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Congress is considering changes to the privacy of our health data, specifically, our medical histories involving drug abuse and rehabilitation. Why are they treated differently? And should we change the rules? Balancing confidentiality with a physician's need to know is not always a simple decision.
The latest data from the Centers for Disease Control on obesity trends are mixed. Adults – especially women – continued to gain, but the same wasn't true for younger folks. Maybe, just maybe, there's hope on the horizon for diminishing the obesity epidemic.
In our latest #KuriousKiddos segment, Elliot and Sullivan want to know whether or not the legend of swallowing gum is true.. Will you become part Wrigley if you swallow the rubbery goodness?
Dan Berger, Ph.D. is a patent agent, who knows how nuances can result in billions of dollars going to one company rather than another. Even minor errors in drug patents can have enormous consequences. Given the stakes involved, we asked him to discuss what goes on inside pharmaceutical companies, and how their decisions ultimately affect consumers like you.
Deprive yourself of an adequate amount of sleep each night and you'll have a harder time regulating your body weight. Reinforcing that concept, the results of a recent study showed that when would-be dieters get less sleep their ability to lose body fat becomes more difficult.
As the chick readies to hatch, the eggshell's inner surface weakens. How the hardness of eggshells is created by a matrix is fascinating biology. And it may give us insight into a more human problem: the hip fractures of old age.
The authors had a clear strategy in mind: (1) Do a study on a common household object; (2) Produce boring data that doesn't surprise any microbiologist; (3) Write a provocative, fear-mongering headline; (4) Market it to a gullible, clickbait-hungry press, exhibiting no critical thinking; and (5) Watch the grant dollars roll in.
Aside from suffocation and strangulation which are responsible for 25 percent of all sleep-related deaths, other causes of SIDS remain somewhat of a mystery to scientists and parents. But in recent years, much research has explored neurological variants, like serotonin levels in the brain, and a gene variant that could provide some insight.
A science fair that recently took place wasn't giving out blue ribbons for homemade volcanoes. Rather, the projects were original research done by some of top-notch, high school talent, with the winners pocketing hefty cash awards. In the world of research, check out what this generation of future scientists finds both interesting and important.
The Environmental Working Group has once again released their Dirty Dozen list — the fruits and veggies they say are covered in pesticides. One minor detail: organic produce contains pesticides, too, but that doesn't quite fit their narrative.
This list, published annually by the Environmental Working Group, should be ignored for a multitude of reasons. It wrongly promotes the idea that organic foods don't have pesticides, while also making sweeping claims unsupported by scientific evidence. So media, why are you repeating EWG's nonsense without doing some fact-checking?
It's no surprise that drug traffickers are quite creative about distributing their products. Recently, the Drug Enforcement Agency and Homeland Security pounced on an operation that used Donald Duck and Winnie the Pooh objects to disguise illegal shipments.
A study published in The Lancet concludes that one additional drink per day increases a person's risk of stroke, coronary disease, heart failure, fatal hypertensive disease, and fatal aortic aneurysm. Alcohol may not be to blame, but we can't determine this because the authors didn't even bother to collect data on it.
From a security standpoint, the only thing that matters is that our soldiers are effective at killing people and breaking things. Does acupuncture help accomplish that? We presented one opinion last week. Now, here's a second viewpoint on the matter.
A coffee lawsuit has turned science upside-down by requiring coffee companies to prove that their product isn’t unsafe. That is absurd, not only because it violates 400 years of common sense about coffee, but because it is impossible to prove a negative. Science also cannot prove that ghosts aren’t real. Perhaps all California residences should carry a poltergeist warning, just in case.
The lure of page views and viral videos strikes again. A disturbing trend of snorting condoms finds good company with other misguided – and dangerous – fads.
Americans are increasingly choosing alternate sites of care, specifically retail clinics, urgent care centers and telemedicine. Their choices reflect a balancing of care, convenience and price. But in the end, what's the true overall cost of this shift?
The attention paid to concussions, and the long-term brain damage they cause, has been an essential advance in injury prevention. But an important by-product of that research reveals how microconcussions – hits to the brain that don't produce visible symptoms – also need to be minimized so as to limit future cognitive decline.
In 2005 an article indicated that medical care was responsible for 50% of bankruptcies. It became a myth that a new study clearly refutes.
Added sugars are the focus of the latest nutrition culture wars, with articles helping us find "hidden" sugars. You know, the ones listed on the ingredients labels. The problem isn't really added sugar — it's over-consumption.
Over the years nuts have increasingly been viewed as pretty beneficial, delivering a range of health benefits by the handful. However, according to a new study by Swedish researchers, such a reputation may be fairly misleading. That's because, as they learned, the nut-eater has to be inclined towards a healthy lifestyle in order to enjoy their benefits.
Who's prescribing homeopathy? A research group sought to learn if there's a difference between medical practices that prescribe homeopathy, and those that don't. What it found was that practices with the worst prescribing quality were more than twice as likely to recommend homeopathy than those who were best.
Governments gave subsidies to farmers, who implemented political beliefs about biodiversity, like planting flowers among their rows of food. Did any of it work? Sort of. But there's more to it than that.
Now that the results of his posthumous brain examination are in, we now must add Jeff Parker, who played briefly in the 1980s and died last September at 53, to the running list of former hockey players who developed CTE during their careers. Everyone gets the link between head trauma and this devastating brain disease. Everyone, that is, except the head of the NHL.
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