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World War II ended with the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Those bombings and the late effects of radiation on the development of cancers in those “survivors” spurred scientific inquiry into the mechanisms underlying human carcinogenesis – the development of cancer. Today’s regulatory science of chemical carcinogens is based upon assumptions and beliefs that are now 75 years old. Our understanding of carcinogenesis has evolved; should our regulatory models shift?

Welcome to another edition of The J-Man Chronicles where we can guarantee that you'll never find anything the slightest bit useful, but quite possibly amusing and probably offensive. Today it's the Penis Drawing Plane and how not to get a leg extension.

It is widely accepted that animal testing is the gold standard in biological research. The facts debunk this belief. There are many reasons to object to animal testing, but the simple truth is that there is a better way.   

"It can disappear in a moment," Dr. Chuck Dinerstein said after his near-fatal battle with a pulmonary embolism. How should our mortality influence our worldviews? Unregulated medical devices may put patients in harm's way. Why is the Cleveland Clinic parroting anti-vaping talking points from the Truth Initiative?

If you watch TV, ads for Coca-Cola's Smart Water are inescapable. Also inescapable is that the ads suggest that the stuff will make you smart or perhaps offer some other health benefit. But the only thing smart about Smart Water is Coca-Cola's ability to make you shell out money to buy something you could pretty much get from a fire hydrant in Newark.

A disease produces specific signs or symptoms. Symptoms are reported by patients and are largely subjective, while signs are elicited by physicians and have a more objective quality. Meanwhile, a syndrome is a set of symptoms suggesting the presence of an underlying disease or condition. And while COVID is a disease, long COVID remains an often-ill-defined syndrome.

Dr. Jay Joshi explains PRN and how it can help or harm pain patients.

Many Americans are obsessed with nutrition or totally disinterested in it. Why are these extremes so common? ACSH contributor David Lightsey joins us to explain. Public health officials committed many blunders during the pandemic. Part of the problem may have been the incomplete and often inaccurate information they were working with. How can they avoid the same errors next time around?

The 2016 and 2022 CDC opioid prescribing guidelines were based on the assertion that doctor over-prescribing to patients has been a major cause of opioid use disorder and overdose-related deaths. Published
data from the CDC and other sources reveals that this assertion was incorrect – and the CDC knew it was incorrect when it published its guidelines.

Some doctors are alarmed by the blase attitude toward the Covid drug Paxlovid, quite different from when the drug first became available. What's going on? Some of the waning interest in the drug is because of the widespread use of the term "Paxlovid rebound," implying that there is something wrong with it. More likely, the problem is the term, not the drug.

Medicine, like the science that underlies it, is seldom transformed by “Eureka” breakthroughs; rather, it is most often a process of systematically accumulating knowledge and making incremental advances. Radiation treatment for breast cancer is a good example: New data has enabled us to revise and improve old approaches.

In 2016, the American viewing public was exposed to 663,000 television commercials for pharmaceuticals. That is a significant “ad spend” by Pharma, which we pay for through increased drug pricing. A new study looks at the therapeutic value of the more heavily advertised drugs. The key concept here is “market differentiation.”

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is in the process of making a remarkable decision and one that will have repercussions throughout the US.  Its proposed safe levels in water for the “forever” chemicals perfluorooctanoate (PFOA) and its sulfonic acid (PFOS) are at extraordinary odds with other national authorities. 

Restaurants provide more than food and drink; they serve a social function, allowing friends to get together over a shared meal. Although as we age, ambient sound may make hearing one another increasingly difficult in this setting. Welcome to the Lombard Effect.

Those who run the CDC and DEA have blood on their hands. No reasonable person can deny that the catastrophic crackdown on medical opioids has resulted in far more deaths than it saved. That’s because both patients and addicts are forced to turn to street drugs, and they end up dying from illicit fentanyl. But as ACSH Advisor Dr. Jeffrey Singer writes in Reason Magazine, there’s another harm that’s barely discussed: Suicides by those denied pain medications are becoming increasingly common.

Processed foods continue to get a bad rap
Geofencing January 6th Goes to Court
Zero COVID and Immune debt – Is China paying up?
And now, Dad Brain

The question of the protection afforded by COVID infection vs. the immunity conferred by the mRNA vaccines is still unsettled. A new study may put our concerns to rest. Spoiler alert: each form of immunity has its strengths.

China’s Zero-COVID policy goes against the central idea of the hygiene hypothesis: that to be the fittest to survive you must be exposed to germs. Could China’s current dilemma be sufficient proof of the need for a sweet spot between filth and sterility?

Humans, trained to become radiologists, must pass a series of examinations to demonstrate their ability to accurately read and interpret images to be “board certified.” The training typically last five or more years; artificial intelligence has been training to take over the reading of these images for at least that long. This month, researchers asked an AI system to take radiology’s board exam; the results are not pretty.

Sweden has been the poster child of the live-free-or-die, no-lockdown crowd. The Great Barrington Declaration has its roots in the Swedish response. But beyond those snippets, what actually took place there? It is time for many of us, including myself, to find out.

Let’s continue our countdown of the top articles written by ACSH this year.

"Peer review" of scientific articles before publication is often considered the "gold standard" of reliability, but its luster has become tarnished by greed – the desire of the research community to tap into research funds, the pressure on scientists to publish or perish, and publishers of scientific journals seeking to maximize profits. 

There is no longer any doubt that drinking alcohol raises the risk of multiple cancers. Why alcohol? What's it doing to us? And an episode of The Dreaded Chemistry Lesson From Hell. No extra charge!

Deaths of despair, death from alcoholism, drug overdoses, and suicides have become a consistent explanation for the increasing mortality in middle-aged White males. A new viewpoint calls our attention to the deaths of despair among Native Americans.

Plants can be genetically modified to produce high-value pharmaceuticals, a practice called “biopharming.” Many of these "biopharmed" vaccines and other biologics do not require refrigeration, special handling, or sophisticated medical equipment to distribute them, making them ideal for middle and low-income countries. They are also cheaper to produce than our current methods and can help reduce the increasing costs of biologics. But these products have not yet entered the marketplace in part because of regulatory constraints.