In his latest article, Alex Berezow asks, "Is the US doctor shortage intentional?" Alex presents some compelling points about high healthcare costs and supply and demand dynamics, but it does not address the complete picture. Here’s my take, not as a rebuttal, but to add some missing nuances to the complexities at play.
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Congestion pricing a troubled dream.
Congress, in its gridlock, stands, laws abandoned to executive hands.
The machines don't believe or see, AI’s errors, seen anew.
BLM and lockdown protestors go hand in hand.
Social media is a significant purveyor of health misinformation (including outright falsehoods), seeded and fertilized by celebrity know-nothings and a handful of contrarian physicians, and abetted by disreputable organizations with legitimate-sounding names. One recent scam misreports an American Heart Association (AHA) study, falsely claiming that the COVID vaccine is tied to heart defects.
However, the dangers of misinformation aren’t limited to vaccines and haven’t stopped with diminished vaccine uptake.
Ischemic heart disease, the leading cause of death in the United States, has long puzzled researchers. While high serum cholesterol levels are linked to cardiovascular risk, the role of dietary fat remains unclear. The copper deficiency theory, suggesting a strong link between decreased copper intake since the 1930s and the rise of ischemic heart disease, can provide a new perspective on prevention and treatment.
This report was prepared by Agnes Heinz, Ph.D., a former Director of Nutrition and Biochemistry with the American Council on Science and Health.
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Every now and then someone says, "Calories do not count. Some foods are more fattening than others." This statement is not quite correct, calories do count. However, recent scientific evidence suggests that the calories from some foods are more fattening than from others. How can this be? Let's take a look at the calorie content of different foods, and how these calories are used in our body.
Adapted from "The New Skinny on Snack Foods," by Dr. Elizabeth M. Whelan, in Priorities for Long Life and Good Health, Vol. 8, No. 1, 1996.
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A self-styled consumer group is deliberately distorting the facts to scare the public about a perfectly safe sweetener, the American Council on Science and Health announced today.
ACSH, a consortium of more than 200 scientists, was responding to unfounded charges by the Center for Science in the Public Interest that the no-calorie sweetener Acesulfame-K causes cancer.
Influencers are not new, but their popularity has exploded since the advent of social media. They have become an easy place to go for health advice and recommendations, but that’s not necessarily good.
A new report from the National Transportation Safety Board is highly critical of Norfolk Southern's handling of the 2023 derailment. The railroad made a terrible decision to burn off the vinyl chloride in five railcars. Chemistry explains why the cure was far worse than the disease.
A decline in the number of new breast cancers among postmenopausal women coincides with a decline in the use of hormone replacement therapy (HRT), a study published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute says. Canadian researchers looked at 1,200 Canadian women between the ages of 50 to 69 and found that the number of new breast cancers fell nearly 10 percent between 2002 — the same time a large U.S.
Just a week after a Norwegian study cast doubt on the extent of the benefits of mammography, a Swedish study has found they’re more beneficial than previously thought.
Nine years of good TV and bad science is coming to an end. The X-Files has been cancelled and will end in May.
It was the best science fiction TV series of all time, with better acting, writing, and above all cinematography than any of its kin. True, when it started it had the second-rate feel of one of those syndicated series shot in Canada that only appears in late-night timeslots, sort of like Tales from the Darkside, but it grew into something much more polished and much more influential.
It's time to get things straight in the crooked world of illegal drugs. As a parent of a son who occasionally experiments with illegal substances such as marijuana and "ecstasy," I fear most two events: (1) a phone call from a hospital emergency room saying that he is dead or dying, and (2) his becoming addicted to a drug that ruins his career, relationships, and health.
Some reports in the media have suggested that sexual activity increases the risk of prostate cancer. "The evidence, however, is still far from conclusive," says Carmen Rodriguez, MD, MPH, senior epidemiologist and director of the Lifelink Blood Collection Study for the ACS. Dr. Rodriguez believes that there is no consistency in the research. "It is an interesting and possible real association," Rodriguez notes, "but not an established risk factor."
Tattooing and body piercing are somewhat trendy now, having gained popularity in the 1990s. However, these forms of "body modification/body art" are anything but new. Both have been around since ancient times and are practiced in many cultures. Although their popularity attests that millions of customers feel both procedures are worth doing, there are some potential risks and complications.
Tattooing
The American Council on Science and Health (ACSH) today announced the addition of nine distinguished scientists, physicians, and policy experts to its Board of Directors. Directors are responsible for the overall direction of ACSH, such as setting organizational policy and overseeing the executive staff.
The new directors are:
Terry L. Anderson, Ph.D., M.S. Executive Director Political Economy Research Center (PERC) Bozeman, MT
Dr. Anderson's career in law and environmental economics enables his providing insight to ACSH on such issues.
"Canola oil," Rodney W. Flynn apparently said in a message that recently circulated on the Internet, "is a health hazard to use as a cooking oil or salad oil. It is not the healthy oil we thought it was. It is not fit for human consumption, do not eat canola oil, it can hurt you. Polyunsaturated or not, this is a bad oil." Yet in an email response to a question from me, Flynn said of this message: "I am no authority on the subject. As a matter of fact, I did no research.
A national panel of public health scientists has declared that childhood vaccinations are safe and has urged Americans to continue to protect their children's health by immunizing them against common childhood diseases.
The first issue of Priorities: For Long Life and Good Health was published in l988, with a mandate to fill an information gap left by popular health magazines specifically, to assist consumers in distinguishing between real health risks and phantom ones.
Did mysterious fumes from the World Trade Center disaster leave firefighters, aid workers, and others with debilitating, lifelong diseases? Or might the people involved suffer from nothing more than a combination of smoke inhalation, flu symptoms, and (quite understandable) stress? It's too soon to say, but already hype about mysterious illnesses is spreading in the press. Witness last month's Associated Press report by Malcolm Ritter.
Food allergies afflict perhaps 2-2.5% of the U.S. population or 6-7 million individuals. The symptoms can range from comparatively mild reactions such as hives, itching, and gastrointestinal distress to life-threatening reactions such as laryngeal edema (throat swelling), asthma, and anaphylactic shock. An estimated 29,000 Americans visit emergency rooms each year as the result of inadvertent ingestion of foods to which they are allergic; an estimated 150-200 deaths from food allergies occur each year in the U.S. also.
The story of the man-breasts was not the first sign that an anti-Aspartame paranoia campaign was growing.
I must confess that my own dear mother recently expressed concern about the sweetener Aspartame, found in many diet sodas, after hearing the testimonials of some daytime talk show guests, who attributed their aches and pains to the substance. The show even inspired my mother to give up diet soda.
Pagination
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