The New Scientist reports on a study suggesting that direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical ads may be ineffective. The best part is that the study uses the natural divide between French- and English-speaking Canadians to create a perfect cross-sectional study (Canada forbids pharmaceutical ads, but US television does not).
Cheese is a mixture of heroin and over-the-counter cold medication. An NPR story this morning covered the epidemic usage of this drug among Hispanic elementary school children in Dallas. Cheese is extremely cheap — only $1 or $2 a dose, and “well within a middle-schooler’s lunch budget.” Dr. Carlos Tirado at the University of Texas [...]
I was fascinated by a piece on yesterday’s Morning Edition about sleep, In today’s world, the well-rested lose respect. A myth has been created by America’s most successful politicians, businesspeople and other luminaries that their success is in some way tied to a physical condition, short sleeping, that allows them to have more productive hours [...]
I am a big advocate of eating right. I participate in the No-Corn-Syrup Diet. To this end, I’m always really frustrated when marketing gets in the way of people making the right decision. Take for instance the 100 Calorie Pack by Nabisco, which come with the following message:
Sweet, salty, crunchy, chewy, creamy — what kind [...]
Every year, Rick Webb and his fellow Barbarians take an incredible health pledge for a month to clear their systems of the unwholesome indiscretions of the holiday season. This involves no alcohol, no caffeine, no fat, and a laundry list of other rules. The fun commences after Keith Butters birthday, January 5, or the following [...]
On days like today (high of 20°F in New York City), I often wonder how close I am to hypothermia. Wikipedia defines three stages of a cooling body temperature:
Stage 1 (1-2°C below normal body temperature): light shivering and goosebumps (which are ineffective in humans)
Stage 2 (2-4°C below normal body temperature): with strong shivering, pale skin [...]
After 9/11/01, the CDC Division of Public Health Surveillance with help from Homeland Security implemented a new program for tracking possible bioterrorist threats, known as syndromic surveillance. Instead of relying on medical diagnosis of individual doctors, the system looks for statistical anomalies across the symptoms reported in recent emergency room visits and notifies epidemiologists when [...]
After nearly reaching eradication in America, syphilis rates have been on the rise among gay and bisexual men for the past few years. Most major cities have seen exponential growth in the number of cases over the past two years, and this is causing alarm in many state health departments.
Syphilis is a curable STD. After [...]
So it’s definitely not SARS. For the past few days I’ve been bedridden with some mysterious virus, perhaps the first EVER summer malady in my life. And of course I did what I always do when I get stuck with a tough cold: consume. In the past three days I’ve gone through two gallons of [...]
Somehow I’ve come down with a cold in the middle of the summer. Is that possible? Maybe by definition is has to be the flu, or at least it goes by another name (perhaps “a balmy” or “the humid”). Anyway, in this sort of heat, the standard homeopathic remedies aren’t very appealing: chicken soup, hot [...]