The New Rules for Unreality Is what you read true or false? Institution after institution – from science to the media – is deciding they don’t know. Often, they don’t care. Instead, many say if you want to know if something’s true, you must decide yourself. Presuming you have the time, means, interest and ability. […]
Statins and the New Numbers Racket (12/9/13)
The Old Numbers Racket One way to keep a population unhealthy is to endlessly worry them about getting sick. For the last few decades, purveyors of cholesterol as the core of heart disease have created a medical industrial complex that has been hard to suppress. Now that complex is changing its spots again with new […]
Does Depression Age You? (12/2/13)
The Tale of the Telomeres If you ever get depressed, you will age much faster. Or at least that’s what some recent articles proclaim. The latest – a study from Amsterdam of 2400 people and their genes – looked at their telomeres, the “buffers” of DNA sequences at the end of chromosomes which prevent them […]
How Drugs Change You Through Time (11/19/13)
Steroids Can a single dose change your body the rest of your life? My patient wasn’t thinking about that. He just wanted to have big muscles. Really big. He had been caught red handed with syringes in his back pack. His parents wanted to know what they were – and why. Nothing much, he told […]
Make It (Money) While You Fake It (11/11/13)
Herbal or Verbal? We’ve said it before but it’s more true than we knew – herbal medicines often don’t contain what they claim. New research looking at “DNA barcoding” found widespread fraud in herbal medicines. How Do We Know? Researchers at the University of Guelph in Ontario did a blind DNA test on 44 herbal […]
