Marijuana – What Does It Treat? “It does everything,” my colleague explained, shaking his head. “It treats pain. It treats headaches. It treats depression and anxiety. Epilepsy. They keep asking me for it, every day.” A novel antidepressant? An extraordinary new anti-anxiety agent? No, marijuana. My internist friend is bombarded with requests to […]
Why You Have a 30 Foot Gut (5/5/14)
Is It Time to Eat Your Fruit and Veg? Consider. Humans adults have a 30 foot gut. Within it live 100 trillion bacteria. Dogs have a six foot gut. Why are dogs so foreshortened? The tale lies not in the tail or the untailed. It’s about what you eat. The Omnivore’s Opportunity There’s […]
Cheap, Beautiful Skin (4/28/14)
Just Beautiful What does a $46 billion hostile stock offer for a drug/cosmetics company have in common with physical exercise? Could it be that the office lobby of the company making the offer is a basketball court? No. It’s that both options promise healthy, beautiful looking skin. Though at very different prices. Valeant Pharmaceutical […]
Driving Through Sleep (4/21/14)
Transport and Sleep Chance can kill you. So can sleepiness. People on the Metro-North commuter train into Manhattan were expecting a normal trip one morning last December. Until something “abnormal” occurred. At 7:20 AM, the train turned into a thirty mile an hour flying at 82 miles per hour. They were heading towards Spuyten […]
New Era for Alzheimer’s? (4/14/14)
New Days It’s not just in media, high tech and politics where hype often overwhelms hope. It also happens in medicine. The discovery of abnormalities in amyloid and tau proteins made researchers in the 1980s believe they had a handle on Alzheimer’s disease. A host of medications promised to stall or push back its manifestations. […]
