Public Health

If you have bad breath and it hasn't been an issue your entire life, the most common cause may be that garlic and Limburger cheese sandwich you ate at lunch, but sometimes it's not a lifestyle issue. It could be an oral issue but it could also be a stomach one. Gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD), e.g. heartburn, is characterized by a weakened lower esophageal sphincter which often leads to the backward flow of stomach contents into the esophagus.  Normally, the  esophageal sphincter, deemed such because it looks like a ring of muscle, opens when you swallow food and squeezes…

A population-based cohort study sought to examine a controversial epidemiological claim about assisted reproductive technologies like in vitro fertilization and the body mass index (BMI) of children. It's only controversial due to corporate media coverage, the same reason some people believe that chewing gum and diet soda can cause cancer and that bacon is as bad for your health as plutonium and cigarettes. Like all epidemiological claims, especially those made by activists at France's International Agency for Research(IARC) on Cancer and Harvard's School of Public Health. it is only…

It is an unfortunate reality in America that medical societies have an outsized influence on government policy. We are the only country with a nonexistent condition called "prediabetes" because the American Diabetes Association (ADA) has oversized influence at the US Centers for Disease Control, allowing the ADA to get a blood a1c level so low that 500,000,000 Chinese people would need medication if it were harmful placed into a concern campaign by CDC - and then ADA raised money campaigning about the new disease they manufactured. Pick an issue where America has a bizarre take compared to…

Politics is about trade-offs. Perhaps a reason President Biden isn't better-regarded is because if Congress didn't give him what he wanted, he circumvents them with agencies he controls, such as OSHA with vaccine mandates, the CDC with rent control, and EPA to ban safe weedkillers and pesticides. He can take a page out of Presidents Clinton and Bush 43 on how to do better if he wins again this fall. Neither started off easily. President Clinton won with just over 40 percent of the vote(1), thanks to Ross Perot siphoning votes away from the incumbent, President George H.W. Bush, yet he…

One concern about the Affordable Care Act was that in providing access to 700,000 people that companies refused to insure, access would decline along with the surges in cost for everyone. That has turned out to be true in both cases.  Some states have also 'bundled' behavioral and physical health care, and that hasn't improved access or care for people with mental health issues. It isn't worse, that is the good news, but for the 400 percent increase in cost it isn't better - and demand became higher due to heightened anxiety and depression rates during and post the COVID-19 pandemic.…

Data tools like ChatGPT, colloquially called Artificial Intelligence (if you think a fancy autocomplete is actual AI), have the promise to do a lot of good. There are some concerns about human content 'creators' being replaced but we don't miss the 150,000 fewer bank tellers we had before the rise of ATMs and a lot of writing done by humans is pretty generic. Like any computer code, the art will be making sure quality goes in. So if someone who is selling some kind of elimination diet book - gluten-free, vegetarian, low carb, etc. - puts a lot of that stuff in, Large Language Models can write…

It's that time of year when activists, academics, and social media mavens hoping for media coverage begin to promote worry about Thanksgiving.  Some risks are real, even if relatively slight; a lot more people driving mean more accidents and if you have a family member who is an International Agency for Research on Cancer epidemiologist, they will ignore the greater amount of driving and just tell you that Thanksgiving is deadly.(1) Food safety matters. Turkey should be 165 degrees Fahrenheit and ham 145, but anyone telling you that in a press release might as well be taking the bold…

Like the CDC manufacturing a prediabetes epidemic and pregnant women getting a scarlet letter if they have a glass of wine while pregnant, flossing seems to be a distinctly American phenomenon. Are we right? The British are famous for bad teeth, for example, and fiscal conservatives will say that's because dental care is not free under their socialized medicine. They must not floss, right? Well, they don't, but it may not matter. Most people in Europe who have great teeth don't floss. They think it is humorous that we pull string through our teeth the same way European women wonder why their…

Some controversial claims by epidemiologists with links to anti-meat groups (Frank Hu, Walter Willett, et al.) suggest that a normal human diet containing meat causes inflammation, which they then link to increased risk of heart disease. A risk factor for a risk factor for a disease isn't very compelling but journalists often confuse hazard, including when epidemiologists use 10,000 doses, and risk, which is actual clinical relevance to people. A new study sought to clear up some confusion, using metabolite data in the blood instead of simplistic food surveys that suggest a link to a…

Harvard University, and its anti-science allies like The Guardian(1) paper in England, are again claiming that meat causes diabetes. Such warmed over 1990s anti-meat posturing is nothing new from epidemiologists and since they are at the same school which just put its closet anti-Semitism on display for all to see, maybe they are hoping that something which remains a safe position for their political tribe - meat is killing us - will recover some of their lost standing among fellow Democrats. Nothing else can explain why they would write something as stupid as that they have correlated meat…