Public Health

Medicine stopped being symptom-based over 50 years ago but psychology still uses it. Little is known about why or how the brain works the way it does, much less personality variation, so if a psychological therapy works, it works. Acupuncture is touted by alternative medicine practitioners as being effective for a few ailments and it is - often up to 29 percent of the time. When the issue is psychological the cure can be also and so a new epidemiological analysis from China compared the clinical efficacy of acupuncture/electroacupuncture with oral antidepressants in improving depressive…

Heart attack death has declined across all regions of the United States but it remains proportionately higher in the South, according to a paperat the American College of Cardiology's 63rd Annual Scientific Session. Though there are lots of associations and correlations made regarding why rates of cardiovascular disease vary by state and region of the country, facts are few about geographic variation in associated death rates. A new retrospective analysis used the Nationwide Inpatient Sample (NIS)  to examine heart attack in-hospital mortality by region and identified more than 12.9…

Health officials say that holding in your urine when you really have to go can be harmful. But every public pool has signs that prohibit peeing in the pool. Yet a lot of Olympic swimmers admit to doing it anyway and if you are visiting a public water park and it's not 20 percent urine, count yourself lucky.  In season 5 of Seinfeld, George and Jerry had this very discussion: George Costanza: It's not good to hold it in. I read that in a medical journal. Jerry: Did the medical journal mention anything about standing in a pool of somebody else's urine? According to a new report, Jerry's…

Doctors make people nervous. Most people don't go unless something is wrong so they are already anxious. Thus, it is no surprise doctors routinely record blood pressure levels that are significantly higher than levels recorded by nurses, according to a a systematic review led by the University of Exeter Medical School. The results show that that recordings taken by doctors are significantly higher (by 7/4mmHg) than when the same patients are tested by nurses. Dr Christopher Clark, of the University of Exeter Medical School, writes in the British Journal of General Practice that the…

Addiction is not a lifestyle. It is an experience that shapes the internal story you tell about yourself. It can define your self-understanding. From inside this perspective of addiction, we tell ourselves that the physical challenge of quitting keeps us trapped. But it is more than that. Addiction is defining. Who would you be without addiction? Who would you be, stripped of this way of understanding yourself? Tom, Dan, Mike and Arjun* started their recovery journeys as people struggling with addiction. Though they were all in supportive groups, none felt connected to the other people in the…

News media in the United Kingdom and United States have fallen in love with statins all over again.  According to media reports, a recent study by British researchers into 29 clinical trials for statin drugs allegedly concluded that except for an elevated risk of developing Type 2 diabetes and/or seeing liver enzymes increase, statins have no side effects. You can thank The Guardian (the most frequently cited source in the articles I have read) for promoting what is essentially bad science that has unfortunately influenced decision-making bodies to release new guidelines that will…

Canada’s Parliament will debate a bill next week that could add significant new powers to regulate the sale and recall of drugs in the country. Bill C-17, officially titled the “Protecting Canadians from Unsafe Drugs Act,” was nicknamed “Vanessa’s Law” in honor of the daughter of Conservative MP Terence Young, who died of a heart attack at the age of15 while taking the drug cisapride for a stomach ailment. The drug was later recalled in both the U.S. and Canada. The bill’s main focus is to expand the Food and Drug Act to better regulate medicines after they reach the market. The Health…

Obesity isn't always presenting an accurate picture of health. BMI is a nice metric for television shows but in reality, simplistic notions of height, weight and circumference are only a guideline when it comes to predicting health. A lack of physical activity, a poor diet and hours every day reading Science 2.0 isn't a great idea, but obesity alone is not providing insult into metabolic fitness. Not everyone obese is going to get diabetes, though you'd be hard-pressed to know that if you read the New York Times or watch Dr. Oz. A study of 181 children with obesity aged eight to 17 years…

The muscles of the inherently thin may give them an edge, according to a new paper by Chaitanya K. Gavini et al., who previously found that aerobic capacity is a major predictor of daily physical activity level in laboratory animals. In their new study, they compared female rats with high aerobic capacity (genetic tendency toward leanness) or low aerobic capacity (genetic tendency toward obesity) to investigate how muscle physiology affects leanness.  Though the rats in each group were similar in weight and lean body mass, the rats with a high aerobic capacity were consistently more…

America is a plus-size country, literally. The obesity rate remains as high and as alarming as ever. Recent data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) revealed that more than one-third of American adults is obese. What is even more alarming is this: more and more children as young as two years old are being considered obese. CDC further reported that over 8% of children aged2 to 5 are obese while nearly 18% of those aged 6 to 11 fall under the same category. As early as 2004, the CDC already declared obesity as the top health risk facing America. As a matter of fact,…