Public Health

Want to know if you have an honest dentist?   Tell him you want to try UV tooth bleaching.   A study in Photochemical&Photobiological Sciences writes the lack of any enhanced bleaching effect is bad enough but it also damages skin and eyes up to four times as much as sunbathing. And as with sunbathing, fair-skinned or light-sensitive people are at even greater risk, said lead author Ellen Bruzell of the Nordic Institute of Dental Materials.   Bruzell also found that bleaching damaged teeth. She saw more exposed grooves on the enamel surface of bleached teeth than on…

Has anyone else had that cold that lasts about three or four weeks? It's going around out here and I'm finally starting to get over it. Too bad I didn't know about the wonder flu cure Oscillococcinum, or as everyone chatting online about herbal remedies likes to mispell it, occicillium. What is Oscillococcinum, you ask? As one completely uniformed consumer opined, "Basically Occicillium is some kind of antibiotic, or something like that, in a granular form." Wrong, my easily-duped e-friend. Marketed by Boiron as Oscillo, the homeopathic remedy is held up alongside Airborne and other…

Who says football is dangerous only to the people who have 320 lb. linemen that can do a 4.4 second 40-yard dash flying at them?    We can get hurt too, namely by choking on a chicken wing.   Or getting a tummy ache from too much Bratwurst. Super Bowl game day is actually pretty dangerous.   People get up and cheer too quickly and pull a muscle, there are drunken driving accidents and people who drink too much and fail to get up and go to the bathroom can also develop a problem called urinary retention, a condition where the bladder gets so full that the muscles are not…

On January 25, 1945, sodium fluoride was slowly poured into Grand Rapids , Michigan ’s public water supply to prove that fluoridation reduces children’s tooth decay. Five years into the experiment, things weren’t going as expected. Cavities declined equally in the non-fluoridated control city of Muskegon too.  So to blur the truth or prove expectation, Muskegon was fluoridated also. Children’s teeth were checked but not adults or other body parts.   Sixty-four years later, research exposes fluoride’s undesirable health effects to human…

Here's some good news: The ultimate goal for the use of GRNOPC1 is restore spinal cord function by injecting hESC-derived oligodendrocyte progenitor cells directly into the patient’s injured spinal cord.

People on low-carbohydrate diets are more dependent on the oxidation of fat in the liver for energy than those on a low-calorie diet, researchers at UT Southwestern Medical Center have found in a small clinical study published in Hepatology. Although the study was not designed to determine which diet was more effective for losing weight, the average weight loss for the low-calorie dieters was about 5 pounds after two weeks, while the low-carbohydrate dieters lost about 9½ pounds on average.  Glucose, a form of sugar, and fat are both sources of energy that are metabolized in the liver…

As a science site, we can continually be baffled that both the left and the right can find something to be critical about.   Some on the right are critical of stem cell research or climate science (Republicans) while some on the left are critical of genetically modified foods or vaccines (Democrats) - to science, it doesn't make much sense. But not everyone here is necessarily a scientist and we have the most diverse cross-section of both readers and contributors of any site around so I'm going to make you aware of something even if I don't actually agree with it - I trust your smarts…

In our 'studies you don't need to read' category is this bit of economic insight from the February edition of Addiction;  the more alcoholic beverages cost, the less likely people are to drink. And when they do drink, they drink less. After analyzing 112 studies spanning nearly four decades, researchers documented a concrete association between the amount of alcohol people drink and its cost.  Yes, it was unclear before that we should make alcohol something only rich people can have, thus widening the social and cultural gap before have's and have not's even further. The…

Rats whose mothers were fed alcohol during pregnancy are more attracted to the smell of liquor during puberty, say researchers writing in Behavioral and Brain Functions.  They say rats exposed during gestation find the smell of alcohol on another rat’s breath during adolescence more attractive than animals with no prior fetal exposure. Professor Steven Youngentob from the State University of New York Upstate Medical University, led a team of researchers who investigated the social and behavioral effects of fetal ethanol exposure in adolescent and adult rats. He said, “The findings by…

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, according to Ben Franklin. But what if the prevention causes more harm than benefit? And what if the prevention doesn't prevent much of anything at all? We've all heard the calls to get screened - mammograms, prostate exams, and more. And screening does save lives - a few minutes, some slight discomfort, and you can drastically reduce your chances of being surprised down the road by an undetected disease. But is screening 100 percent benefit, or are there some associated harms? Reading articles in the lay press, you'd be hard-pressed to find…