A couple weeks ago I wrote about whether prevention can really cut health-care costs. Given America’s troubling chronic-disease rates, however, a more pertinent question might be this: Can health-care workers actually implement prevention on behalf of their patients? Sure, there’s cancer screening and annual check-ups. But that’s not usually what people mean when they talk [...]
It’s one of humanity’s longest-standing questions: How long can we live? Even the Bible weighs in. But people, on the whole, seem to be natural pessimists when it comes to the answer. Time after time, experts have estimated a maximum possible life expectancy that any human population could achieve. Time after time, we’ve exceeded it. In [...]
With a single well-timed injection, scientists show they can erase a bad memory from the mind of a rat. For their remarkable finding, researchers from Brazil and Argentina gave electric shocks to rats and then tested how long the animals remembered and tried to avoid shocks in the future. The researchers showed that rats will quickly forget a [...]
When it comes to pandemic flu, the best strategy for the U.S. is not to vaccinate those at highest risk of illness, but rather to vaccinate those at highest risk of transmission. That’s the best way to protect the country’s most vulnerable people, according to a new study published today in the journal Science. The theory goes: [...]
As the heated debate over health care continues, there has been plenty of talk about how the U.S. system stacks up to that of other countries, and how much American doctors earn compared with M.D.s in other parts of the world. But, how do salaries compare across the spectrum of jobs within the U.S. health [...]
If you’re a runner, odds are pretty good that you’ve been injured at some point in the last year or two. Journalist Christopher McDougall has an interesting and no doubt controversial explanation. It’s your shoes, he says. There’s too much of them: too much cushioning, too much arch support, too much stabilization, too much everything. [...]
Adding to research that shows smoking can dull your sense of taste, a group of Greek ear, nose and throat specialists and physiologists recently conducted a study of 62 male soldiers—34 of whom were non-smokers, and 28 smokers—measuring their sense of taste using a technique called electrogustometry. The method entails administering a mild electrical stimulation [...]
A recent study from Duke University found that a significant portion of baby boomers—22% of men and 9% of women ages 50 and up—were binge drinking on a regular basis, increasing their risk for both long term health problems such as neurological complications and elevated blood pressure, and more acute problems like accidental injury.
A study of suicidal thoughts and behaviors in the Asian American community reveals that U.S.-born women of Asian descent have alarmingly high rates of suicidal ideation—thoughts of suicide—compared with the general U.S. population. Nationally, an average of 13.5% of people will contemplate suicide in their lifetime, among Asian American women born in the U.S., that [...]
Long-time heroin addicts who get supervised doses of the drug seem to stay in addiction treatment longer and have less criminal activity than similar addicts who get conventional methadone treatment. That’s the finding of a randomized controlled trial published this week in the New England Journal of Medicine. Researchers from two Canadian cities, Vancouver and Montreal, gave diacetylmorphine [...]
