Around 1.5 million preventable medication errors occur in the American health system each year at a cost of over $4 billion annually, according to a new report released yesterday by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The report’s release marks the start of a new effort to reduce those numbers. The FDA’s “Safe Use” initiative [...]
Many millions have been made in Hollywood by lampooning the acute effects of marijuana on memory—but Israeli researchers suggest that they might one day be harnessed to prevent or treat post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). And today’s election results bringing medical marijuana dispensaries to yet another state suggest that day might be sooner than ever. A [...]
Yoga for teens could be more than a spiritual and physical boost—a new randomized controlled trial suggests that it may help those with anorexia, bulimia and other eating disorders. The study included 50 adolescents aged 11-16, the vast majority of whom were girls. They were seriously ill. Nearly half had previously been hospitalized because of [...]
The slow food movement may have started as a means to support sustainable food practices but a slew of recent studies show eating slowly and mindfully has plenty of physical perks as well. For instance, a study slated for upcoming publication in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism shows that those who snarf their [...]
Breast cancer surgeons have long wagged their fingers at patients warning them never to lift anything over 15 pounds, especially if lymph nodes were taken during surgery. Well, for any woman with a child (or groceries for that matter) the limitation is annoying at best, disempowering at worst. That advice was rooted in the fear [...]
With this week’s “fall back,”—giving us a blissful extra hour—sleep and its role in health is on a lot of minds. New research is showing how varied sleep’s influence is on virtually every aspect of life—from memory to obesity to improving your golf game. One study, just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy [...]
People who suffer with a chronic disability or illness may be happier if they give up hope that things will ever improve, suggests a small but intriguing study published in this month’s issue of Health Psychology, the journal of the American Psychological Association. Why? Because people don’t adapt well to situations they think are short [...]
Smokers are more than twice as likely to quit if they use the nicotine patch along with nicotine lozenges—compared to lozenges or patches alone, buproprion (Xyban), buproprion plus the lozenges or placebo. The trial was the largest study ever to compare these approaches head to head, and included 1,504 smokers. All of the treatment groups [...]
Approximately 270,000 of the 10 million cancer survivors alive in the U.S. were diagnosed and treated before they were old enough to buy themselves a drink, according to the National Cancer Institute. Thanks to scientific advances, as many as 80 percent of children treated for cancer go on to live full lives, but the shadow [...]
The (possibly apocryphal) advice given to Victorian women who weren’t fond of sex to “lie back and think of England,” may actually be useful to increase the odds of conception, at least following intra-uterine insemination (IUI). A new study found that 27% of women who were advised to lie still for 15 minutes after insemination [...]
