Szalavitz's latest book is Born for Love: Why Empathy Is Essential — and Endangered. It is co-written with Dr. Bruce Perry, a leading expert in the neuroscience of child trauma and recovery.
As I wrote recently, many of our most useful medications come from bizarre sources, ranging from mold from Adriatic castles to Gila monster spit and horse urine. Soon, cockroach brains may be added to this profoundly unappetizing list.
The California Beer and Beverage Distributors association, which describes itself on its website as “a nonprofit trade association representing over 100 beer distributors and brewer/vendor members,” has donated $10,000 to a group …
For the first time, human eggs have been matured in a three-dimensional “artificial ovary,” a development that could one day make in-vitro fertilization (IVF) treatment easier and more effective.
Medical students tend to hold negative stereotypes about depression when they suffer from the disorder themselves. Why? The high-pressure, cutthroat environment of medical school may be to blame.
California may be considering the full legalization of marijuana, but in Texas, a student was recently suspended from school for having red eyes.
Some people go to infamous extremes to get high — smoking dried toad venom, for example, or in one Northern culture, drinking the urine of reindeer that are tripping on psychedelic mushrooms. And yet, stranger sources than …
Only three medications are approved by the government to treat alcoholism: Antabuse (disulfiram), Revia (naltrexone) and Campral (acamprosate). None is anything close to a cure, but a new review of the research on acamprosate …
The Dutch are known for their liberal attitudes toward sex and drugs: while not officially legal, marijuana use and sale in “coffee shops” is tolerated in The Netherlands, as is prostitution, most notoriously in the street …
Nobody wants strangers riffling through their medicine cabinet — least of all the police. But that’s what the North Carolina state sheriff’s association is seeking — access to state computer records that identify which …
I recently tried to find some consensus in the research on whether smoking marijuana makes you psychotic — some data indicate that pot-smokers are more likely to develop schizophrenia, while other studies find that marijuana …
We’re so used to thinking of pleasurable things as “sinful” and “bad for you” that when the popular media, or science for that matter, attempts to validate our guilty pleasures — such as my colleague John Cloud’s excellent piece about recent research showing that heavy drinkers outlive teetotalers — skepticism runs high.
Good drama relies on conflict and confrontation — but that is not true of good therapy. In fact, if you are trying to change human behavior, kindness, empathy and support are far more effective than tough love and quick fixes.
When scientific studies first began suggesting that “Baby Einstein” videos might make children more like Einstein himself — as a child, he was taciturn and not especially verbal — rather than creating literary prodigies, …
