What you don’t know about how drugs are tested and marketed could hurt you, says author Ben Goldacre in his book Bad Pharma
Medicine
‘Stuck Up!’ Odd Objects Inserted in Odder Places
You have to see the X-rays to believe it. In their new book, Stuck Up!, Drs. Rich Dreben, Murdoc Knight and Marty Sindhian catalog the bizarre collection of “rectal foreign bodies” that patients come to the emergency room to have …
Q&A: Two Harvard Docs Talk About Making the Best Medical Choices
(Updated) Critical medical decisions can be difficult to make — even for two Harvard doctors. But Dr. Jerome Groopman, who is also a staff writer for the New Yorker, and his wife, Dr. Pamela Hartzband, have thought a great deal …
Q&A: Why Bad Math Can Ruin Your Health
How do we know which numbers to trust and which health studies are sound? Healthland faces this dilemma every day, so we spoke with Charles Seife, the rare journalist with an undergraduate degree in mathematics, from Princeton no less.
Cell Phones: How Precautionary Should Our Principles Be?
TIME is endeavoring to give you every angle you need on the possible connection between cell-phone use and brain cancer. (Speaking of which: five ways to reduce your exposure to cell-phone radiation.) But as I’ve followed the …
WHO Says Cell Phone Radiation Is “Possibly Carcinogenic.” Now What?
Using a mobile phone may increase your risk for certain kinds of brain cancers. That was the scientific conclusion relayed today by a working group of 31 scientists from 14 countries meeting at the World Health Organization’s …
Happy Clean Your Hands Day!
You should listen to your mother: always wash your hands. That’s especially true if you work in health care, where poor hand hygiene can be matter of life and death.
Will the FDA Ban Menthol Cigarettes?
The Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) Tobacco Products Scientific Advisory Committee is due in the coming week to submit to the agency its final report on the health effects of menthol cigarettes. The FDA is considering a ban …
Family MattersFlu
Sniffles and Sneezes: Canadian Herbal Remedy Wants to Be Approved for Kids
Colds are the bane of a parent’s existence in wintertime, which is pretty much the equivalent of perpetual runny-nose season. The drug manufacturer that can successfully develop a remedy for the sneezing, drippy noses, …
IVF Pioneer Robert Edwards Wins Nobel Prize
Thirty two years after the first test tube baby was born, the biologist who was the first to successfully mix egg and sperm in a lab dish and generate a healthy human baby was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine.
The Strange World of Drug Origins: Nuns’ Urine, Yew Trees and Rooster Combs
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 …
When measuring medicine, stay away from the spoon
A new study published in the International Journal of Clinical Practice adds to research suggesting that, when it comes to measuring children’s medicine, a “spoonful” is seldom the right dose. The findings highlighted by the BBC are based on an analysis of teaspoons taken from 25 households in Greece, as well as an experiment in which
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Many doctors don’t feel obliged to report incompetence
More than one in three American physicians say that they do not always feel a responsibility to report colleagues who are impaired or incompetent, according to a new report from researchers at the Mongan Institute for Health Policy at Massachusetts General Hospital. The findings, published in the July 14 issue of the Journal of the
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