As the L.A. Times health blog reports, the Food and Drug Administration recently issued a warning advising consumers not to use “ear candles”—fabric that is soaked in either paraffin or beeswax, set on fire and deliberately placed in the ear. These candles, which allow wax to drip into the ear canal (if you don’t set your hair on fire
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Closing the societal gender gap is a noble goal, but there is at least one area where women shouldn’t be striving to outdo men: drunk driving. While, in keeping with historic trends, overall men are still more likely to get into deadly alcohol-related accidents than women, a new study published in the journal Injury Prevention suggests
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Vaccines have dramatically impacted global health: by 1979, international vaccination campaigns had successfully led to the eradication of smallpox, which was once estimated to kill as many as 30% of people infected. And since the launch of the World Health Organization’s polio eradication campaign in 1988, widespread vaccination has
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In the last three decades, chronic health problems including obesity, asthma and behavioral and learning problems have been steadily increasing among children. To get a hold of the magnitude of the problem, researchers from MassGeneral Hospital for Children analyzed data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth-Child Cohort,
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Medical TV shows may often be overly melodramatic, but many of the health emergencies they depict do happen in real life. (That is, perhaps, with a notable exception of preventing a bomb from exploding inside a patient’s abdomen, eh hem, Grey’s Anatomy.) And, as a result, when it comes to learning the basics about how to cope should a
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Holding on to the belief that children will shed their “baby fat” as they get older may be perpetuating the childhood obesity epidemic, and laying a foundation for obesity later in life among overweight tots. According to 2006 data from the Centers for Disease Control, 16% of American children were obese, and 32% overweight, with a
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While some of the staples of eating healthy are pretty easy to remember—eating balanced meals that include veggies, protein and starch, and eating lots of fiber, not too much sugar and not too much fat—sometimes keeping track of all of the little ways that diet can influence our health can be a challenge. Yet, if there’s one thing
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Drawing on previous research suggesting that stuttering might have genetic origins, a new study published in the New England Journal of Medicine may have identified precisely which genes cause stuttering in certain people. Stuttering, the disorder characterized by repetition, delay and interruptions in speech, impacts an estimated 1% of
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In response to First Lady Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move initiative to combat childhood obesity, the American Beverage Association (AmeriBev) announced this week that it will voluntarily add calorie counts to the front of soda cans, bottles, vending machines and soda fountains to better enable consumers to make informed choices. AmeriBev,
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Adding Asperger’s syndrome to the autism spectrum, eliminating the terms “substance abuse” and “dependence” in favor of “addiction and related disorders,” introducing the condition “hypersexual disorder” and introducing an assessment of mental illness based on severity are among the proposed changes for the new edition of the Diagnostic
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Hospital gowns may be functional, but they aren’t exactly cute. After all, while easy access to important body parts may be crucial to medical care, padding around the ward with your backside hanging out doesn’t exactly boost anyone’s confidence. To address the shortcomings of the much-abused medical garb, the U.K.’s Department of Health
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A moving public service announcement from the Sussex Safer Roads Partnership in the U.K. has quickly become a viral phenomenon—with views in at least 89 countries and a Facebook group of 1,500 members and counting. The “Embrace Life” ad was launched on January 20, and added to YouTube on January 29, where it’s since been seen nearly
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Women who give birth after age 40 face a higher risk of having an autistic child, regardless of the father’s age, according to a comprehensive study of all births in the state of California in the 1990s. Researchers from the University of California, Davis, found that a woman who gave birth after age 40 was 50% more likely to have an
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