Posts:
By Alice Callahan Fifty years ago this summer, Melanie Dreher, a registered nurse and young graduate student in anthropology, landed in rural Jamaica to study how people there were using cannabis. It was the same summer of the moon landing and Woodstock, where...
Body Temperature. Have you ever wondered how 98.6° Fahrenheit or 37° Centigrade became “normal” body temperature? In the 1850s, a German physician named Carl Wunderlich collected data on 25,000 patients, taking their temperature multiple times. Wunderlich was the...
By Susan Burke March The Journal of Wild Mushrooming is a fascinating resource for all things mushrooms. They say there are 10,000 described species in North American alone, but that may represent only a third to a fifth of what’s really out there! In percentages, 50%...
Ouch! Not again! Canker sores are such a painful bother — bad ones can interfere with your ability to eat, and even compromise your health. Wouldn’t it be great if you never had to deal with one again? Canker sores are small, shallow lesions that develop on the soft...
There are too many nutrition myths to count, but some persist! Certainly the internet contributes to the gobs of misinformation and “theories” that abound, each week there’s a post about an “amazing” or “natural” cure that sounds legitimate, but is not. Let’s look at...
By Erin Blakemore Amy Martin’s 3-year-old twins were sick yet again — and the Anacortes, Wash., mom was fed up. “We were just getting cold after cold,” she says. Her solution: Dietary supplements. She searched online for ideas, then picked up a bottle of elderberry...
Editor’s note: As published in CuencaHighLife.com on September 2, Ecuador is the world’s top banana exporter, and there are more than 7,000 growers and 2.5 million jobs dependent on a healthy crop. By Steven Savage, Ph.D. As I wrote for Forbes in 2018, we might lose...
Author's Note: As I update this column (which originally ran on March 15, 2018) I'm even more concerned about e-cigarettes than I was a year and a half ago. CBS News reported last week that about 20 percent of U.S. kids are vaping, some as young as 8th grade; A study...
Susan's note: I admit it, I'm a National Public Radio fan. I take an hour-long walk in the morning and listen to podcasts of NPR shows I've missed. Yesterday I listened to an interview with Dr. Jen Gunter, a Canadian-American obstetrician-gynecologist, a specialist in...
In November of 2018, an outbreak of measles in in the Orthodox Jewish community in the Williamsburg and Borough Park neighborhoods in Brooklyn, New York foretold the beginning of an epidemic. Throughout the remainder of the year health ministers of countries including...
By Amy Gorin You hear about calories all the time. But what are they really? A calorie is technically the amount of energy required to raise the temperature of one gram of water 1°C, per Merriam-Webster. Confused? No worries. In plain speak, calories provide energy in...
One of the reasons many of us fail at weight loss is that we try to use a short-term approach to solve a long-term problem. We secretly believe we can begin a diet, lose weight and then resume all our old bad habits. Weight management is a lifestyle challenge that can...
The Ancient Egyptians are said to have first developed toothpaste made from ashes, eggshells, pumice and water. The Greeks and Romans added crushed bones and oyster shells. And as reported in Huffpost.com, “the very essence of early tooth care was “abrasion,” and it...
Could the foods you eat help determine when you start menopause? They might, says a study published in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health. Researchers found that women who ate more fish and beans and other legumes started menopause at a later age, while...
By Ted Kyle Brush your teeth, wash your hands, take a shower. These are all good, healthy ways to clean up. Dietary cleansing and detox rituals? Not so much. So it’s surprising to see the Washington Post making itself a platform to promote a pseudoscience sugar detox...
By B.J. Miller As a hospice and palliative medicine physician, my job is to help reduce suffering. At the end of life, that job becomes especially intense when time is short, when machines and data seem to be taking over, and so many intense emotions surround a body...
If you’ve had an infection that required you to take antibiotics, you may have suffered diarrhea, a common side effect. After all, antibiotics eliminate the bad bacteria, but also ‘good’ bacteria, which scientists say cause an imbalance that may lead to gastric...
According to MayoClinic.org, detoxification (detox) diets are popular, but there is little evidence that they eliminate toxins from your body. But, evidence never stopped hoaxers from marketing products as “amazing”, and “miraculous,” and it appears there is a growing...
Women who have high levels of the antibacterial agent triclosan in their urine have worse bone health than other women, new research indicates. Triclosan, which was recently banned in hand sanitizers, is used in a variety of "consumer goods and personal care products...
By Jacqueline Howard Is coffee safe or risky for your heart? Two recent studies appear to contradict each other on this question, which often leaves coffee-lovers scratching their heads. A study presented at the British Cardiovascular Society conference in June 2019...
