A paper recently published in the Journal of the American Medical Association has gotten a lot of press. From a prominent story in The New York Times to a cover story in Newsweek, print and web publication were filled with the news that the latest study of antidepressants… Read full post »

What's going on in California? Why has the maternal mortality rate risen so sharply?

Nathanael Johnson, of California Watch, broke the story yesterday:

The mortality rate of California women who die from causes directly related to pregnancy has nearly tripled in the past decade, promp… Read full post »

 Evidently for lactivists there is no problem so great that it can’t be solved by throwing breast milk at it. Looking at the horrific recent earthquake in Haiti you and I might see death, injury, homelessness and the threat of disease. Lactivists saw a breastfeeding problem… Read full post »

I am eagerly awaiting the new “right to life” campaign aimed at high school girls, tentative slogan: “Sleep with your boyfriend, get pregnant, stop breast cancer!”

Well, truth be told, I don’t really know if that’s going to be their next campaig… Read full post »

 Surprise! It’s Alaska, home of that stalwart supporter of abstinence only education, Sarah Palin, and her daughter Bristol, a teen who became pregnant outside of marriage. That startling bit of information is was included in CDC statistics that formed the basis for a new… Read full post »

Imagine if we did a study on triple bypass heart surgery and divided patients into three groups. The first group contains people who have no heart trouble and don't have surgery. The second group contains people who have no heart trouble but have surgery anyway. The third group… Read full post »

It's not often that you find scary stories in scientific journals, but a new paper in the journal Microbiology offers a scary story indeed. Effect of subinhibitory concentrations of chloride on the competitiveness of Pseudomonas aeruginosa grown in continuous culture d… Read full post »

At first glance, the graph above appears to represent an indictment of contemporary obstetric practice. From 1970-1980, the C-section rate rose precipitously, and the neonatal mortality rate also dropped precipitously. Since then, the C-section rate has continued to rise ever faster,… Read full post »

The hallmark of homeopathy is the belief that tiny doses of medicinal substances have big effects. It's like insisting that the less salt you put in water, the more salty the water will taste. In other words, it defies common sense, is scientifically unfounded, and has been thoroughl… Read full post »

Proponents of "alternative" medicine often disagree profoundly on treatment methods. Sick? In pain? Try this homeopathic remedy that contains no active ingredients. Stick needles into acupressure points. Wear magnetic foot pads to pull the toxins out of your body.

But on one point all… Read full post »

It’s official. America hates fat people.

Human beings are constantly searching for socially sanctioned reasons to feel superior to others and in 2009, those who are thin feel mighty superior to those who are not. How else could a college dare to make body mass index… Read full post »

Every year, for lack of timely screening and treatment, hundreds of women will die of breast cancer. No, I’m not talking about the change in mammography screening guidelines for women aged 40-49. I’m talking about women of any age who will not have access to mammography o… Read full post »

There has been much righteous indignation expressed in response to the new US Preventive Services Task Force changes that no longer recommend routine mammograms for women aged 40-49. The indignation takes two basic forms. The first is the assertion that it is worth any amount of mone… Read full post »

When I heard about the US Preventive Services Task Force mammography recommendations issued on November 16, I had two thoughts. The first was that these recommendations are old, not new, but people keep ignoring them for political reasons. The second was that the Republicans would ex… Read full post »

Americans, particularly American women, are shocked, bewildered and angered over the change in mammography guidelines. Many emphasize that it is changes like these that foster distrust in the medical system and lead people to seek alternative practitioners. That’s unfortunate b… Read full post »

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) Consensus Development Conference on Breast Cancer Screening for Women Aged 40-49 … concluded that data on the benefits and risks of screening mammography for women aged 40 through 49 are sufficiently mixed that informed decision making… Read full post »

What would you think if the package insert for your new medication said the following?

Our company, Drugs4All has tested this medication in 20,000 people and collected copious data about its effects. But we made a promise to Drugs4All shareholders that we will not let… Read full post »

Everyone has heard about women faking orgasm, but most people assume that men would never do so, and that it is impossible in any case.

A new study in the Journal of Sex Research aims to over turn the conventional wisdom. Men’s and Women’s Reports of… Read full post »

President Obama believes that the primary goal of healthcare reform is to provide access to the millions of Americans who currently have no health insurance. Dr. Andrew Weil, writing in the Huffington Post (The Wrong Diagnosis), thinks he knows better, as the title of his article imp… Read full post »

Believers in pseudoscience appear to suffer from a free floating fear. What unites vaccine rejectionsists, organic food devotees, and consumers of “alternative” health? They are united by a pervasive fear of being poisoned. And not poisoned accidentally, either. They are… Read full post »

This is embarrassing.

My state is home to the mother church of Christian Science, officially Church of Science, Christ. In what must be considered one of the more bizarre examples of political pork, my state’s Senators, the late Ted Kennedy and John Kerry,… Read full post »

The new CDC report on infant mortality, Behind International Rankings of Infant Mortality: How the United States Compares with Europe, is an object example of how to deceive with statistics. It purports to be a detailed investigation of infant mortality, but it inexplicably fails to… Read full post »

It sounds like a horror story made up by an anti-abortion group, but it is not. Neocutis, a Swiss “cosmeceutical,” is being marketed as a “Bio-restorative Skin Cream with PSP™” for “sensitive, stressed and irritated skin.” PSP are processed s… Read full post »

Vaccine rejectionism, like most of “alternative” health finds its adherents among those who know very little immunology, virology or statistics. There’s no solution for that besides education in those disciplines. But there is another aspect to vaccine rejecti… Read full post »

What does it mean to be educated in a particular discipline? Whether that discipline is architecture, anthropology, or law, being educated generally means years of study, thousands of hours of experience, and intimate acquaintance with the specialist literature.

Medicine is like that,… Read full post »