PET scan showing distribution of brown fat in a human subject

Here we go again…

Scientists at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute have discovered that exercise stimulates the production of a hormone that turns white fat into brown, promoting fat loss/… Read full post »

The turtles constitute the Order Chelonia, which is generally believed to be the sister group of all other living reptiles. The oldest undisputed stem-group turtle, Odonotochelys semitestacea, appears in the fossil record some 220 million years ago.

 The name li… Read full post »

The past year has not been a good one for the manufacturers of psychotropic drugs, and the assault continues. The January 29 edition of the New York Times features an essay by L. Alan Sroufe, Professor Emeritus at the Institute for Child Development of the Univer/… Read full post »

“Ankasa” literally means “don’t talk.” Legend has it that once upon a time, travelers crossing the bridge spanning what is now known as the Ankasa River were admonished to keep quiet, lest they might attract the attention of malevolent dwarves,… Read full post »

 I just found out I'm going to be expected to teach not one but two new courses this semester (sure glad they  didn't wait until the last minute to tell me). Plus I still have a stack of 240 exams to grade. Until I get a handle on all this,… Read full post »

TeenScreen, a program sponsored by the National Center for Mental Health Checkups of Columbia University, offers “free tools and materials to health care, educational and community-based professionals to screen for depression and mental illness in adolescents.” Their website… Read full post »

A series of articles in the Palm Beach Post has revealed that children in the custody of the Florida juvenile justice system are being prescribed massive doses of powerful antipsychotic drugs, often by doctors with questionable records and/or financial conflicts of interest/… Read full post »

For a bizarre real-life tale of medical cruelty, it’s hard to beat the sad sordid story of Luckner Cambronne. He rose from humble beginnings to head the hated Tontons Macoutes, or the secret police of Haiti, becoming second in power only to the hated Papa Doc Duvalier… Read full post »

 

Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America by Robert Whitaker 

The shock waves continue to reverberate from author Robert Whitaker’s explosive work of non-fiction. The book (along with The Emperor’s Ne… Read full post »

Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America by Robert Whitaker

Good Gawd, are they STILL peddling that tired old fable that psych meds are “just like insulin for diabetes?”

In a wo… Read full post »

No doubt many people have dreamed of a treatment that would effortlessly melt the fat away. It’s not here yet, but a paper published this week in Science Translational Medicine describes efforts to develop just that.

Scientists at the University of Texas M.D.… Read full post »

Here’s an article in the New England Journal of Medicine that describes the effects of weight loss on levels of various hormones that affect body weight. The authors expressed the hope that the results would shed light on why people who lose weight typically have so m/… Read full post »

Blood Feud: The Man Who Blew the Whistle On One of the Deadliest Prescription Drugs Ever by Kathleen Sharp

The very first page of this book begins with the prose equivalent of a clean right to the jaw: a graphic account of the bloody death of cancer patient… Read full post »

 Here’s an article in the New York Times about efforts to develop a vaccine against obesity.

Doctor Kim Janda of the Scripps Research Institute has devoted the last twenty-five years to efforts to developing vaccines for substance abuse and overeating. The vaccine agai/… Read full post »

Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America by Robert Whitaker

An epidemic is raging in the United States of America, an epidemic of crippling and sometimes deadly disease. The disease is bipolar disorder,… Read full post »

Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America by Robert Whitaker

Author Robert Whitaker reviews the history of the condition once known as hyperactivity, then as Attention-Deficit Disorder or ADD, and now as Attent… Read full post »

Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America by Robert Whitaker

Click Here to read Part 1 of this post.

By the 1970’s, psychiatry was facing a crisis of identity which threatened… Read full post »

Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America by Robert Whitaker

When I was a teenager, my best friend’s mother told me that, owing to her long-term addiction to Valium, there were ten years of her life… Read full post »

Here’s an article in the Los Angeles Times that describes one woman’s campaign to rid fast-food playgrounds of germs.

Erin Carr-Jordan, a developmental psychologist and mother of four, has visited playgrounds at McDonald’s, Burger King, Chuck E. Ch… Read full post »

The NGO sponsoring me in Ghana recently flew me to Phoenix for their annual conference, and they gave us Sunday morning off, so I took the opportunity to visit nearby Echo Canyon Park.

I departed the hotel at exactly 9:00 AM. I knew from a Google Maps… Read full post »

“The thalidomide disaster of the 1950's will pale by comparison to the dramatic rise and fall of the statin industry.” -- Stephanie Seneff, MIT Senior Research Scientist and author of How statins work explains why they really don’t work.

That’… Read full post »

The crocodiles, along with their cousins the alligators, the caimans, and the gharials, constitute the Order Crocodilia. Although the crocodilians have always been grouped in the Class Reptilia, they are in fact closer related to birds than to any other living group of rept… Read full post »

Last year brought some bad news for the manufacturers of so-called “antidepressant” drugs. Doctor Irving Kirsch’s book, The Emperor’s New Drugs, forcefully called attention to the fact that the drug companies’ own data – the data the… Read full post »

In a previous post, I described how Pfizer dragged its feet in reporting to the FDA suicides associated with the use of it stop-smoking drug, Chantix. But in fairness, I suppose I should point out that not everybody who takes Chantix kills himself.

Sometimes they ki… Read full post »

Coming on the heels of revelations that Pfizer dragged its feet in reporting suicides associated with its stop-smoking drug, Chantix, is an FDA advisory linking the drug with an increase in heart attacks in patients with stable cardiovascular disease.

The rate of heart at… Read full post »