On December 1, 2008, Lorain County Sherriff’s deputies stormed the home of John and Jacqueline Stowers of LaGrange, Ohio, where they run a natural foods co-op called the Manna Storehouse, which distributes locally produced food, including grass-fed beef and lamb, free-range chicken, or… Read full post »

(N.B.: My thoughts on these matters have been influenced greatly by C.S. Lewis’s essay, “On Vivisection.”

I used to think the animal-rights advocates were the biggest idiots on God’s green earth. How, I used to wonder, can anybody be against “saving lives?… Read full post »

Commentators like to opine that we are a “thinness-obsessed society.” They couldn’t be more wrong. A short walk down almost any crowded street in America will reveal the truth: we are a fatness-obsessed society. Americans are fatter than any other major nation in the w… Read full post »

According to this story in the Baltimore Sun, on the 25th of February of this year, police stormed the home of Andrew Leonard, a 33-year-old chemist residing in Medfield, a leafy neighborhood in north Baltimore. Leonard and his wife were watching television and relaxing after attending… Read full post »

In a sane society, the absurdity of “screening” for depression would immediately be apparent. You mean, you don’t know how you feel? And if you really don’t know, doesn’t that mean you need to spend some time in open and honest consultation with yourself?

Nevert… Read full post »

(Don’t worry – I won’t subject you to the requisite pun about “designer genes.”)

The Fertility Institute of Los Angeles will begin offering parents the opportunity to select the physical characteristics of their children. Using a technique called Pre-impla… Read full post »

Lately, for no particular reason, I’ve found myself in odd moments thinking about my Grampa – Thomas Aloysius “Hap” Coburn of Manasquan, New Jersey.

He actually wasn’t a blood relative of ours. Both of my grandfathers died before I was born. Tom Coburn ma… Read full post »

According to this article in the Chicago Tribune, the makers of Ocean Spray Cranberry Juice Cocktail have replaced the high-fructose corn syrup in their product with sucrose, or table sugar. Ocean Spray is the latest in a long list of giant corporations which have made the switch, incl… Read full post »

Our Daily Meds: How the Pharmaceutical Companies Transformed Themselves Into Slick Marketing Machines and Hooked the Nation on Prescription Drugs by Melody Peterson

The pharmaceutical industry is out of control. Soaring prices threaten to bankrupt us, both individually and as a society. A mu… Read full post »

None of my four jobs provides health insurance. Recently I purchased at my own expense a policy with a $10,000 deductible (not a typo) which I suspect will turn out to be like an umbrella that folds up as soon as it starts to rain, should I ever actually need… Read full post »

Poker players call it the “tell” – a subtle, nonverbal signal that your opponent is holding a really good hand – or a really bad one. Recently, the health care industry dropped its poker face just long enough to let us all know just how lousy the hand they’re hol… Read full post »

Here’s an article BMJ about a study which followed every single patient listed for a heart transplant in Germany in 1997. The study found NO DIFFERENCE IN SURVIVAL RATES between those who actually received a heart transplant and those who didn’t.

Why wasn’t this front… Read full post »

The controversy over the risks and benefits of cancer screening has been given renewed impetus with the publication of a letter to the editor of the Times of London concerning breast cancer screening. Since this letter is not available online to non-subscribers, it is worth quoting at s… Read full post »

“Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”

 Those simple words, which constitute the opening line of Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food could revolutionize the way we eat. Pollan’s book is a manifesto against the modern Western Diet and its companion ideolog… Read full post »

 America’s Health Insurance Plans, a lobbying organization for the health insurance industry, has blasted President Obama’s proposal to create a government-run insurance program to compete with private insurers. In a press release, the organization stated that “A govern… Read full post »

Click here to see Part 1 of this post.

Enjoying the sort of adulation usually reserved for rock stars, Michael Pollan., author of In Defense of Food spoke to a standing-room-only crowd of about 900 last night at the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore.

Pollan elaborated… Read full post »

Well, I’m outta here. It’s been fun. They say every academic’s secret desire is to write freelance magazine articles, and I figured this blog would be a good place to start. I don’t imagine J.K. Rowling is losing any sleep over me, but I’m gratified that every o… Read full post »

Imagine a society in which the drug lords enjoy crab imperial, champagne, expensive cigars, and accommodating women -- while in jail. Actually, if you are a US citizen, you don’t have to imagine it – you already live in it.

According to this article in the Baltimore Sun, federal… Read full post »

According to this article in the Baltimore Sun, Maryland lawmakers and CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield have introduced a proposal to force uninsured state residents to shell out $3,000 apiece every year for health insurance, whether they want to or not. Residents who refused to pony up w… Read full post »

 Tonight I went to the Towson University Center for the Arts, where Senator Ben Cardin of Maryland was holding a town meeting on the subject of health care reform. Don’t ask me what the Hell happened at the meeting, because the didn’t let me or about 1,000 other people… Read full post »

 Just before I left for Africa for the first time, my mother told me the story about how she came to be an atheist. Her father had been born in the old country in 1891. He left home at the age of eleven (people grew up faster in those days)… Read full post »

It is my contention that medicine has become the modern-day substitute for religion.

With the loss of the belief in an afterlife, people have pinned their hopes for life everlasting on the medical profession. And, like true believers of all stripes, they tend to get upset when you… Read full post »

The message is clear: socialized medicine kills.

At least, that’s the inference the writer of this Associated Press article obviously wants us to draw: “More serious problems in Britain's health care were reported last month, when cancer researchers announced that as many as… Read full post »

Reading this article in Discover magazine about life extension made me think of my Uncle Walter, simply because he was the absolute antithesis of the ideas presented therein.

Uncle Walter married my mother’s sister, my Aunt Nancy, when I was a little boy. He had grown up amid… Read full post »

When I was a boy, we actually had a kindly old family doctor, straight out of Central Casting. I still remember him fondly – tall, thin, white-haired, gentle-voiced, Henry Heller, M.D., General Practitioner.

He took a year off from his practice to go to Viet Nam. When he re… Read full post »