This week, a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association received a lot of undeserved media attention. The study wanted to examine the relationship between exercise and long-term weight changes among women who were eating a normal diet (i.e. not dieting). It followed for over a decade 34,000 women who were 45 years old or older and correlated their self-reported physical activity and body weight.
The study found that on average, the women gained about 6 lb during...
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More Match Day Misery
… or, If We Beg, Will You Go Into Primary Care?
What if tomorrow 30% of the nation’s plumbers disappeared? Perhaps they vanish due some fantastic science fiction experiment gone horribly wrong. What would happen? Would a national plumber group call for making plumbing a more attractive profession? Would there be a cry for greater federal plumbing subsidies to draw more people from other fields into plumbing?
No. (Or at least, I hope not.) In the short term, there would be a terrible shor...
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Are Bisphosphonates to Blame for Baffling Bone Breaks?
This week ABC World News aired a story about a possible side effect of osteoporosis medications. The family of medications involved in this story is called bisphosphonates and includes Fosamax, Actonel and Boniva. These medications have been proven to prevent fractures in patients with osteoporosis (very low bone density). Apparently, some doctors had noticed the occurrence of an unusual kind of fracture, a break in the thigh bone between the hip and the knee, in some women who had been takin...
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American Cancer Society Revises its Guidelines for Prostate Cancer Screening
About a year ago I reviewed the controversies of prostate cancer screening, especially the conundrum that we still don’t know whether finding prostate cancer early saves any lives. I concluded by citing the US Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) recommendations that the evidence is insufficient to recommend for or against screening for prostate cancer in men age 50 to 75. The USPSTF recommends against screening men older than 75 as the evidence suggests that harms outweigh...
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