Three months ago I wrote about carotid artery narrowing, which is one of a number of causes of stroke. There are currently two alternative treatments for severe carotid artery narrowing: surgery, called endarterectomy, to open the artery, and a newer procedure called carotid artery stenting. (Read my previous post, link below, for some background about these procedures and their role in stroke prevention.)
Thus far, carotid artery stenting has not been shown to be as safe as endarterectomy. ...
More
A Brief History of Unnatural Selection
Indulge me as I digress from writing about health this week to write about an important scientific breakthrough.
People have been altering the living things around us as long as we have been around. We domesticated wild wolves into tame dogs and kept them for protection and as pets. Eventually humans began to farm, and raise livestock. We then began selecting the best animals to breed for the next generation, and we selected seeds from the best plants to sow. Generation after generation, we...
More
Maybe You Have Food Allergies, But Probably Not
A lot of people who believe they have food allergies don’t. What’s worse, a lot of people who were told by their doctor they have food allergies don’t.
An article in the current issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association tried to review the existing literature on food allergies to standardize how food allergies are diagnosed. What the study found was an inconsistent jumble of unreliable test results and methods.
First, to clear up some of the confusion, we have to understand th...
More
Zostavax is Safe, Effective, and Not Free
Varicella zoster virus (VZV) is the virus that causes chicken pox, usually a relatively minor childhood illness. Unlike other viruses that are cleared from our bodies after infection, VZV stays in our sensory nerve cells forever. Over the subsequent decades our immunity to VZV wanes. When our immunity falls too low, VZV can reactivate and cause shingles. Shingles is a painful blistering rash along the distribution of one sensory nerve. The rash resolves in a few weeks, but in some older pat...
More