Many of my patients have come down with a nasty cold in the last two weeks – runny nose, cough, hoarseness, sore throat and the kind of fatigue that makes lifting your head off the pillow seem unnecessarily ambitious. And just in time the Annals of Internal Medicine published a study to give them valuable advice.
The effects of echinacea on the common cold have been studied many times previously, though never as rigorously as in this study. A definitive benefit has never been proven.
This st...
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Flu Incidence on the Rise
(Please excuse this short post during this short week. If you feel deprived of health education, I’ve listed some educational links for you below.)
You better watch out. The flu is coming to town, and it doesn’t care if you’ve been naughty or nice. It looks like flu season is starting later this year than usual, but both the CDC data and Google Flu Trends suggest that illnesses due to the flu are increasing nationwide.
The best way to protect yourself is with a flu shot. And if you do get ...
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NDM-1: No Drug Matters
My longtime readers know that I’m not one to panic when the media does. I wasn’t very worried about anthrax in the mail. I didn’t think swine flu was going to be a big deal. (See link below.) And I’m not concerned about the health effects of airport X-ray back-scatter machines.
But there’s plenty of stuff that worries me. Most of it is scary on time scales longer than the typical media attention span. What scares me is stuff that will hurt us decades from now. For example, I’m very worri...
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Animated about Aspirin
Aspirin was hailed as a wonder-drug in the 1800s when it was first purified – the first anti-inflammatory medication that did not have the severe side effects of steroids. More recently aspirin’s benefits in stroke and heart attack prevention have been proven. This week another possible benefit of aspirin has been uncovered.
An important study published in The Lancet attempted to find any effect of aspirin on cancer prevention. I’ve written frequently about the myriad substances that are fal...
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The Most Recent Celebrity Vitamin: D
Every now and then some vitamin or dietary supplement becomes all the rage. A couple of generations ago vitamin C was the miracle drug that could prevent all diseases, despite lots of evidence to the contrary. Lots of my patients still take it for colds, demonstrating its persistent mythology. Vitamin B12 became the wonder-drug a few decades ago, leading to a whole generation of patients getting monthly injections for reasons that remain scientifically mysterious. And many lesser stars can b...
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