This week a group of researchers in the World Health Organization (WHO) released a study that caused a bit of a kerfuffle. The group, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), published a paper classifying processed meat as a carcinogen. What’s processed meat? According to the authors, it’s “meat that has been transformed through salting, curing, fermentation, smokin...

Last week every single physician across the country who bills insurance companies, every hospital, every diagnostic laboratory, every medical facility of any sort that bills Medicare or private insurers switched the set of codes they use to submit diagnosis information to insurance companies from the ninth International Classification of Diseases (ICD-9) to ICD-10. Why? Because the change was mandated by the federal government. So you might think that ICD-10 has clear advantages over ICD-9 t...