A family of osteoporosis medications called bisphosphonates (which include Fosamax, Actonel, and others) is known to cause irritation of the esophagus. These medications have been prescribed millions of times. There are a few reports of patients developing cancer of the esophagus while taking these medicines. Obviously, many more people who develop esophageal cancer have never taken bisphosphona...

In 2006 Massachusetts passed sweeping health care reform which provided for insurance coverage for nearly all of its residents. In 2010 the Affordable Care Act (ACA) was passed at the ...

Three years ago I wrote a post alarmed that measles was on the rise in the US. Little did I know then that this was only going to get worse. This week the CDC released data in its Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report and in a ...

Why wouldn’t you want an EKG every year as part of your check up? Why would you not want to be screened for prostate cancer at the age of 80 (or maybe at any age)? Why should you decline the annual chest X ray that your doctor keeps ordering? Is it because you’r...

About 20 million Americans currently have type 2 diabetes, three times more than in 1980. Diabetes is a major risk factor for stroke and heart attack, is the leading cause of new cases of blindness, and is the largest cause of the need for dialysis. Diabetes is also usually progressive, meaning that on the same medications and on the same diet and exercise regimen, the blood sugar of a patient wit...

Let’s imagine that we had a hunch that lighting incense at midnight contributes to weight loss, and we wanted to test that hunch. How would we do that? We would recruit lots of overweight adults and (with their permission) randomly assign them into two groups. The first group would receive a wakeup call every night at midnight and would then light some incense. The second group would still recei...

"Red meat is not bad for you. Now blue-green meat, that's bad for you!” -- Tommy Smothers

I generally try to avoid writing about meaningless studies that should be ignored. First, there are a lot of them. Second, I don’t want to attract more attention to them than they already get in the media. But sometimes a meaningless study seems to perfectly confirm what ...

In 2010 I predicted that Clostridium difficile (C. dif.) would become a household name. C. dif. is a bacterium that infects the colon causing severe, sometimes life-threatening, diarrhea. C. dif. infection is frequently a complication of antibiotic use. Antibiotics can kill the normal bacteri...

“Doctor, I really want to stay healthy and I just got a big promotion/had a baby/had a grandchild, so I really don’t want to end up with some horrible illness. Please test me for everything.” Primary care doctors hear requests like this all the time. It’s an impossible request to fulfill because it assumes two premises that are usually false. It assumes that we have a test for all illnesses, and ...

Our old nemesis, the clap, is in the news again this month. Gonorrhea is the second most common sexually transmitted disease in the US, with more than 600,000 cases annually. In men it usually causes pain on urination, penile discharge, or sore throat. In women it may not cause symptoms or may cause painful urination, vaginal discharge, or sore throat. If untreated, gonorrhea can spread to the ...