There’s arsenic in apple juice, and I just poured my daughter a big glass. Go ahead, call Child Protective Service...

My regular readers know I have a bit of an obsession with food-borne illness. Why? Because it’s such a difficult and old problem. (Obviously germs have been contaminating food and sickening animals long before people were around.) Modern sanitation and farming have made our food much safer, but occasional outbreaks remind us that our current methods are still imperfect. This week an outbreak of t...

Imagine that you manufacture and sell ottomans. You are very proud of the excellent ottomans that you make. You trained for many years at great expense to become an expert ottoman maker. But as your career progresses, you find yourself generally dissatisfied with how many ottomans you have to make every day to make a living, and you think that your ottomans are worth more than you’re getting paid ...

Atrial fibrillation is an irregular heart rhythm affecting about 3 million Americans. The most serious risk of atrial fibrillation is stroke, caused by a blood clot forming in the abnormally beating heart chambers and traveling to a blood vessel in the brain. For over 50 years the mainstay of atrial fibrillation treatment has been the anticoagulant warfarin (better known by the brand name Coumadin...

A child develops a fever of 104 ⁰F, cough, runny nose and red eyes. A few days later she develops a red bumpy itchy rash as in this photo. Any guesses as to the diagnosis? Many of us would be stumped, having never seen this disease. This is the classic presentation of measles, which prior to the development of the measles vaccine in the 1960s affected hundreds of thousands of U.S. children annua...

Ah, the magical serenity of mid-August! Students face the new school year with dread, parents face the new...

Chronic constipation affects about one in six people in the U.S. and is a problem that primary care doctors hear about very frequently. Symptoms include infrequent bowel movements, hard stools, straining, abdominal bloating and discomfort, and a sense of incomplete evacuation. It’s not a dangerous problem, but it causes plenty of misery for lots of people. Though doctors have a few remedies for ch...

[Lunch warning: Parts of this post are kind of gross. If you’re reading this over a meal, you have been warned.] What a depressing week. The debt ceiling debate postponed all difficult decisions, second quarter economic growth was revised so low that you need to squint to see it, and yesterday the stock mark...

… or “Read this mammogram, HAL.” “I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that.” I went to college in the late 1980s, at perhaps the peak of optimism about computer intelligence. Personal computers had just become available and there was a general expectation that computers would soon be driving our cars, accepting our commands in spoken English, and generally doing everything better than humans c...

We’ve all heard of the power of the placebo effect – the benefit from receiving an inactive medication or a phony simulated treatment. But how do placebos work? Do they improve objective measures of disease? Do they improve the patient’s subjective symptoms? Do they do both? A cleverly designed study in last week’s New England Journal of Medicine (link 1 below) answers that question. The investig...