In November I wrote about preliminary data from the National Lung Screening Trial, a large study funded by the National Cancer Institute that attempted to find out if catching lung cancer early with spiral CT scans made a difference. (See link 1 below for my November post.) Last week, the New England Journal of Medicine published the trial results (2) and an accompanying editorial (3). The study ...

For almost any category of product or service you can think of, a huge variety of price and quality is available. From clothes to food to transportation we can all think of lousy but inexpensive choices that we wouldn’t like and incredibly luxurious choices that we can’t afford. For almost all of us somewhere in the middle there are choices that are both pleasing and affordable. That doesn’t mean ...

... or Technology Phobia Can Be Fatal [This post is perfectly safe for work, but may not be safe for lunch, as it mentions poop more frequently than you may find appetizing.] This post is an update about the E. coli food poisoning outbreak in Germany that I posted about two weeks ago (link 1 below). If you didn’t read that post, please do, as it explains some important terms like hemoly...

What’s the difference between a medication’s intended effect and its side effects? Is there some physiologic difference between the beneficial effects of a medicine and the annoying or even toxic things that it does? Not really. All medications have lots of different effects on the body. The intended effect is simply the one that the patient (or doctor) hopes to achieve. The rest of the effects ar...

Since May Germany has been plagued with a particularly nasty outbreak of food poisoning. There have been almost 3,000 people who have become sick so far and 27 deaths, with a small number of cases in other countries. The bacterium causing the outbreak has been identified, but the name of the bacterium is so convoluted that it needs explaining. The outbreak is caused by shiga toxin-producing E...