… or, An Angioplasty Also Won’t Make You Taller Over a million coronary angioplasties are performed in the US each year.  In this procedure a thin tube is threaded into a narrowed coronary artery.  Through this tube a balloon is inflated to open the narrowed artery, and then a stent (a metal mesh tube) is placed to keep the newly expanded artery open. Some large well-designed studies in the last...

This summer a Salmonella outbreak traced to contaminated eggs has sickened over 1,000 people and led to the recall of over 500 million eggs. Eggs are particularly susceptible to Salmonella contamination.  The outsides of egg shells can be contaminated by bacteria if they come into contact with chicken droppings or with dirt.  That’s why you should discard cracked or dirty eggs. ...

I’ve written before about how the error rate in the practice of medicine is far greater than that in other industries.  I’m not talking about when doctors make a difficult decision that in retrospect was wrong; I’m talking about just plain mistakes, such as when one medication is ordered but another is dispensed or when the dose dispensed is 10 times greater than what was what was intended because...

Summertime, and the livin’ is uneasy Stocks are slumpin’ Unemployment is high

(with apologies to George Gershwin)

Reminders of the end of summer are upon us.  Kids are returning to school.  Rain covers are thrown over backyard grills.  Flu vaccines are arriving in doctor offices.

This season’s influen...

What sort of diet helps people lose more weight?  Do overweight people lose more weight on a low-carbohydrate diet (like Atkins) or on a low-fat diet (like Weight Watchers and others)? A carefully designed study published in the current issue of the Annals of Internal Medicine answers that question.  The study enrolled over 300 obese adults and randomized them to a low-carbohydrate diet or a low-...

This week I discovered how painful it can be to change a habit.  Not because it means admitting I was doing the wrong thing, but because it means analyzing how feeble my reasons were for the habit in the first place. Ever since I started practice I’ve been recommending calcium supplements to post-menopausal women.  Why?  Mostly out of habit.  There’s not a shred of evidence that calcium supplemen...

My regular readers are a sharp bunch, so you probably already know that cardiac arrest – the cessation of a pulse and of blood circulation – is very very bad for you.  Most doctors don’t recommend it.  Nevertheless, hundreds of thousands in the U.S. every year suffer cardiac arrest outside of a hospital, frequently due to a heart attack.  Cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) was developed 50 years ...

Before I review this week’s study, bear with me while I clear up some terms. Type 1 diabetes mellitus and type 2 diabetes mellitus are completely different diseases.  That they have such similar names and are differentiated only by a “type” promotes the common misunderstanding that they are subtypes of the same disease.  They should just have different names to keep things clear.  (I suggest “Geo...

Obesity is an increasingly prevalent problem in developed countries, and a safe and effective medication for weight loss is eagerly sought.  Most weight loss medications have been plagued by serious side effects. Fenfluramine, a medication used with phentermine in the popular “fen-phen” combination in the 1990s, was found to cause serious heart valve abnormalities and was withdrawn from the marke...

This week the American Cancer Society published its annual review of cancer statistics and trends.  This year the big picture was overwhelmingly positive. The three most frequently diagnosed cancers in men are prostate cancer, lung cancer, and colorectal cancer (in that order).  For women the top three are breast, lung and colorectal cancer.  (See the link below to Figure 1 in the study for detai...