My regular readers know that prostate cancer screening has been an active research topic recently.  (My not-so-regular readers who are interested are invited to catch up on the topic by reading my most recent post on the subject.  See the link below.)  Whether testing men for prostate cancer saves lives is still an open question.  Large trials are currently underway that should provide a definitiv...

Doctors are expected not just to diagnose and treat diseases but to prevent disease by counseling patients about behaviors that expose them to risk.  We are expected to ask patients about smoking, alcohol use, high-risk sexual behavior, failure to use seatbelts and dancing on windowsills.  We are expected to counsel our patients to refrain from behaviors that may lead to injury or disease. “Mrs. ...

Everyone knows that caffeine is useful on occasion if we need to stay alert, especially when we’re sleepy.  Is there any college graduate who hasn’t had a caffeine-fueled all-night study session before an exam?  I certainly remember several nights in which I drank coffee to the point of inability to blink, much less sleep. But for those who drink a lot of coffee daily, how much of a boost in aler...

Three months ago I wrote about carotid artery narrowing, which is one of a number of causes of stroke.  There are currently two alternative treatments for severe carotid artery narrowing:  surgery, called endarterectomy, to open the artery, and a newer procedure called carotid artery stenting.  (Read my previous post, link below, for some background about these procedures and their role in stroke ...

Indulge me as I digress from writing about health this week to write about an important scientific breakthrough. People have been altering the living things around us as long as we have been around.  We domesticated wild wolves into tame dogs and kept them for protection and as pets.  Eventually humans began to farm, and raise livestock.  We then began selecting the best animals to breed for the ...

A lot of people who believe they have food allergies don’t.  What’s worse, a lot of people who were told by their doctor they have food allergies don’t. An article in the current issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association tried to review the existing literature on food allergies to standardize how food allergies are diagnosed.  What the study found was an inconsistent jumble of unre...

Varicella zoster virus (VZV) is the virus that causes chicken pox, usually a relatively minor childhood illness.  Unlike other viruses that are cleared from our bodies after infection, VZV stays in our sensory nerve cells forever.  Over the subsequent decades our immunity to VZV wanes.  When our immunity falls too low, VZV can reactivate and cause shingles.  Shingles is a painful blistering rash a...

My regular readers know my skepticism about vitamin supplements.  I leap at the chance to bring you news that some vitamin has been tested for some disease and found useless.  So for balance, I have to also report when a well-designed study finds that a vitamin actually helps something. This week’s New England Journal of medicine published a study about the treatment of nonalcoholic steatohepatit...

Two weeks ago I wrote a post about the mistake we make when we think of some medicine or food as generally “good for you” or “bad for you” as opposed to having specific benefits and harms.  I started with an anecdote in which a friend asked me whether diet sodas or regular sodas were better for you. Susan Dopart, a terrific dietitian who I...

In a world where journalism was free of hype the above headline would have been atop the many stories this week relating to a press release by the CDC about food-borne illness.  The numbers are far less sensational than the headlines. The CDC report reviewed statistics about food-borne illnesses in 2009.  Overall there were 17,468 laboratory-confirmed food-borne infections in 2009.  What the CDC ...