Despite many encouraging advances in the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of heart disease, heart attacks remain the largest cause of death in the US.  Many of those heart attacks happen suddenly and cause a life-threatening abnormal heart rhythm called ventricular fibrillation.  Patients frequently suddenly collapse, and without prompt restoration of a normal heart rhythm, survival is unlikely...

Yesterday's LA Times health section had an important article about what to do in the event of a heart attack.  In the last decade our understanding and treatment of heart attacks has improved dramatically.  The best treatment for a heart attack is immediate angioplasty, a procedure that in...

Human growth hormone (HGH) has been receiving a lot of media attention recently because of the controversy of performance-enhancing drugs in baseball.  This made some researchers curious about how much evidence existed that HGH actually improves athletic performance.  They reviewed the scientific studies on HGH in an

I am constantly encouraging patients to exercise.  Usually, the motivation is physical health -- the patient's weight, or blood pressure, or cholesterol, or sugar is too high and exercise is the healthiest way to normalize it.  But I'm increasingly impressed by the ability of exercise to improve mental health.  Patients tell me all the time that their mood is better, their anxiety lower, and their...

Colon cancer is a leading cause of cancer death in the US, second only to lung cancer.  Fortunately, there are effective tests that can diagnose colon cancer early, or even prevent colon cancer while it is still a pre-cancerous polyp.  Given that this is one of the few cancers for which effective screening exists, I have been very enthusiastic about recommending colon cancer screening to all my pa...

I'm sorry to write about the same topic on two consecutive weeks, but this really deserves the attention.  Last week I wrote about how we're still not past the peak of this flu season and how the flu shot this year has been less effective, and I linked to a few authoritative web sites that I thought would be useful. This week, allow...

The recent news about this flu season has all been bad.  As reported in this Reuters article, the match between the strains in this year's flu vaccine and the strains that are actually making people sick in North America are not as close as in previous years, meaning the flu vaccine this year is giving pa...

Last month BusinessWeek had a fascinating article about cholesterol-lowering medications.  The article also teaches us how we should calculate a specific medication's benefit and harm, and how pharmaceutical companies manipulate our opinions by reporting benefits in percentages but side effects in a...

This week we learned something very important about diabetes.  We learned that we don't know something we thought we knew.  (Regular readers will note that this keeps happening in medicine.  For a generation everyone assumes something.  Then we check and discover it isn't so.) We've always assumed that in type 2 diabetes, the closer to normal that blood sugar is lowered the fewer complications of...

The scientific evidence for treatment of obesity is trending in a very interesting direction.  For years a safe and effective medication for weight loss has been sought, with only modest results.  (I wrote about orlistat, the medication in Xenical and Alli, a year ago.)  Surprisingly, for obese patients evidence is increasingly mounti...