Acute low back pain is a very common problem, so one would think that we would already know how to treat it optimally.  Sadly, we don't. A study in this week's Lancet raised serious doubts about two of the most common therapies sought out by patients with low back pain: non-steroi...

Methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) is a drug-resistant strain of Staph which has been getting a lot of media attention recently, having caused several serious infections in schools, especially in student athletes.  This search for MRSA in Google News reveals th...

Medical mistakes have been receiving a lot of attention in the last few years.  The number of patients injured due to medical mistakes, especially in hospitals, has caused pressure at every level of health care to reexamine how patients can be protected.  Many of these error prevention measures are technical -- computerized drug interaction checking, pharmacy algorithms to prevent dispensing medic...

Bell's palsy is a fairly common condition that causes the sudden paralysis of half of the face.  Effected people can't fully close the effected eye and have an asymmetric smile, since only one side of the mouth moves well.  The cause is unknown and has always assumed to be viral.  The symptoms slowly resolve over a few months. The accepted treatment has always been steroids and acyclovir (an anti...

The West of Scotland Study was a landmark in preventive medicine.  It was published in the early 1990s and was the first study to definitively show that statins (a family of cholesterol-lowering medicines) could prevent a first heart attack in people with high cholesterol.  It randomized over 6,000 middle-aged men with high cholesterol who had never had a heart attack to either pravastatin (Pravac...

At any given time thousands of people feel unwell and are dissatisfied with the diagnoses offered them by their doctors.  They struggle to understand their illness and frequently form patient groups for mutual support.  Every few years a new diagnosis captures their attention and becomes the latest vogue illness, usually without any scientific evidence.  Even worse, unscrupulous doctors latch on t...

A review in the current issue of The Lancet Infectious Diseases has caused quite a hubbub and generated much media coverage, including this Seattle Times article.  The review states...

This week's Annals of Internal Medicine has a very well designed study that examined the effect of exercise on patients with diabetes.  Previously sedentary diabetics were randomized to four groups:  one group was enrolled in an aerobic exercise program, a second group was enrolled in a resistance training prog...

My regular readers (both of them) have noticed that I spend almost as much time writing about new studies you should ignore as about new studies you should pay attention to.  That's because the media is driven by hype, not by sober science, and there's no incentive for an editor to get rid of a story just because the study is misleadi...

Food additives are ubiquitous in packaged foods, and they have been blamed for many health problems despite the lack of evidence one way or another.  It's easy to imagine patient groups or physicians noticing that their particular disease of interest is on the rise, whether asthma or breast cancer, and desperately searching for a cause.  Food additives entered the market in the second half of the ...