If stodgy medical journals ever hyped themselves, last week's New England Journal of Medicine could have been hyped as the special weight-loss surgery issue.  It featured two studies that examined the effects of weight-loss surgery...

Two weeks ago I warned you about excessive sun exposure.  Ironically, this week I'm warning you about a consequence of insufficient sun exposure. A recent article in the New England Journal of Medicine exposes a very common and under-diagnose...

In our germ-phobic culture antimicrobial soap, once only used in hospitals, has become very popular in households.  This issue of the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases contains a study which reviews the literature comparing antimicrobial soaps versus plain soap.  The...

With the long days of summer upon us, many of us are hitting the beaches and getting suntans.  Southern California is obsessed with both beauty and health, and tanning sits at the intersection of the two.  Suntans have become symbols of status, health and beauty. But why?  There are certainly no health benefits to tanning, and many health risks.  Dermatologists have been warning us for over a gen...

I know I just wrote about the common cold two weeks ago, but I don't make the news, I just report it. This week the news is about zinc.  A study in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases reviewed all the studies in the medi...

I wrote back in January about the large numbers of studies that are publicized in the media that doctors and patients are better off ignoring.  I usually try not to give these studies any attention, but this week a study got so much media coverage that I felt I had to tell you all to ignore it. More

The Cochrane Reviews are systematic rigorous reviews of the medical literature on medical therapies.  Because of the objective and comprehensive methods they use for finding all relevant studies and categorizing them by quality, they are regarded as one of the gospels of evidence based medicine. Recently the Cochrane Reviews published

This week another dietary supplement moves from the "not proven to have any benefits" column to the "potentially harmful" column.  A study in the Annals of Internal Medicine which was reported in

This week's New England Journal of Medicine published a study funded by Boeing which has received much media attention, including this Washington Post article. The study sought to reveal the eff...

Dr. David Gratzer is a psychiatrist who has worked both in Canada and in the United States.  His first book, Code Blue: Reviving Canada's Health Care System, was an award-winning prescription for the long waits and poor satisfaction currently plaguing Canadian patients.  In his current book...