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 misleading or meaningless. (I'm not complaining. That's a consequence of having a free press, and it's muc...
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Some Food Additives Increase Hyperactivity in Children
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 twentieth century, so they provide a prime suspect for diseases that have worsened during that time....
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Surgery for Weight Loss May Save Lives
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 on mortality, and More
Vitamin D Deficiency is Common and Dangerous
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-diagnosed problem, vitamin D deficiency. This has become a bigger problem as our activities have moved incr...
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Antimicrobial Soap no Better than Plain
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 results of the study was reported in many media articles, including More
Good Day, Sunshine!
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 generation that sun exposure increases our risk of melanoma, the most dangerous form of skin cancer. I...
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Zinc Unproven in Treating Common Cold
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 medical literature on the efficacy of zinc for the common cold. The study attracted some coverage in th...
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More Studies to Ignore
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.
This study in the journal Circulation
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Vitamin C Can Prevent the Common Cold in Extreme Conditions
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 review of the medical literature on vitamin C for the prevention and treatment of ...
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Sorrowful About Selenium
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 CNN article is the largest study yet to look at the effects of selenium on the dev...
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