I recently got an email from a gentleman who told me I was wrong about many things because I “come from an era of incomplete medical education and information.” He rambled on but had two main points: modern doctors fail to recognize a kind of allergy that defies standard diagnosis and that is the cause
Depression can kill. Antidepressants can help. A meme that continues to appear regularly in the media and in the comments section of this blog is “antidepressants are no better than placebo.” It is a false belief based on a faulty interpretation of the evidence. A new study has just come out that should put
Flowers of the bloodroot plant, Sanguinaria canadensis. You’re welcome, I could have used a very different image (warning: gross bordering on horrifying). I first wrote about escharotic treatment for cervical dysplasia in 2015. A caustic substance is applied to the cervix. This produces an uncontrolled chemical burn and the dead tissue sloughs off, hopefully taking
Instead of a new post this week I decided to recycle and revise what I wrote about Answering Our Critics a few years ago, here and here. I thought it was time to visit this issue again, because our critics didn’t get the message. They are still flooding the comments section with the same
Patients with heartburn are often diagnosed with GERD (gastroesophageal reflux disease) and treated with a drug called a proton pump inhibitor (PPI) to reduce stomach acid production. It is pretty effective, but it doesn’t always work. When it doesn’t, standard practice has been to double the dose of PPI. Doubling the dose only improves symptoms
The Puritan’s Pride website has a Vitamin Advisor that claims to provide a personalized supplement plan, with expert recommendations chosen just for you. In my opinion it is deceptive, designed not to provide evidence-based personalized health advice, but to sell their products; and one can only wonder what kind of “experts” would support such ill-advised recommendations. Stephen
One of our regular commenters forwarded to me an email that had slipped by her spam filters. It was from MyMedLab, whose slogan is “Lab Tests the Easy Way.” It starts out: What is glyphosate? Glyphosate was patented as an antibiotic Glyphosate kills bacteria in the soil The same bacteria exists in our gut
I like to read. I read a lot. I am retired and have time to read. And I like to tell others about the books I have read. (My teachers made me write a lot of book reports in high school and I guess the habit stuck.) As a result, I seem to have
Mark Hyman has a new series of 8 documentaries on The Broken Brain. He interviews over 50 “experts” carefully selected to agree with his ideas, with nary a word of dissent. He says we are experiencing an epidemic of broken brains, manifesting as anxiety, depression, ADHD, autism, Alzheimer’s, bipolar disorder, and a host of other
When margarine attacks! One of those alarmist emails has been circulating with fake news about margarine. A friend sent it to me and asked if there was any truth in it. There is a little bit, but not much! It is horribly misleading, and has even been debunked by Snopes. I’ll go over the email’s
