When we need a physician or a specialist we increasingly turn to our family, friends and even the Internet. But cost and convenience -- not medical competence -- are usually the most important factors in the decision-making process.
Disease
Prince Andrew, who currently occupies the hot seat for at least two dubious associations, sheds some light on a relatively unknown disease: anhidrosis, the inability to sweat. Let's take a look at that physical condition. (Whether you believe him is another story.)
A healthy lifestyle and a few inexpensive medications are as good as expensive surgery or stents in treating chronic heart disease. Translating this study to the real world is going to be tough because many patients prefer not to alter their lifestyle. No one minds the pills, but stents just seem simpler than changing how one lives.
Loneliness, as compared to solitude, resulted in a 2-to-3 fold increase in one-year mortality. For social creatures like us, loneliness can detrimentally affect our health.
The mainstream media would have us believe that vaping, especially among our children, is the gateway to smoking tobacco. A new study suggests otherwise.
Genome-wide association studies are a means of identifying genes associated with traits or diseases. For those who didn't graduate college lately, here's a guide to how they work, what they find, and their limitations.
Human physiology is complex. Homeostasis tells us that our physiologic responses maintain us within a specific range. Fractal physiology tells us that, over time, our responses become less responsive. And those changes can be seen years before clinical disease is apparent.
Why do microbes kill some people but not others? This is one of the hardest questions to answer in medical microbiology. Here's what we know about the senator's tragic death from the rare tickborne virus.
When medicine is practiced as a team, who gets to be the quarterback? For diabetes and heart disease cardiologists believe they are the logical choice. Primary care physicians, oddly enough, disagree.
Big Data can find patterns in our behavior that may be too subtle or occur over too long a period for us to notice. Those patterns are used every day to encourage more consumption, but it seems they might also help us identify dementia before it comes to our family's or medical attention.
Influenza, commonly known as the flu, is more than a bad cold. Seasonal outbreaks cause not only tremendous misery but huge numbers of hospital admissions and fatalities. Although the "holy grail" – a universal flu vaccine that recognizes all strains, including newly-arising ones – is not yet available, this does not mean that you should not get the seasonal vaccine. You should, and soon.
Is leptospirosis, an infection from a bacterium that's transmitted through contact with urine, on the rise among dogs in Utah and Colorado, as headlines declare? Possibly. Maybe an optional leptospirosis shot for the pooch isn't a bad idea.