The BMJ's Journal of Medical Ethics cited Dr. Dinerstein's analysis of how doctors actually spend their time in Ethical roadblock ahead: How healthcare is becoming quietly wrapped around Big Tech’s AI technologies, practices and systems. Nicole Gross’s September 23 piece argues that the live question is no longer whether AI “belongs” in clinics. The systems are already there in the form of scribes, schedulers and procurement platforms. They're rearranging who thinks first, who documents and who has to justify disagreeing with an opaque output. Dr. Dinerstein's article remains a useful baseline: even before generative tools arrived, interns already spent far more hours on indirect care and screens than on face-to-face medicine. If AI now eats the note-writing and then hands clinicians a first draft to police, the freed-up time does not automatically return to the bedside. It might just become a new kind of paperwork.
RealClearHealth (RCS) picked up Joe Schwarcz’s takedown of a pesticide-and-cancer claim that traveled around the internet in a hurry. RCS pointed readers to Schwarcz’s analysis of a Nature Medicine paper that tried to tie early-onset colorectal cancer to the herbicide picloram via DNA-methylation “fingerprints.” Early-onset colon cancer is a real epidemiologic puzzle. A methylation pattern that resembles an environmental-exposure signature is not the same thing as evidence that a particular weedkiller is driving the trend.
The same week, RealClearScience featured Dr. Dinerstein on the unadvertised costs of “happier” free-range hens in Free-range paradox: The high cost of happy chickens. Uncaging looks like an obvious welfare win until researchers tally feed, land, emissions, disease and mortality alongside the behavioral benefits. Housing changes sold as kindness can raise resource use and deaths. The egg carton never prints that trade-off.
Cameron English joined SacTown Talks to walk listeners through the Environmental Working Group’s Dirty Dozen. In the September 23 podcast episode Is the “Dirty Dozen” Misleading Parents? The Science Behind Your Produce, host Hector Barajas and English cover the toxicology that keeps getting lost in the headlines: detection is not dose, USDA residue monitoring routinely finds levels far below tolerances, and those tolerances already contain large safety margins. The scare still works, but the presence of a residue on a lab report is not evidence that conventional strawberries are a chemical hazard.
On the Health Policy Podcast, ACSH contributor and toxicologist Susan Goldhaber told Bryan Hyde that Washington State’s nonstick-cookware rules are running ahead of the evidence. Goldhaber, who spent a decade at EPA and now shares her expertise with our readers, explains why “forever chemicals” is a slogan, not a scientific definition. PFAS is a huge chemical family with very different persistence and toxicity. High-dose animal studies, which bear little resemblance to real-world exposure, do not automatically translate to actual risk, and the cancer evidence remains sparse. Washington pulled back from an outright cookware ban to a reporting rule after pushback over substitutes. California’s governor vetoed a similar ban. Goldhaber’s point is the one ACSH keeps making on chemical scares: lumping diverse compounds under one frightening nickname is a way to skip dose, route and evidence—you know, science.
