We here at the council enjoy debunking health fads. We especially enjoy debunking — in both print and video — weight loss fads. In fact, just last week I debunked one of the hottest trends in weight loss: body wraps. I don't know why this is, but something about selling unrealistic goals to vulnerable consumers for financial gain that only benefits the person at the top of the pyramid scheme really irks me. 

Glutathione (GSH), a combination of three amino acids made by the body, had become a fad for skin bleaching. While it is a potent antioxidant, GSH supplements or injectables have not been widely tested or approved for skin lightening. And for anyone interested in using GSH for that purpose, we can only warn that the injectable form should not be given by unqualified individuals.

Over the past few decades, there's been a significant increase in the incidence of thyroid cancer throughout the world. The countries with the highest prevalence had two common denominators: improved access to diagnostic tests (ultrasounds, CT scans, and MRIs) and routine cancer surveillance.

The MINDACT trial results suggest that women with a certain genetic profile would have a good chance of survival and cure regardless of chemotherapy, but it's not so simple.

The first in a series of articles about all of the weird things that people put in places in their body, which then get stuck there. In short, decisions that make absolutely no sense.

Bariatric, or weight loss, surgery works. A severely obese person might lose 50 percent of his or her excess body fat in the first year after such surgery. One question that has lingered for decades is: How long do such effects last? Another is: Do people gain back the weight that they've lost and, if so, how quickly does that happen?

Over the course of the past few weeks Mylan has replaced Turing and Valeant as the most scrutinized and critiqued pharmaceutical companies in the United States. Though politicians and pundits have claimed the problem is Big Pharma, the issue of price-gouging is far more pervasive among generic drugs.

We know you hate guessing games so lets' get right to the answer. An alarming 58 eight countries or territories currently have active Zika transmission. And those do not include those countries where someone brought it back home after becoming infected on a trip. Here's the breakdown.

One of the few places one might expect to find a soaring rate of gonorrhea infection is the piously conservative state of Utah. But, new CDC data shows that the incidence of gonorrhea is up over 400% in merely three years, from 2011 to 2014.

Researchers in Pittsburgh studying the effectiveness of email say that the electronic process is rife with miscommunication, exchanges between parties often have a difficult time conveying feelings properly, and most interestingly that emails among friends are no more effective than those between total strangers.