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In the high-stakes arena of cancer drug development, SU212 was engineered as a safer twist on podophyllotoxin—a toxic killer designed to halt rogue cell division. Yet in a twist worthy of scientific serendipity, it veered off course, bypassing its intended target entirely and stumbling upon a superior mark. SU212 starves aggressive cancers, slashing growth with scant harm to healthy cells. This off-script pivot echoes drug history's happy accidents. Let's talk about how luck can lead to scientific breakthroughs.

A quiet policy proposal to shift America’s childhood vaccination schedule toward Denmark’s leaner schedule is on pause. Denmark’s “fewer jabs” is a context-driven strategy shaped by the Danes’ universal healthcare, different disease risks, and explicit trade-offs about severity, cost, and public acceptance. The real lesson for the US isn’t which shots to copy, but how to build a transparent process that earns trust by making those trade-offs visible.

You may have enjoyed a glass of the bubbly on New Year's Eve, but did you drink it from the right kind of glass?

As vaccine exemptions spread and courts are weaponized in the name of “medical freedom,” preventable childhood diseases are roaring back—with consequences states may even more loathe to implement than the “dreaded” jab.

You wake up on New Year’s Day, and all kinds of horrid things have been flying out of your mouth. Your head feels like it’s been in a stampede. What do you do? Tylenol? Maybe not.

What does science tell us about gluten sensitivity? Depending on whom you ask, it's either a heal scare advanced by social media grifters or a legitimate medical condition that afflicts many people. Let's take a closer look to separate fact from myth.

New York’s Medical Aid in Dying is often framed as compassion guided by medical expertise. But is the legislation prescribing a moral choice behind the mask of scientific certainty?

Flu season is hitting hard right now, thanks to this new variant called Subclade K—yeah, the one they're dubbing the "Super bug." It's basically taken over as the main strain in the US, spreading super fast with some sneaky mutations that dodge a bit of our usual immunity. It's legit, and this year's flu vaccine isn't providing the best protection against it.

Artificial sweeteners have long been cast as either miracle weight-loss allies or metabolic saboteurs — but the science is far less dramatic and far more nuanced. Non-sugar sweeteners have shaped diets worldwide, even as public confidence has begun to wobble. New data suggests they’re largely safe and may modestly support weight loss when paired with an overall healthier diet, but they’re no magic fix, just tools whose benefits depend entirely on how, and why, we use them.

Much has been written advising laypeople to navigate conflicting medical opinions and identify the golden truth amid the pervasive muck and mire. These questions also vex judges when evidence is presented in litigation seeking damages from allegedly related injuries. Although judges do not decide which of the competing positions is correct, they are, as the evidentiary “gatekeeper,” responsible for determining the soundness of the science presented and barring junk science from the courtroom. Once assessed, all sound evidence from both sides is presented to the jury for deliberation, essentially based on which witness they found most credible. Whether the decision is made by a judge or a jury, specific, albeit different, strategies are used to make these assessments.

I have tea coming out of my ears. Not literally of course. But the ears were the target.

The immune system’s first encounter with a virus or vaccine establishes a “starting template” that shapes its response to new variants, a phenomenon often called immune imprinting. A new study shows that protection isn’t about being vaccinated or infected—it’s about the sequence of those exposures, and how repeated boosters or infections can reshape the response over time.

Josh Axe is expanding his wellness empire, this time to include wellness training. The Health Institute is another money-making ploy pushing vibes, anecdotes, and Axe’s personal beliefs. The Health Institute sells confidence to those looking for a way to break into the wellness world, but as with most things in the Wellness World, The Health Institute" trades in the feeling of authority rather than the substance of it. 

Across four very different stories—Revolutionary-era smallpox, the still-mysterious ignition of the Black Death, a modern measles outbreak shaped by community identity and distrust, and the promise of genetics to build safer drugs—a single theme emerges: disease is never just biology. It is also environment, social structure, politics, and perception.

More than a decade ago, Addyi—marketed as the “female Viagra”—was approved amid political pressure, heavy lobbying, and a lot of hype. The problem then, as now, is simple: the drug barely works and causes enough side effects that many women stop taking it. Yet, in what can only be described as an FDA boner, the agency has expanded the indication to older women.

If Americans traded stocks using the kind of nonpublic information available to Congress, they’d face investigations, fines, and prison time. Yet lawmakers—especially those who rise into leadership—can legally buy and sell shares while shaping the very rules and contracts that move markets. Too often, the vote that’s “best for the American people” competes with what’s best for a member’s portfolio—a tension that recent economic research now helps quantify.

Does motion sickness turn you into a green, spewing mess? For plenty of people, the answer is yes. Current remedies may or may not help. But after 40 years, the first new motion-sickness drug has been approved. Ready to cross the Pacific in a laundry basket? Not so fast.

Fireplaces are cozy until it’s time to shovel out the ashes. Nuclear power has the same problem: abundant, reliable energy paired with a growing pile of difficult-to-discard spent fuel. But a new reactor design aims to “burn” part of that nuclear ash by turning certain spent fuel back into usable energy.

The Tuskegee syphilis study stands as one of the greatest moral failures in American medical history, a reminder of what happens when vulnerable people are treated as expendable in the name of research. The safeguards created in its aftermath were meant to ensure such abuses never happen again—but a new, CDC-funded study in West Africa raises disturbing questions about whether those lessons are being forgotten.

In a strange turn of events, The Lancet—one of the world's oldest medical journals—has taken a line you might expect to hear from Robert F. Kennedy Jr., declaring "ultra-processed" food a driver of chronic disease. Is there any evidence behind this association, or are we just dealing with academic snobs who can't appreciate the benefits of convenient, abundant food?

With highly potent and (sometimes) legal marijuana widely available across the US, emergency rooms are reporting an increase in Cannabis hyperemesis syndrome (CHS), an unpleasant condition characterized by screaming and vomiting—"scromiting" in the vernacular. The condition is yet more evidence that marijuana’s reputation as a low-risk drug is undeserved.

In 18th-century France, science was a men’s club, and women were expected to be ornaments. One aristocrat, the Marquise Émilie du Châtelet, quietly took on Isaac Newton, translating the Principia into French, correcting Newton’s mistakes, adding groundbreaking commentary, and shaping the idea of the conservation of energy. If you only know her as Voltaire’s lover, you’re missing the real story: she was one of the sharpest scientific minds of her age.

Dietary guidelines are never just scientific documents; they are also political and rhetorical ones. The new “Final Dietary Guidelines” read less like a neutral public health manual and more like an urgent manifesto about a food system gone off the rails. In this framing, “whole” becomes synonymous with trustworthy, while “processed” signals suspicion. That tonal shift—arguably as significant as any specific nutrient target—sets the stage for how the guidance will be interpreted, accepted, or resisted.

Alright folks, hot off the presses: the new US Dietary Guidelines for 2025–2030 just dropped, and I’ve got my very first thoughts, a hot take. Let’s raise some real questions.

Health chatbots are not popular because patients believe artificial intelligence is smarter than their doctors. They are popular because chatbots offer something rare: time, attention, and the feeling of being heard. Their success tells us far more about what patients are missing from modern medicine than about the power of AI itself.