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It's time for another installment of the "Health Ranger Chronicles," where we critically examine the strange ideas promoted by Mike Adams' wildly popular website Natural News. This time we investigate a story about Monster Energy's "Satanic" plot to poison our children with sugar and caffeine.

Even before the time of COVID, urgent care centers (those in the trade call them docs in a box) were the go-to alternative to a long Emergency Department wait or having to see your primary care physician (PCP in the jargon) during your work hours, or in a week or so. I get it; your time is just as valuable as mine. But I wonder if something is lost in patients treating physicians as commodities and physicians treating patients as consumers. A new study looks at how the length of time seeing the same doctor influences your care.

All over the U.S. the lines for COVID testing often stretch around the block. You can wait an hour or two just to be tested, before learning that the results are not available when you need them. President Biden is going to send us all two home tests. But what are the science-guided recommendations? The New England Journal of Medicine provides a very reasonable answer, beginning with a simple picture.

One of our engaged readers raised a new JAMA study on surgical outcomes based on the genders of the surgeon and patient. According to the study, everyone does better with a female surgeon, although you can consider a male surgeon if you’re a male patient. Could this be true?

The risk management of raw cookie dough, the psychic and physical energy spent in engaging misery, Don’t look up, and the supply chain, quarterly profits, and too-just-in-time.

The 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) required large food chains to post the calories along with the prices for their food. According to the Center for Science in the Public Interest [1], this costs food chains roughly $45,000 each to create that information; producing the changes in menus is an additional cost. A new study shows what we got, calorie-wise, for all that fuss and bother. 

No, denial is not the name of a river in Egypt. It has, and still is, alive and well in many of our most contentious political and scientific concerns. But in order to combat denial, one must be aware of what’s in the denialist’s toolbox. Here are the hammers, screwdrivers, and saws used to construct the denialist platform.

Finally, there are antiviral drugs that will keep people with COVID out of the hospital (and the morgue). But, good luck getting a prescription if you should need it. The FDA has pretty much guaranteed that this will be almost impossible. Here's why.

Reporters and science communicators commonly point to widespread COVID misinformation to explain why so many people are skeptical of vaccines and other infection-control measures. Bad pandemic takes clearly influence the public, but there's much more to the story.

Another study has found that lotteries didn't boost COVID vaccine uptake last year. Here's a few reasons why these giveaways probably didn't work.

Yay! We have another variant. But this time, the scientists who isolated it named it after themselves. Shameless? I say yes.

Should we end anonymity on the Internet to bring civility back? The Great Barrington Declaration, Making a Deal with the Devil, a contrarian opinion on the value of a vegan diet.

Hospitals are noisy places. What with the alarms and the interruptions to take medications or check your blood pressure, pulse, or blood sugar. It is challenging for patients to get any real rest. Short of a medically induced coma, is there anything to be done? A new study offers up a possibility.

Hello, nut cases! Have I got a book for you. Comedy writer Dennis DiClaudio's  "The Hypochondriac's Pocket Guide to Horrible Diseases" is both repugnant and hilarious. Here are three (of many) diseases you don't want to catch. Not for the squeamish. Plus some science thrown in. No extra charge.

Are GM crops a tool of "neocolonialism"? The answer is "no." I joined Dr. Kevin Folta on episode 325 of the Talking Biotech Podcast to explain why.

We know that Omicron is more contagious than Delta. Those 30 mutations on the spike protein alter its activities in ways we are just uncovering. A new study suggests that those nasal swabs may be so last year.

We continue to be awash with COVID stories. But let us cut to the chase. How many annual COVID-19 deaths are the nation prepared to tolerate on a routine basis? Substantial public health efforts have been devoted to reducing these other causes of death; why should COVID be different? Reducing traffic accident deaths by mandating vehicle seat belts comes to mind, for which some 9000 lives were saved each year. How prepared are we to similarly enforce a comprehensive COVID-19 vaccination program?

There are chemistry teachers all over the U.S. that know this simple truth: chemistry matters in everyday life. Nothing demonstrates this principle more than when you look back at the lead water crisis in Flint, Michigan.

Marie Curie died of aplastic anemia, a disease brought on, in her case, by exposure to a large amount of radiation from both her laboratory work and from her work running field x-ray machines during the First World War. There was no surprise there, given the little known about radiation and its effects on our bodies when she did her early work. But it turns out that it’s not only Marie and Pierre Curie who were contaminated - even her notebooks are stored in a lead box.

As Omicron continues to infect its way across America, let us not forget its viral companion: influenza. How is that working out?

The published literature on COVID now exceeds 211,000 papers, books, and documents, which include: 22,866 observational studies, 19,591 reviews, 1496 meta-analyses and 781 randomized control trials. These publications comprise the backdrop for our research and writing. The project began in the spring of 2020 based on a limited source of cumulative COVID-19 data and has broadened considerably. Here is what we have learned.

I immigrated to the U.S. in February 2020, not knowing that going back home would not be easy. Two weeks later, international travel was banned due to an unpredicted outbreak of COVID-19, and I was trapped ...

Scientific American's descent from respected publication to ideological tabloid is nearly complete. The magazine is now promoting anti-GMO activism under the guise of "social justice."

All of a sudden we have two (provisionally) FDA-approved COVID antivirals, which will be in pharmacies soon. They are quite different. Which is best for you?

Two sources of immunity from infectious diseases are widely recognized: vaccination and immunity acquired naturally in survivors of previous infections. The latter may be involved in the roller-coaster up-and-down behavior seen in the progression of daily new COVID cases after the current pandemic began in early 2020. Cases increased as the virus spread throughout the nation, in part due to insufficient attention to limiting exposures, but what could account for subsequent decreases? We (and others) ascribe the long downward slide from the 2020-21 winter peak to the coincident national vaccination program. Here we set out to investigate possible contributions from infection-acquired immunity.