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When does Elsie, the Borden cow, go from being an icon to being a Big Mac? When do children and adults decide which animals are pets, and which are eligible to be eaten? A new study suggests these decisions begin when we are tweens.

Who hasn’t done it? Twisted an Oreo in two and then enjoyed the creamy filling before eating the wafer (with dunking in milk, optional). Why, for the most part, does the filling always remain on just one wafer? A new study in the Physics of Fluids addresses this hugely important issue.

In my experience, orthopedic surgeons are the most fanatical of all surgeons regarding infection prevention. It makes sense since much of their work involves implanting hardware into bones – and an infection in a bone, let alone in the presence of hardware, is very tough to eradicate. So, when a new study looks at orthopedic thought on infection prevention, it is worth considering.

A non-profit seeks to disrupt the way we finance scientific research
Before it was the Big Apple, it was the Big Oyster
Eating monkey brains, what could go wrong?
There is no such thing as junk food.

There is a structure to how we have organized care. Primary care physicians care for our day-to-day and chronic illnesses while helping us navigate the landscape to find specialists and hospital care when that is needed. They are our Sherpas – knowledgeable of the landscape and its pitfalls and nuances. You wouldn’t attempt to climb Everest without them. Ultimately, because a rope connects you, you must trust them with your life. While that may be a bit dramatic an analogy for a primary care physician, that rope, that trust, is built from many smaller, lower risk encounters. A consistent health Sherpa results in better care.

My wife is an excellent cook, and I am a fair sous chef, not quite as devoted as Paul Childs, [1] but persistent and helpful. I always rinse chicken as I take it from its packaging; my wife always tells me that she and the CDC do not recommend that practice. A new study brings physics and bacteriology to the issue, alas, not in my favor – but it offers me some science-informed compromise.

Remember the 1983 movie, War Games, in which a teen played by Matthew Broderick hacked into a military computer system? He was asked, “Shall we play a game?” and he responded, “Sure, how about thermonuclear war.” Well, Twitter has gamified conversation and turned discourse into a different kind of “thermonuclear” war, without the missiles.

Caviar, especially from Beluga sturgeon, is an acquired and expensive taste. With changing geopolitics, would it surprise you that China now produces a third of the global supply? Much of that supply is farm-raised, 500-fold more than wild-caught.

Academic collaborators with industry?
Lawyers and Courts practicing medicine?
How to find a good doctor.
A hilarious take on TV’s medical ads.

Prediabetes is a cautionary warning, based upon a blood glucose or HbA1c, a marker of long-term glucose metabolism that signals if you might be at risk for developing diabetes. If prevention is indeed worth a pound of cure, prediabetes is the signal to make some changes. A new study looked at how Johns Hopkins, #8 in US News and World Report’s listing of hospitals for endocrine care, is heeding that signal.

The pressure for medical treatment for COVID generated lots and lots of studies. Some good, some awful, few peer-reviewed before being widely and wildly disseminated. A new study looks at how we might separate the good from the bad and ugly.

Good genes and a good diet should spare most of us from developing Type II diabetes. The popular nutritional thought suggests that it is predominantly a bad diet, perhaps woven with a genetic “propensity” that gets the rest of us in trouble. A new observational study pulls at the threads of that argument.

We’ve all been there: Searching online for something to buy, deciding not to, and then having the item stalk us as we move from site to site. (It doesn’t even disappear if we purchase it.) Advertising tracking has been accepted as the price for a “free” Internet, but a new study shows that ad tracking from Big Pharma is alive and well in medical journals. We shouldn’t be surprised.

For the once pretty, vivacious young women in their late teens and early twenties awaiting marriage and children, sickened as they lip, dip, and painted radium onto watch dials the statute of limitations was a major obstacle to their legal claims. In Part II of our story, we look at their legal struggle.

“Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose,” wrote Gertrude Stein. Others often quote this as a statement of identity. Likewise, in algebra, the law of identity is the equation ‘a = a’. What is true in botanical and mathematical terms also applies to chemistry. Whether extracted from corn or honey created by bees, glucose is glucose, and fructose is fructose.

Once pretty, vivacious young women in their late teens and early twenties awaiting marriage and children, one by one, they sickened. On X-ray, their bones looked moth-eaten; their teeth fell out, leaving pockets of pus– every dental effort to treat them caused more tooth loss. Eventually, their jawbones broke or splintered in their mouths, or they suffered cancerous sarcomas of their limbs, requiring amputation. Their spines crumbled, their legs shortened, so they painfully limped. For years no one could determine what ailed them. They were the “Radium Girls.”

These days we’re awash in mask mandate conflicts, continuing vaccination resistance, and warnings that the wholesale disruptions to our lives “ain’t over yet.” While the media tends to focus on administrative conflicts as well as the slight, local, daily up and downticks, here we present a longer and broader view.

In order to preserve their "independence," a growing cadre of medical journals is refusing to publish any research conducted by vaping-industry scientists. It's a policy marred by hypocrisy that will exclude good science from the peer-reviewed literature.

There is no doubt that remote care, virtual care, has come into its own during the pandemic. It seems equally clear that it is not going away but will find a niche in our healthcare landscape. Big businesses, especially private equity investors, see this shift in the landscape as an opportunity and are being led to the promised land of a large return on investments by consultants. What are those “thought-leaders” telling those investors will be the future? Does the term “smoke and mirrors” ring any bells?

If you read only one thing this week please consider the hypocrisy over the ban on mentholated cigarettes. We are made of stardust, and our energy within might mean we are made of music. Once upon a time, Barnes and Noble was a predator; nowadays, has it become a benefactor? The Scream, not the picture, but the sound?

A Boston Globe article describes COVID-19 patients completing a course of Paxlovid – and then becoming ill again shortly thereafter. Is there something wrong with the drug? Is this something to worry about?

Just over a year ago I wrote about the Biden Administration’s plan to ban menthol. As Dr. Janet Woodcock, the acting FDA commissioner stated [1], “Banning menthol—the last allowable flavor—in cigarettes and banning all flavors in cigars will help save lives, particularly among those disproportionately affected by these deadly products.” A new study suggests that her statement with respect to those disproportionately affected is wrong. Let’s see what a new study concludes.

Over the past few months more healthcare articles have featured a new (at least for me) statistical methodology: mediation analysis. It doesn’t prove causality, but it can assign a value to the impact of a variable on an outcome. More usefully, it can help suggest what factors we can leverage using public health measures, regulation, or legislation.

Adam and Eve were commanded not to eat of the tree of knowledge, lest “in the day thou eatest thereof, thou shalt surely die.” [1]
Adam and Eve did not die - not then, anyway. But now, with knowledge generated by whole genome sequencing comes proposed attempts to create the “perfect child.” Should that day come, I suggest, it would be the death of humanity.  

Chef Julia Child may have chortled “wash that bird,” but for years food safety experts have been pushing back against that practice. Before cooking, washing raw poultry was thought to contaminate the sink and nearby food contact surfaces with “chicken juice” and any pathogens it might contain. A recent observational study conducted by North Carolina State University has pointed to a more significant source of cross-contamination: your hands.