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Maia Szalavitz's terrifying article in Wired, which described the cruel laws and punitive regulations that pain patients are forced to abide by, brought to mind hundreds of similarly tragic comments I've been reading for years. These can be found following any of my ~100 articles about pain, opioid denial, or government malfeasance and ineptitude. Here are a few.

Energy fuels our growth and maintenance. How exactly that changes, and the relative contributions of exercise and metabolism over time, is difficult to ascertain. A new study provides some answers. It is both dynamic and, as is often the case, nuanced.

The creative class, the elites and the bobos, deep concentrated work, death and evolution, shopping, and of course, COVID-19

After a short gestation period, COVID-19 vaccines arrived throughout the nation and became part of the daily scene. Questions about which vaccine to get have diminished replaced with concerns about who is getting shots and who is not. Here is what the latest statistics tell us.

The pandemic chaos continues...

Always eager to win friends and influence people, The Conversation recently published an article claiming that people who refuse to get COVID shots are selfish and un-American. This is not how you convert vaccine skeptics.

Dr. Jeff Singer of the Cato Institute, and also a member of the ACSH Board of Scientific Advisors was invited to participate in a panel discussion on ending the opioid crisis. Here is a description of the event and a link to a YouTube video of the discussion.

On February 9, 2001, the Ehime Maru, a Japanese trawler off Diamond Head in Hawaii, was rammed and subsequently sank by the USS Greeneville with the loss of nine lives. The Naval Court of Inquiry found the captain responsible. What does any of this have to do with COVID-19, let alone swiss cheese? Let’s start with the findings of the naval inquiry that will get us to the cheese.

According to a recently released study by the Environmental Working Group (EWG): “Wireless radiation exposure for children should be hundreds of times lower than current federal limits.” It recommends stricter, lower exposure limits for all radio frequency sources, especially for children. Is there a reason for concern?

Stuart Little aside, laboratory animals aren’t people. And – yes – I know that this is pretty obvious to most of us, but it needs to be said. This is one limitation in studying the effects of…well…anything on rats and mice and applying the results to humans.

To a physicist, every moment of every day is filled with radiation.

Last week with little fanfare, the Environmental Working Group released its latest “report” on the putative harmful effects of cellphone radiation. Right from the start, it features two eye-catching words, "radiation" and "children."

Roughly 70% of Americans have gotten or plan to get vaccinated – a percentage that has not changed since June. The public remains divided between those that fear the virus and its consequences and those who fear the vaccination.

June and July saw substantial changes in the progression of the COVID-19 pandemic, essentially reflecting the competition between relief from vaccination and the spread of the more contagious delta variant of the virus. These changes varied by time and place; here we seek perspective by examining temporal trends in six regions of the US [1]

Is there *nothing* so offensive and juvenile that it's off-limits, even to me? Maybe not.

Masks offer some protection against COVID-19 infection, but not nearly as much as the authorized vaccines. By telling the public they have to continue masking after immunization, we all but guarantee skeptics will forgo both shots and masks.

I've been following (and writing about) Antibe Therapeutics' otenaproxesul, an atypical NSAID without the GI toxicity of Aleve or Advil, since early 2020. It's been nothing but good news. Until now. Otenaproxesul caused a substantial jump in liver enzymes in some clinical trial participants. Can the company overcome this? Wall Street sure doesn't think so.

Studies investigating serious side effects associated with the COVID-19 vaccines are beginning to give us a better sense of how safe the shots are. Despite what you may see on Twitter, the evidence continues to show that vaccination poses minimal risk to the vast majority of people.

Viral evolution, school lunch, soil science, and life on Mars.

EPIC is arguably THE electronic health record system in the US with the most significant market share (56% of all patient records). Countless millions of federal money have passed into their corporate coffers during our transition to digital record keeping. Artificial intelligence, which is more sizzle than steak, at least medical care has been held out as a grail where the data held in electronic health records could be fashioned to improve medical care. A study from JAMA updates us on that particular marriage.

A new study from the Journal of the American Medical Association tells us what anyone with two functioning brain cells already knows: When patients on long-term opioid therapy have their meds tapered, bad things happen. Here are the details.

Despite relatively high vaccine uptake, New York City is about to enact mandatory shots for all residents before they can visit indoor restaurants, gyms and entertainment centers. This is unhelpful at best and counterproductive at worst.

Writing for the Reason Foundation, Jacob James Rich and Robert Capodilupo tell us what we already know – that Prescription Drug Monitoring Programs (PDMPs) may have had a purpose when first initiated but that time has passed. Now the programs, which are intrusive and possibly a HIPAA violation, serve only to drive up black-market drug use.

As the Delta variant becomes THE primary source of COVID-19 infections there’s a growing body of knowledge to explain why this is happening. Let's consider two new studies and a fact we may have forgotten.

Three well-known anti-GMO groups have attacked the New York Times for publishing a generally excellent story about crop biotechnology. Natural News, for example, called the article "pure propaganda masquerading as journalism." Unsurprisingly, Natural News is wrong.