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The social determinants of health (SDOH) include your economic, family, and community stability, the neighborhood and built environment, your educational attainment, your access to healthcare, and its quality. Several studies have looked at disparities in care and care outcomes and have found that while only 3% might be due to your neighborhood or built environment, 47% was due to socioeconomic factors. Your health behavior accounted for 34%, and the remaining 16% was related to healthcare itself.

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Armando Simón, a retired psychologist, attempted to rebut an article of mine that criticized Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo for his dangerous, anti-vaccine, anti-mask views and policies. Although Simón is entitled to his opinions, he is not entitled to fabricate his own facts, which he did repeatedly. Many of them are demonstrably false:

O He said, for example, that “COVID shots are not true vaccines in that they do not contain inert pathogens as is usually the case, but involve a novel treatment using mRNA.” In fact,...

Before jumping in, here's a quick reminder: Prevalence is the number of individuals with a condition in some defined population, e.g., 2 out of 100, and is often expressed as a percentage, 2%. The dataset comes from the National Survey of Drug Use and Health, which began asking about an individual’s history of cancer in 2015. All individuals 18 or older who self-reported a solid organ cancer (not blood-borne like leukemia) were included, and the diagnosis of substance use disorder (SUD) was based on self-reported behavior during the previous year. The researcher identified 6101 adult cancer survivors.

61% were female, and 57% were aged 65 years or older. Because cancers vary with age and gender, the results were weighted to account for different numbers of each type of solid...

The study, conducted across 29 academic medical centers, looked at patients who were transferred to the ICU or had died 24 hours or later after hospitalization for a medical illness. The 24-hour delay was meant to eliminate those where there was not an opportunity for medical error – those not placed in the ICU due to occupancy issues and who were so ill on admission that death was more probable than not. Restricting the patients to those admitted for medical conditions eliminated patients undergoing elective surgery who might have died from operative complications. The researchers looked at 487,532 hospitalizations in calendar year 2019. 5% or 24,591 patients died or were transferred to the ICU during their hospitalization. Random selection identified approximately 100 individuals...

This protocol has worked well for some pollutants, for which concentrations are now well within standards:

  • carbon monoxide (CO)
  • sulfur dioxide (SO2)
  • lead (Pb)

However, ozone (O3), nitrogen dioxide NO2), and particulate matter (PM) are different.

  • Ozone is not emitted directly but is formed by chemical reactions in the atmosphere, often far downwind.
  • Any combustion process can produce NO2 at sufficiently high temperatures.
  • PM is defined solely by particle size and can have any chemical composition, including combustion products, pet dander, floor sweeping, or the personal “clouds” around individuals.

Each of us operates and controls our personal sources of NO2...

Having come from the pharmaceutical world, I tend to be on the supportive side of the industry because I spent more than 20 years finding out how insanely difficult it is to get a drug from the earliest stages (drug discovery) to the pharmacy shelf. Based on statistics that I estimated more than a decade ago, a chemist who has worked in drug discovery for 20 years will have about a 5% chance of ever coming up with something that will be on the market (1)

Although I despise prescription drug TV ads, it would be wrong to dismiss the extraordinary accomplishments that have come from the industry resulting in game-changing (and life-saving) therapies. These include HIV/AIDS, hepatitis C, certain cancers, and more recently obesity, a breakthrough that my colleague...

We treat sports Gambling differently because the State is addicted to the revenue and ignores the cost.

“Since 2018, when the Supreme Court struck down the federal ban on sports betting, 38 states (including DC)  have legalized the practice in some form. Twenty-six states allow sports gambling through sports apps, and five more have serious proposals circulating in their state legislatures. It’s a $280 billion marketplace that’s generating massive tax windfalls for the state legislatures that legalize it.”

Of course, there is more to the tale. From Matthew Yglesias’s Slow Boring, The sports gambling industry needs reform...

Autism is a neurological disorder typically diagnosed in childhood. It affects social interaction, including communication and learning, often manifesting in repetitive behaviors. Because of the significant variability in symptomatic expression, it is called Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). No one knows precisely what causes it, and through its tortured history (the name was first coined in 1911, and the diagnosis reformulated in the 1960s), it has been a disease in search of a...

I discussed the main ingredient in many of these medications, phenylephrine, a medication that has been around for a quarter of a century but whose approval as an effective therapeutic is equally as old and not the current state of the art. Modern tests and trials indicate that it is not effective.

Lars specifically mentioned using DayQuil, which contains phenylephrine, and feeling relief within 15 minutes. I suggest that this could be attributed to psychosomatic or placebo effects, which are well known.  I explained the phenomena of the placebo effect and what might be thought of as its mirror image, the nocebo effect, where individuals may experience adverse reactions to inert substances simply because they believe they should.

Lars asked what people should do if these...

Join host Cameron English, Dr. Chuck Dinerstein and Dr. Josh Bloom as they break down these stories on Episode 59 of the Science Dispatch podcast:

Plug-in electric vehicles (PEV) running solely on electricity are the cornerstone of the effort to reduce vehicular emissions. Prediction of electrical use and environmental benefit base their calculations on vehicle miles traveled (VMT), assuming that the number of miles driven with electrics is the same as those by conventional fossil-fueled vehicles (CV). A new study questions that assumption.

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