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What is precision medicine?
Precision medicine stands to be the future of healthcare. A future painted as delivering personalized medicine and targeted therapies, doing away with the one-size-fits-all approach and exploiting the root cause of a disease to find curative/therapeutic options. It’s a beautiful, grand concept, that the current medical and scientific world’s infrastructure is simply not prepared for to be more than a concept.

Gallup's recent poll on race relations asked a loaded question and lacked a control group. This is a recipe for very bad social science.

Perhaps the most debilitating part of breast cancer treatment is chemotherapy. A new report by an international team of researchers suggests a means of more precisely determining which patients do or do not require chemotherapy.

When I was still in school, the rule-of-thumb for the human microbiome was that bacteria outnumbered human cells 10-to-1. Not so, say the authors of a new PLoS Biology paper, who re-crunched the numbers. According to their estimate, the ratio is much closer to 1-to-1.

What explains such a rapid rise in price for a drug that has been off-patent for years?

The same product as last year, but now $600. Credit: Mylan

In a post on her website, Khloe Kardashian expresses her love for Vitamin E. And while the benefits of this antioxidant have been well established, she wrongly recommends its use for strengthening of the vaginal lining.

We've known for a while that excess body fat (as in overweight and obesity) can raise the risk not only of chronic diseases like diabetes, but also some types of cancer. A new report indicates that the number of types of cancer may be more than we have thought.

In 1972, the National Academy of Sciences asked me to investigate the persistence of Agent Orange and other defoliants used during the Vietnam War. For seven months, I walked in the chemical in my bare feet. Now at age 83, the bottom line is that I am a very healthy guinea pig after huge and nearly continuous exposure to herbicides.

Organic farming produces 20% fewer crops. An inefficient food production system is, by definition, not sustainable. The authors also underscore this point by noting that “if all US wheat production were grown organically, an additional 12.4 million hectares (30.6 million acres) would be needed to match 2014 production levels.” Extrapolate that out to the rest of the globe, and one can easily see how organic farming cannot feed the world.

We need a more scientific approach to funding scientific research. It won't be easy to evaluate short-term crises against long-term epidemics, but too many lives are at stake to shy away. Scientists have a key role to play in educating decision makers on risk and helping to get that balance right.

The nation's coastal waters are rising, and towns dating back centuries are at serious risk of being engulfed and disappearing completely. What should the U.S. be doing to address this cascading calamity? More engagement and continued dialogue with the Dutch, who are experts iin the field of flood prevention, might be a good place to start.

Brussels is now a destination for medical tourism. Unfamiliar with the term? According to the CDC , "medical tourism" refers to foreign travel for the purpose of receiving medical care. It's estimated that up to 750,000 US residents travel abroad for medical care each year....The most common procedures that people undergo on medical tourism trips include cosmetic surgery, dentistry, and heart surgery.”

The importance of protein for muscle-building and cell functions was discovered in the 1830's, but there is still some controversy regarding what's considered an ideal source of protein for overall health. A recent study in the Journal of American Medical Association directly compared animal protein with plant protein, and it produced some interesting results.

Sure, it would be great if there were one magical thing you could do to lose weight, without lifting a finger

Defining addiction isn't as easy as it seems.

Insulin-requiring diabetics may be able to toss their syringes in the not-too-distant future, if a new type of insulin-containing pill can conquer research hurdles. Packaging the hormone in a new type of lipid vesicle could protect it from breakdown by stomach acid and eliminate the need for frequent injections.

What does Facebook's algorithm say about me?

Our founder, Elizabeth Whelan, liked to remind us that "mice are not little men," and that we ought to stop banning chemicals "at the drop of a rat." Apparently, the head of the NIAID, Dr. Anthony Fauci, agrees.

Obesity and excess body fat — especially the type around the middle — can lead to excess fat within the liver. When this occurs, it can diminish the liver's ability to function, and if continued long enough can lead to liver failure. But exercise (and it doesn't have to be extreme) can turn this problem around, at least in Chinese adults.

NEW YORK - Aug. 23, 2016 - PRLog -- Standing with Giants is a collection of essays written to honor Dr. Elizabeth M. Whelan, who co-founded the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH) in 1978, and acknowledge both the broad spectrum of issues she tackled and her important imprint on public health.

From 1986 to the present, the CDC has monitored pregnancy-related deaths. Surveillance data show a steadily increasing number of reported pregnancy related deaths up to 2012. The increase on its own may not turn heads, but in a global context, it depicts a slowly growing problem when compared to figures across other developed countries. And even more worrisome, experts have been unable to clearly identify the overall cause for the increase.

In 1966, Dr. Donald Henderson, M.D., M.P.H spearheaded the World Health Organization’s war on smallpox virus and by 1977 science had won. Thanks to him and fellow ACSH scientific advisor Dr. William H. Foege, the smallpox vaccine was added to the measles program in West Africa during the 1970s and the disease was eradicated.

Food fraud is outrageously common. In the UK, horse meat was sold as beef, and in China, rat meat was sold as lamb. Now, Malaysian researchers have detected buffalo meat in "beef" frankfurters.

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Two generations ago, tattoos were relatively scarce, and primarily only among a few types of people, but their presence has increased from 5% in 2003 to 12% in 2016, and half of those with tattoos have more than one, all without really knowing the safety and regulation of the inks used for tattoos and permanent makeup.