The following is a compendium of articles and op-eds I have written since 2013. It is an updated version of "Analyzing The Opioid Crisis: 65 Articles By Dr. Josh Bloom," which was published in 2019.
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YouTube announced last week that it's banning a number of high-profile anti-vaccine activists from its platform. The policy shift is meant to stem the spread of misinformation, but it raises some troubling questions. Most important among them: is more censorship worth the cost it imposes on society?
Has the New York Times, which has been squarely in the 'No GMO' column for many years, moved into this century? Drs. Kathleen Hefferon and Henry Miller argue yes, but not nearly enough so to make up for past misrepresentations about genetic modification.
Had she lived, Henrietta Lacks would have been 101 in August. Instead, she died at 31, a victim of aggressive cervical cancer. Monday marks the 70th anniversary of her death on October 4, 1951. But her cells live on, immortalized by George Gey, a cellular biologist at Johns Hopkins.
It takes up a third of our life; why do we sleep? Jimming the lock of the lock and key model of biology. How to escape a volcano, like the one on La Palma. The Work Ethic revisited.
It's time for another installment of "The Health Ranger Chronicles," where we examine Mike Adams' claims about the supposed dangers of COVID vaccination. Adams and other Natural News writers have alleged that the shots are mind-control tools or bioweapons, and that planning for the pandemic began in 2015. This time, COVID-19 is apparently a real threat, but the vaccines are still more dangerous.
Wanna hear something crazy? Fentanyl test strips are FDA-approved to quickly test for the presence of the dangerous drug in the urine in overdose cases. They can also be used to check for fentanyl in street drugs and counterfeit pills. But in more than 40 states, this is illegal (!). Why? Because they are considered to be drug paraphernalia. Seriously. Good luck finding any policy or law dumber than this.
As the inhabitants of an ancient Middle Eastern city now called Tall el-Hammam went about their daily business one day about 3,600 years ago, they had no idea an unseen icy space rock was speeding toward them at about 38,000 mph (61,000 kph).
Many tobacco control advocates have attacked vaping by emphasizing the risk it poses to teenagers. While children should never use any nicotine product, there's a strong case to be made that the campaign against teen vaping has distracted us from tackling a critical public health threat: adult smoking.
The DEA just issued a Public Safety Alert about the presence of deadly doses of illicit fentanyl in counterfeit pills, something that has been known for years. Why the delay? Dr. Jeffrey Singer of the Cato Institute (and an ACSH advisor) explains.
How does frequent social media use impact our mental health? A recent study attempted to pinpoint the effects of spending hours on Twitter and Facebook, but the inherent difficulty in analyzing human behavior limits our ability to find a precise answer.
A detailed investigation has exposed troubling connections between Scientology-affiliated lawyers and anti-GMO, anti-vaccine groups. For years, these forces have colluded to attack safe medicines and pesticides, while slandering scientists and organizations that challenge activist rhetoric as "Monsanto shills."
Imagine you need emergency surgery, but the hospital’s computers are down – victim of a malicious ransomware attack. Processing blood-typing must be done by hand, delaying the results; X-rays can’t be transmitted to the radiologist on call for review. The hospital is refusing to pay the cyber-terrorist's ransom demand. All the while, your medical records (and you) are in limbo.
Less really is more, bagel rolling, how lucky we are, and the power and limitations of “following the science.”
For most of us, hiccups are a minor nuisance. But for a very few, it can be a chronic and debilitating condition.
Facebook has proven itself incapable of reliably preventing the spread of "misinformation." If we needed more evidence, the company recently threatened to "restrict" the account of a prominent researcher for talking about science.
COVID-19 remains a seasonal respiratory virus, and the pandemic has waxed and waned with our summers and winters. A new study tries to quantify the impact of three climate variables: temperature, humidity, and ultraviolet light. The study also updates our understanding of PM 2.5.
The lockdowns caused by COVID-19 were a tradeoff between our actual and economic lives. The US, by and large, chose lives over economics. But rather than an either-or, could we have decided to save both? A new study suggests yes.
What can science tell us about fatherhood? Fathers historically have gotten a deserved but bad rap acting primarily as “hunter-gatherers” rather than as caregivers.
Do kids need COVID shots? It's a difficult question to answer, but incendiary commentary has unnecessarily muddied the issue. Let's take a look at what we know so far.
The New York Times (correctly) reports that a COVID pill is needed, not just a vaccine. But the paper also tells this story in its typically biased manner, implying that the government, not drug companies, discover drugs. It's a bunch of nonsense that dates back to... forever.
What do granite and bananas have in common? Radioactivity. As it turns out, radioactivity is all around us and has been for eons.
Thanks to excess alcohol consumption, July 4th is the deadliest driving day of the year. If you find yourself inebriated at a DUI checkpoint blowing into a breathalyzer, you can thank Sir Ewart Ray Herbert Jones for the invention he published 75 years ago. Yep, you've been caught by organic chemistry, specifically, the Jones Oxidation.
Reforms to the U.S. drug pricing environment are required, but to improve patients’ health outcomes, reforms must be grounded in a comprehensive understanding of the current drug pricing system. Otherwise, policymakers will make things worse, not better. An important piece by ACSH advisor Dr. Robert Popovian and Wayne Winegarden, Ph.D.
Most of the extant COVID-19 analyses have been based on national or state-level data; a more granular county-level analysis would be overwhelmed by “noise” since most counties experienced only single-digit daily caseloads. Here we used an intermediate scale, 100 counties that each include a major city. This protocol avoids the noise engendered by small populations and provides enough diversity for meaningful cross-sectional analysis.
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