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Dietary supplements are a big business. The industry made almost US$39 billion in revenue in 2022, and with very little regulation and oversight, it stands to keep growing.

The marketing of dietary supplements has been quite effective, with 77% of Americans reporting feeling that the supplement industry is trustworthy. The idea of taking your health into your own hands is appealing, and supplements are popular with athletes, parents and people trying to recover more quickly from a cold or flu, just to name a few....

Two cases stand out as a beacon of sound jurisprudence, requiring governmental restraint, even in the face of pandemics. In Jew Ho v. Williamson, the court annulled a quarantine against the Chinese community when the Bubonic Plague struck San Francisco in the Spring of 1900. The legal community touts the decision as a testament to the 14th Amendment and the doctrine of Equal Protection. But in retrospect, this reading overlooks the adverse public health consequences generated by partisan doctors and the impact of economic drivers of policy. It also demonstrates unfamiliarity of the law with public health responses.

The Year of the Rat

On March 7, 1900, paradoxically...

In the US

On February 22, 2023, Chole Cole, now 18 years old, sued Kaiser Permanente (her medical provider) for medical malpractice related to her transition. At the age of 12, Ms.Cole decided she was a boy. Her physicians put her on puberty blockers and testosterone (the predominant male sex hormone) when she was 13 and performed a double mastectomy at 16. [1] Two years later, she’s become the poster child of the “detrans movement,” trying to reassert her feminine status. Just this past week, another case was filed by Layla Jane, also suing Kaiser, who gave her puberty blockers and testosterone when she was 12 and performed a radical double mastectomy when...

Dying with Dignity

Canada, in particular, promotes the practice of self and medical assistance in dying (MAID).  Who could object to a group like Dying with Dignity, Canada,  promoting such compassionate intervention as allowing dying with dignity? If living with dignity is a prime principle of bioethics (at least the UNESCO version), surely dying with dignity should be.  And while relieving suffering sounds honorable and compassionate, for those who have suffered and survived, the concept is demeaning and degrading. Psychiatrist and holocaust survivor, Viktor Frankl, writes in Man in Search for Meaning,

“Certain  unhealthy...

Alas, not. This is about decision-making when views conflict regarding whether personal liberty outweighs public rights, health, and safety.  This is about judicial ego - and who gets to fill the vacant shoes left by Justice Scalia. And this is about who makes legal decisions regarding science - when the science is in doubt.

"…this is just insane…. The federal government lacks the power to require its [own] employees to be vaccinated?"

Steve Vladeck, law professor at the University of Texas

According to Judge Jeffrey Brown: the...

Air pollution epidemiology has tended to emphasize premature mortality; the NIH database lists over 3000 papers with those terms in the title or abstract. But no specific causes of death are uniquely linked to air pollution; studies have focused on non-accidental, cardio-respiratory, and cancer deaths. Fatalities reported in these studies are rare, typically < 0.5% of the population [1], implying that victims are not selected randomly but may comprise the frailest subjects having the most significant exposures. By and large, in the U.S., these studies have been designed to support regulatory interests under the Clean Air Act rather than scientific inquiry. EPA selects the pollutants of concern, the locations to be monitored (outdoors), and the timeframes of interest. Locations range...

As Stat reports,

"GSK has made a corporate decision that while it wants to help in public health emergencies, it cannot continue to do so in the way it has in the past. …Merck has said while it is committed to getting its Ebola vaccine across the finish line it will not try to develop a vaccine that protects against other strains of Ebola and the related Marburg virus."

Do these large corporations have a broader social responsibility to create these vaccines? In truth, who is better equipped, than Big Pharma to develop and bring vaccines to the scale required for a pandemic? But vaccines have a tumultuous history, not the rise of anti-vaxxers, but with the liability that comes from...

The government’s approach toward treating people with substance use disorder is degrading and dehumanizing. It stigmatizes people who are suffering from a compulsive behavioral disorder. We don’t treat people with other physical or mental health disorders this way.

In fact, roughly 3 million people in the U.S. suffer from opioid use disorder. More than 500,000 are dependent on heroin. Yet only 400,000 Americans are accessing methadone treatment.

But with overdose deaths ...

The world is getting fatter, and public health experts don't know what to do about it. As we discussed in part one, a wide variety of interventions, everything from calorie labels to soda taxes, have failed to reduce obesity rates to any significant extent. Yet researchers working in this field can't bring themselves to give up on policies designed to “nudge” (or even coerce) consumers into making healthier food choices.

Here I want to examine why these interventions haven't worked and why many obesity experts seem to have such a hard time accepting this fact. Nobody knows how to rid the world of obesity, but the considerations below should at least point us in the right...

Assisted dying has been legal in Canada since 2016, allowing euthanasia/MAID for those suffering chronic disability – even if not life-threatening, coupled with an “unbearable suffering” subjectively determined by the patient. Nevertheless, medical institutions are still free to ban it within their facilities. In 2019, the Quebec Superior Court found Canada’s MAID law too restrictive. While current legislation excludes eligibility for MAID for individuals with a mental illness, this...