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The easiest method I found to grade a web sites potential reliability was to do a word search for popular categories I was very familiar with, such as organic vs. conventionally grown food, antioxidants, free radicals, chemophobia, supplements, detox diets, anti-inflammatory foods, etc., and see how they handled these issues. I felt that if they addressed issues I was very familiar with poorly, they would be just as likely to handle the information in areas I was less familiar with in a similar way.

It did not take long to realize how difficult it is for the average consumer to sift through the quagmire of misinformation and try to make some sort of practical sense of the media’s take on the “science.” Today, I want to explain why the ACSH is so important to consumers.

A...

Last week, anti-vaxxers protests shut down the mass vaccination program underway at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles. In Israel, the global poster child for a successful vaccination program, anti-vaxxers are making vaccine appointments, then canceling them at the last moment - causing needless waste of a still precious commodity. They’re also making threatening robocalls warning parents that the vaccine causes illness and death, using false statistics to back themselves up.

What, if anything, can be done?

Much of the anti-vax message is disseminated on social...

The findings are from the National Poll on Healthy Aging, a survey of a “randomly selected stratified group” of adults administered by phone or online. The results of the 2,163 participants were then scaled and weighted to reflect the population of the US as determined by the Census Bureau.

The poll asked questions found within the Yale Addiction Scale, a means of assessing, in the words of the developers, “signs of addictive-like eating behavior.” [emphasis added] The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), currently in its fifth edition, is the repository of all mental health...

Recent rumors speculate that ivermectin and Pfizer's promising experimental Covid drug PF-07321332 (1) are both inhibitors of the viral main protease (Mpro) (2) and can therefore be used interchangeably to treat Covid infections. It's gotten so silly that a new term has been invented – "Pfizermectin," implying that Pfizer's Paxlovid is little more than an expensive, big-pharma ripoff of ivermectin. This rumor really has legs, so let's examine whether there is anything to it. Are ivermectin and PF-07321332, more commonly known as Paxlovid the same? Similar? (Note: The active component of Paxlovid is PF-07321332; another drug called ritonavir is added to prolong its half-life.) No, they are not.

To be able to compare ivermectin and PF-...

As a volunteer patient advocate, I do my best to stay current on declarations of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, concerning the treatment of acute and chronic pain.  Thus I recently reviewed the CDC "Get Informed" page on prescription opioid basics [https://www.cdc.gov/rxawareness/information/index.html].  In my view, a better description of the page might be "get misinformed". 

It is time for CDC to withdraw this page to correct its many errors and distortions.  As a principal author of the 2016 CDC Guidelines on the prescription of opioids to adults with chronic pain, Dr. Debra Houry is responsible for many of these errors and is thus addressed in this open letter. In the order that...

Fat, in medicine, it is called adipose tissue, is the body’s primary energy reservoir, storing energy in the bountiful times, releasing it in the fallow. And while it appears to us to be unchanging, except perhaps to continue to grow, it is, in fact, a very plastic tissue responding to our energy environment, hormones, neural impulses, and even mechanical forces like compression.

There are several ways to categorize adipose tissue, beginning with its color.

  • White fat – by far the most abundant, 80% is located just under our skin (subcutaneous); the rest deep within our abdomen (visceral) consists of single cells containing a drop of lipid. It is vital to our energy...

What we know – providing context

Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) is a devastating illness that robs one of their “self” long before the end of life. In addition to the tragedy to the patient, it has enormous financial and psychological costs to their families and our health systems. In 2017, about 2 million Medicare beneficiaries, and it is the over-65s where AD is predominant, used one of the available drugs for AD – they constitute the future audience or market for Aduhelm. The FDA’s approval used a regulatory pathway for: 

“a drug for a serious or life-threatening illness that may provide meaningful therapeutic benefit over existing treatments when the drug is shown to have an effect on a surrogate endpoint that is ...

Ringing in the ears, aka tinnitus, already extremely common, is now being linked to COVID. (Just what we don't need – another bizarre symptom.) But COVID or not, many of us will experience tinnitus at some point in our lives. It can range from unnoticed to annoying to maddening. And you probably don't know that it's coming from your brain, not your ears. Dr. Craig Kasper, a New York audiologist and world-renowned tinnitus expert, has generously agreed to tell us all about the condition. So, perk up your ears. This information may very well apply to you now or as you age.

JB: Dr. Kasper, thanks very much for your time. Can you give our readers a description...

It's a good thing that our beloved director of medicine, Dr. Chuck Dinerstein (apparently), hasn't yet grown weary of the countless Zoom conferences where I inform him, "you look like a bomb blew up in your hair." Because the good doctor gave me a big heads up a couple of days ago that Weill Cornell Medical Center (1) had COVID vaccines on hand at the newly opened vaccination center in the Fort Hamilton Armory. Much to my surprise, the website worked perfectly, and there were about 20 appointments up for grabs. I grabbed.

But could this really work out? After all, the rollout of the two approved vaccines, which ACSH advisor Dr. Jeffrey Singer and I recently...

As if we don't have enough problems.

COVID-19 is way more than bad enough, so pretty much the last thing we needed was the emergence of mutated forms of the damn thing. But it was unavoidable. Why? Because of natural selection. This is how viruses thrive – by spontaneously "improving" themselves, which can make them more contagious, more (or also less) virulent (deadly), or any of these. 

The clever little devils also mutate in response to a drug or vaccine, again ensuring that they thrive. The mechanism is the same, but in this case, selective pressure rather than random errors is the driving force behind mutation. Let's say that a person infected with Virus A is treated with an antiviral drug that prevents replication of Virus A. The drug works by stopping one...