Reading Time: 4 minutes Why are vasectomies cool again? Since the U.S. Supreme Court earlier this year overturned Roe v Wade, a landmark 1973 federal law legalizing abortion nationwide, urologic healthcare providers have reported a sharp uptick in men seeking vasectomies—the male equivalent of women “having their tubes tied.” With more than a dozen states banning abortion outright and […]
Healthcare
Posted inHealthcare
‘Difficult patients’ and the doctors who fail them
Reading Time: 6 minutes Lonnie was in her twenties. She had a rare disease that frequently flared up. I guessed her overnight bag was always packed in a closet by the front door.
“I have a question for you,” she said. Something in her tone made my nerves stand on end. “Have you ever seen this disease before?”
“Not often, but…yes.”
Lonnie seemed to sense my hesitation. “Am I too complicated for you, Doctor?”
Posted inHealthcare
A colonoscopy probably saved my life—but not from colorectal cancer
Reading Time: 5 minutes If reports about a new European study that questions the effectiveness of colonoscopies are causing you to question whether you should get one, don’t let them. I make this recommendation due to my own life-changing personal experience with that undignified cancer-detecting procedure more than a year ago. If the routine, every-5-years colonoscopy I underwent in […]
Posted inHealth
COVID-19 now haunts flu season: What other long term impacts can we expect?
Reading Time: 11 minutes It’s been a rough few days for anyone following flu season data. While China has eased zero-COVID restrictions in the face of protests, despite currently experiencing a surge in case count (along with Japan), North American hospitals face what the American Medical Association is openly calling a “tripledemic”: a wave of flu, Respiratory Syncytial Virus […]
Posted inScience
Alzheimer’s latest drug and science journalism’s memory problem
Reading Time: 6 minutes In July, the medical community was rocked by a disappointing reminder of science’s weakest link: the humans doing the work. The journal Science had shared that its six-month investigation supported the findings of whistleblower Matthew Schrag, who first noted altered images in a high-impact paper on Alzheimer’s, published in Nature in 2006. That paper is […]
Posted inParenting & Family
Are religious hospitals inappropriate for secular kids?
Reading Time: 3 minutes I have been very fortunate that my son hasn’t had to make too many trips to the emergency room— a fact that an ER physician pointed out while he was stitching up my son’s eyebrow after a tumble on some bleachers. He was around ten years old, and we had been exercising at a local […]
Posted inDrugs
Cannabis and psychedelics initiatives win big at the ballot box
Reading Time: 3 minutes Cannabis news outlet Marijuana Moment tracked six statewide cannabis and drug policy reform initiatives on the 2022 midterm election ballots, in addition to a number of local measures in states across the country. Cannabis legalization expands to 21 states According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, 21 states and the District of Columbia have legalized […]
Posted inHealthcare
Report: At least 318,981 dead Covid anti-vaxxers can thank Trump
Reading Time: 6 minutes White Americans are now more likely than Black Americans to die of COVID. That’s just one more telling artifact littering the landscape of destruction Donald Trump’s one-term presidency inflicted—and continues to inflict—on the United States. In the early days of the pandemic in America, Black Americans were dying of COVID at triple the rate of […]
Posted inHealth
What’s driving panic around the BQ COVID variants?
Reading Time: 3 minutes On Friday, October 14, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released weekly COVID-19 data with a new breakdown of dominant strains for infections. These included the “sudden” emergence of BQ.1 and BQ.1.1, which had been recorded under BA.5 in earlier data, and were now prominent and rising strains when recorded separately. Together with […]
Posted inPsychology
What we don’t talk about when we talk about the Satanic Panic
Reading Time: 8 minutes Imagine yourself for a moment in a painfully far-too-common scenario. A loved one, suffering from a growing sense of insecurity and deepening depression, begins seeking a destructive and delusive sense of purpose in wildly improbable conspiracy theories. Day by day, this person that you once felt a strong common rapport with drifts further and further […]