Various web links related to health issues.
Something strange is going on in medicine. Major diseases,
like colon cancer, dementia and heart disease, are waning
in wealthy countries, and improved diagnosis and treatment
cannot fully explain it.
...
Perhaps, he said, all these degenerative diseases share something
in common, something inside aging cells themselves. The cellular process
of aging may be changing, in humans' favor. For too long, he said,
researchers have looked under the lamppost at things they can measure.
Perhaps, he said, all these degenerative diseases share something
in common, something inside aging cells themselves.
The cellular process of aging may be changing, in humans' favor.
For too long, he said, researchers have looked under the lamppost
at things they can measure.
Spurious Correlation: We found a link between cabbage and innie bellybuttons, but that doesn't mean it's real.
When it comes to nutrition, everyone has an opinion.
What no one has is an airtight case.
...
Our foray into nutrition science demonstrated that studies examining
how foods influence health are inherently fraught. To show you
why, we're going to take you behind the scenes to see how these
studies are done. The first thing you need to know is that nutrition
researchers are studying an incredibly difficult problem, because,
short of locking people in a room and carefully measuring out all
their meals, it's hard to know exactly what people eat. So nearly
all nutrition studies rely on measures of food consumption that
require people to remember and report what they ate.
...
Nearly every nutrient you can think of has been linked to
some health outcome in the peer-reviewed scientific literature
using tools like the FFQ, said John Ioannidis, an expert on the
reliability of research findings at the Meta-Research Innovation
Center at Stanford. In a 2013 analysis published in the American
Journal of Clinical Nutrition, Ioannidis and a colleague selected
50 common ingredients at random from a cookbook and looked for
studies evaluating each food's association to cancer risk. It
turned out that studies had found a link between 80 percent of
the ingredients -- including salt, eggs, butter, lemon, bread and
carrots -- and cancer. Some of those studies pointed to an increased
risk of cancer, others suggested a decreased risk, but the size
of the reported effects were "implausibly large," Ioannidis said,
while the evidence was weak.
"Complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM), now more frequently referred to as "integrative medicine" by its proponents, consists of a hodge-podge of largely unrelated treatments that range from seemingly reasonable (e.g., diet and exercise) to pure quackery (e.g., acupuncture, reiki and other "energy medicine") that CAM proponents are trying furiously to "integrate" as coequals into science-based medicine. They do this because they have fallen under the sway of an ideology that posits a false dichotomy: To practice true "holistic" and "preventative" medicine, physicians and other health care professionals must embrace the pre-scientific, pseudoscientific, or anti-scientific ideas about medicine that underlie much of the "alternative medicine" being "integrated."
In fact, the study, from doctors at Johns Hopkins, suggests medical
errors may kill more people than lower respiratory diseases like
emphysema and bronchitis do. That would make these medical mistakes
the third leading cause of death in the United States. That would
place medical errors right behind heart disease and cancer.
...
One reason there's such a wide range of numbers is because accurate
data on these kinds of deaths is surprisingly sparse. That's in
part because death certificates don't ask for enough data, Makary
said. Currently the cause of death listed on the certificate has
to line up with an insurance billing code. Those codes do not
adequately capture human error or system factors.
The Food and Drug Administration cleared silver diamine fluoride
for use as a tooth desensitizer for adults 21 and older.
But studies show it can halt the progression of cavities and prevent them,
and dentists are increasingly using it off-label for those purposes.
...
The main downside is aesthetic:
Silver diamine fluoride blackens the brownish decay on a tooth.
This is just one study (we shouldn't dismiss it, but it's possible the results were simply due to chance). The effects were only found in rats (and may not translate at all to humans). And this needs to be weighed against other evidence that cellphones aren't a big risk for people (we've been using phones for decades now with no uptick in brain cancer). This is an important bit of research and deserves careful scrutiny and follow-up. But it's not an occasion for fear-mongering.