Cold comfort
I was away in New York for a few days and came back last night with a cold. So this morning I canceled a bunch of things I was supposed to do and just crawled back into bed, hunkering down. … Continue reading →
Category Archives: Health
How the Lyme vaccine got banned
Basically, it was part of the anti-vaccine hysteria. Where I live, Lyme disease is a very real possibility if you go outside in the countryside or even suburbia. People have to dress with great care to avoid it, and I … Continue reading →
The cost of Canadian health care
The true costs are mostly hidden: Let’s start with how much Canadians actually pay. The OECD arrives at its figures by the hopelessly simplistic method of dividing a nation’s total health care expenditure by its population. Thus, Canadians pay about … Continue reading →
On those bags of chopped, washed, mixed lettuce
I’m so old I can remember when you had to wash and dry lettuce by hand. What a pain in the neck that was. Then came a fabulous invention: the salad spinner. Salad spinners may seem pretty primitive to you … Continue reading →
The state vs. Alfie Evans’ parents
Like Charlie Gard before him, British toddler Alfie Evan’s situation highlights not just questions of medical ethics, but the power of the state over the individual. I wrote about Charlie here. Alfie Evans’ situation differs in some details, but it’s … Continue reading →
Not quite brain dead
This is an important and sobering article about brain function. Here’s an excerpt: At TIRR, [Kothari, an assistant professor of rehabilitation at Baylor College of Medicine] estimates nine out of 10 patients who come to him with a vegetative label … Continue reading →
“More than half your body is not human”
That’s the clickbait headline for this BBC article. I thought it might be something about Neanderthal genes, or perhaps mitochondria. But no; it’s about bacteria, mainly gut bacteria: Human cells make up only 43% of the body’s total cell count. … Continue reading →
When do you know you’re old enough to die?
That’s the headline for this eyecatching article in the Guardian. At any rate, it certainly caught my eye. I initially assumed it might be about assisted or permitted suicide, and whether and when a minor could be allowed to make … Continue reading →
The battle for life in the NICU
As a person who had some trouble with infertility when I was trying to conceive, I found this story very touching.
Continue reading →Will cutting calories make you live longer?
No, but it will seem longer. That’s my attempt at a joke. But maybe it’s not a joke. Maybe it’s true. For many years there’s been an idea—derived initially from animal research—that restricting caloric intake makes a person live longer. … Continue reading →
Do we need to increase the number of psychiatric beds?
For quite a wile, psychiatric hospitalizations have been on the decline. New drugs are responsible for a lot of this; what used to be untreatable is now often controllable. In addition, there is Szaszian PC mental-illness-is-a-myth thinking, which began to … Continue reading →
What studies of altitude sickness on Everest can tell us about saving people in ICUs
The extreme conditions of climbing Mt. Everest, and the risks involved, hardly seem worth it to us regular folks who can’t even imagine voluntarily subjecting oneself to such an ordeal: Just ahead of them, a man from another party was … Continue reading →