#MedEd: How Well Doctors Use Social Media To Combat Misinformation
If you go to social media, you can see a lot of suspect claims about fad diets, unapproved medical devices, therapies, and conspiracy theories. Many of them have names with "Dr." attached.How is the public to know a "Dr." may be a PhD or an EdD or an osteropath or someone else who didn't go to medical school and become an M.D.? How should physicians respond? From the years 1998 to 2021, coastal states in the US led America in vaccine denial, were doctors supposed to tell their patients they were stupid for believing vaccines cause autism?(1)
New Antibiotics Aren’t A Science Problem, They’re A Regulatory One
The world is in a tough spot with antibiotics. Because they came into use in 1928, to the public they seem like they should all be generic and cost a dollar. Yet due to expensive new regulations passed this century pharmaceutical companies don't have much interest in new ones.(1)Women And Chronic Lyme Disease
Chronic lyme disease does not exist, but if you say it does long enough, a scholar will begin to study it, and then others will cite 'emerging evidence', and journalists will 'teach the controversy', and soon enough doctors who don't want to get sued will sign off, no differently than California pediatricians gave wealthy parents vaccine exemptions to prevent autism during the first two decades of this century.Epidemiology Fallout: Heart Attack Survivors Ignore LDL Cholesterol Risk Because Of Correlation Disrepute
The American Heart Association is concerned that stroke and heart attack survivors don't think enough about 'risk' of LDL (low-density lipoprotein) cholesterol, now colloquially termed 'bad' cholesterol.Without Climate Lockdowns, US Property Values May Plummet?
Prior to the Olympics in Beijing, China solved a pollution problem they previously claimed they never had by banning all cars except those for communist party elites. It did little for CO2, Beijing had a PM10 (smog) problem, but it showed drastic interventions could help the air.Hypothalamus Differences In Obese People
Obesity is closing in on smoking and alcohol as the top killer among lifestyle diseases. Over 25 percent of the world is overweight and in countries like the UK and US, that number is approaching 70 percent. It is correlated to things like heart disease.Is it a genetic issue, and therefore exculpatory? A new paper hopes to show that. The authors analyzed brain scans of 1,351 young adults across a range of body-mass index (BMI) scores. They found that the overall volume of the hypothalamus was larger in overweight and obese people. They declared a significant relationship between volume of the hypothalamus and BMI.
Insecticides For Malaria Control Aren’t Perfect – But It Beats Having Dead Children In Poor Countries
Malaria infects 250,000,000 each year and kills nearly 700,000. It is so rare in America that academics and activists can lament chemicals that kill mosquitoes which transmit it to humans, and even block mosquitoes engineered to prohibit reproduction, but the damage is too great to risk on tinkering with alternatives.Black People Have More Premature Births – Cardiovascular Health Implicated
In 2019, nearly 12 percent of Black individuals experienced pre-term births compared with 7 percent of White individuals, according to a new demography paper.Fentanyl Addicts Rarely Take Prescription Medication To Combat It
Most opioid addicts are recreational users, not those who started on prescription pain medication and continued to have pain and migrated to illegal routes when doctors behaved ethically and shut them off. It just makes people feel good. It is no surprise that opioids are involved in far more deaths each year than guns. If opiods were legally available without a prescription, they'd be in the same category as alcohol when it comes to lifestyle killers. That is what addiction does.Truth Sandwich: Strategies For Refuting Science Myths And Fake News Tested
Prior to 2021 and the COVID-19 pandemic, American Democrats led the anti-vaccine movement. They couched it in anti-corporate terminology and that let politically allied academics and journalists turn a blind eye to the harm their thinking caused. In 2015, after a decade of effort by Science 2.0 and many others, California passed a law banning 'philosophical' objections, a haven that had only been used by fringe religious groups before the 1990s, but in California had led to more un-vaccinated children on the coasts, in places like Berkeley, Los Angeles, and Marin County, than the entire rest of the United States combined.It was a struggle to educate parents that vaccines were safe and necessary when they instead believed in supplements, organic food, and solar power.