All Posts
New GLP-1 Drug Guidelines
New GLP-1 drug guidelines recently recommended by the World Health Organization (WHO) were reviewed in a JAMA article published online a few days ago. One major point? Global obesity rates have been rising substantially for more than 30 years. But change is in the air! To illustrate: adult obesity in the US peaked at a […]
Theo of Golden: A Review
Theo of Golden: A Review. Do you know of this impressive novel and its unusual history? How unusual? Well, it was initially self-published in 2023 and sold over 170, 000 copies before a subsidiary of Simon & Schuster took over as publisher in November, 2025. The book, now on The New York Times bestseller list, […]
Are Politics and Medicine Entwined?
Are politics and medicine entwined? A report published this week in JAMA Forum suggests these two fields actually have connections. Are you scratching your head? The link between the two is revealed in a few snippets from that report. Read the following: In the nearly 50 years that Gallup has queried the public about trust in […]
Read The Color of North if —
Read The Color of North if you are awed by astonishing facts of life, such as the frog that freezes solid each winter and thaws and returns to life in the spring, or the amazing bacteria that survive in scalding temperatures. Read the book if you’re intrigued by information such as the bird that, thanks […]
Introducing Exerkines: The Magical Molecules of Exercise!
Introducing Exerkines: The Magical Molecules of Exercise. Everyone knows that exercise improves health. That’s old news. Here’s something far more exciting. Scientists have demonstrated that our skeletal muscles do much more than just move us about. While contracting, our muscles release swarms of molecules that spread throughout our bodies and blend with molecules released by other […]
Selling Faster Than Hotcakes: GLP-1 Medications
Selling faster than hotcakes: GLP-1 medications are flying off pharmacy shelves, and at fancy prices. Total spending in the U.S. for these drugs in 2023 (the latest year I found data for) was $71,700,000,000 (yes, 71.7 billion. See here.). Sales have been growing steadily. In 2018, total U.S. sales of GLP-1 drugs were $13.7 billion. […]
Worried about AI? I am.
Worried about AI? I am, and for reasons that should frighten everyone. There’s no doubt that Artificial Intelligence can be remarkably useful. You’ve probably used it. I have. I tinkered with it for an earlier post to show how clever (and fast) AI is at composing a poem (see that here). But when writing a […]
Our Deluded HHS Secretary Kennedy
Our deluded HHS Secretary Kennedy is at it again. Earlier this week he fired all 17 members of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s vaccine advisory committee and will replace them with new members. Have you read how he justified this change? “Today we are prioritizing the restoration of public trust above any specific […]
HHS Dumps Successful Vaccine Developer
HHS dumps successful vaccine developer. Do you remember Operation Warp Speed? During the first Trump administration that program led to the unbelievably fast development of Covid-19 vaccines by Moderna and Pfizer. Those companies used newly-developed mRNA techniques to produce their vaccines in record time. According to Dr. Ashish Jha, who coordinated the Covid-19 response in […]
Facts about Vaccines
Facts about vaccines? Here are some worthy of notice. One hundred years ago, on May 2, 1925, the Journal of the American Medical Society cited W. W. Keen’s personal experiences with three epidemics of “the most loathsome, nauseating, sickening disease,” smallpox. To summarize his experiences, JAMA reported that before the use of Edward Jenner’s protective […]
