If reports about a new European study that questions the effectiveness of colonoscopies is causing you to question whether you should get one, don’t let it. I make the 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 […]
Healthcare
Posted inCritical thinking, Healthcare, Law, Psychology, Sociology
What we don’t talk about when we talk about the Satanic Panic
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 […]
Posted inHealthcare, Latest research, Religious News
Evangelicals who get COVID info at church are ‘less likely to be vaccinated’
A new study from researchers at Virginia Commonwealth University finds that evangelicals who spoke with their pastors rather than health care professionals when it came to COVID were less likely to get vaccinated, adding yet another piece of evidence to what we already suspected: white evangelical leaders who treat vaccines like some kind of liberal conspiracy […]
Posted inHealth, Healthcare, News, Science
New studies implicate long COVID in type-1 diabetes and brain injury
We’re in a complicated season of the COVID-19 pandemic. While health officials struggle with messaging around prevention, and politicians are eager to call an end to the era, new data has been surging around the long term impacts of COVID-19. All year, we’ve been seeing reports about the uptick in type-1 diabetes among children who […]
Posted inHealth, Healthcare
Is the pandemic over? Depends on who you listen to
“The pandemic is over. We still have a problem with COVID. We’re still doing a lotta work on it. It’s…but the pandemic is over. If you notice, no one’s wearing masks. Everybody seems to be in pretty good shape. And so I think it’s changing. And I think this is a perfect example of it.” […]
Posted inHealthcare
‘A continued wounding’—the untold epidemic of physician suicide
Dr. Pamela Wible runs a suicide hotline for physicians. She describes herself as having been obsessed with death and suicide since she was in utero, marinating in a brew of her mother’s own severe mental illness. And as a young child, Dr. Wible could only access father-daughter time if she accompanied her dad, a pathologist, […]
Posted inBiology, Health, Healthcare, News, Science
Polio’s back, and the CDC’s latest update could make things worse
In late August, the US reported a case of paralytic polio in an unvaccinated adult in Rockland County, New York. This first case in the US since 2013 was concerning because it emerged in an area with especially low vaccination rates (around 60 percent, to the country’s average of 80 percent), and was still appearing […]
Posted inHealthcare
Antibodies effective against a variety of COVID variants
COVID anxiety levels are dwindling among Americans. Even the very liberal have finally begun to take a breather. As more Americans eschew their N95 and cut large gathering limitations, the more COVID-conscious of us needn’t fret. Optimistic news on new treatment efficacy is also on the rise. Perhaps one of the most exciting and underreported […]
Posted inBiology, Health, Healthcare, News, Science
How bad reporting turned zero deaths into a ‘75% death rate’ for the latest virus
On August 4, Chinese and Singaporean scientists published a paper on a novel Henipavirus now present in humans, and elements of their work are now making the rounds in mainstream and social media in a highly irresponsible manner. Here’s what you need to know about the Langya henipavirus (also known as LayV), which has a […]
Posted inHealthcare, News
Monkeypox hysteria spreads through social media
Monkeypox cases increased notably over the past week, culminating in the White House declaring a public health emergency on Thursday. Panic and anger have mounted along with it, given limited vaccine availability and continued concerns of homophobic stigma. There are stark differences between the rise of monkeypox and that of COVID-19. Monkeypox is far less […]