In Sunday’s second installment in its excellent “Fragile Minds” series on treatment problems for young people with mental illness, the Star Tribune focused on a troubling trend: Many of Minnesota’s children receive prescription medications for psych
An analysis by the Institute of Medicine (IOM) of more than 1,000 scientific articles has found that common vaccines cause few health problems.
Furthermore, most of the side effects that were found to be associated with the vaccines tended to be ra
Writing in the online magazine Slate last week, Dr.
For a long time, doctors have been telling individuals with high levels of so-called bad cholesterol to slice foods from their diet that are high in saturated fat, such as red meats, butter and hard cheeses.
According to a report Tuesday in the New York Times, a new study from researchers at Northwestern University has found evidence that male bisexuals — men who are sexually aroused by both women and men — do exist.
This is a reversal of the findings
Health activism has taken a truly disturbing trend in recent years.
If you’re a frequent Scrabble player, you undoubtedly know, as actress Anne Hathaway noted on “The Daily Show” Thursday night, that qi is a word.
What you may not know, however, is what the word means.
That’s one of the findings of a fun
I’ve written here many times before that despite all the studies linking it to serious health risks, menopausal hormone therapy is not going to go gently into the night.
Maybe our TVs, like our cigarette packages, need health-warning labels.
On the heels of a Harvard study that linked TV watching with an increased risk of diabetes, heart disease and premature death comes a new Australian study that quantifies the p
This week’s Newsweek cover story on how some common medical tests and procedures do more harm than good won’t be generating the same media buzz as last week’s one on Michele Bachmann (yes, the one with the controversial photo).
But this week’s cove
Trying to find a reason for last week’s rioting in England continues to monopolize the British public, press and political establishment.
What has been particularly perplexing to many Brits is the fact that, as the Daily Mail reported, “While the
Humans living at higher latitudes tend to have bigger brains — and bigger eyes — than those living closer to the Equator, according to a new British study.
The researchers speculate that these differences are because humans need larger eyes and mor
Retractions of scientific studies are “surging,” according to an article published Wednesday in the Wall Street Journal.
Here are the startling numbers, as reported by Journal reporter Gautam Naik:Since 2001, while the number of papers published in
As noted in a Scientific American article published online Tuesday (and as I have mentioned from time to time here in Second Opinion), the last decade has seen an explosion of research into the psychological underpinnings of the ideological differen
The idea that intestinal waste somehow “putrefies” and poisons the body has been around for thousands of years.
No wonder, then, that people have been devising colon-cleansing therapies — both oral products (herbs, powders and other supplements) an
Concern is growing over comments U.S. Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Margaret Hamburg made recently about loosening the FDA’s conflict-of-interest rules for who can serve on its expert advisory panels.
The Boston Globe ran an intriguing article last month on how scientists and historians are delving “into our olfactory past, trying hard to understand how people experienced the world with their noses — and even save scents for post
Researchers, including those from the Mayo Clinic, the University of Minnesota, and the Minnesota Department of Health, have identified the new bacterium in more than 25 people.
The July issue of the journal Medical History has a short but illuminating article on the history of the seven-decade-long professional power struggle between psychiatry (particularly psychoanalysis) and clinical psychology.
In July, the federal government proposed new rules governing the protection of human participants in medical studies.
But as University of Minnesota bioethics professor Carl Elliott notes in a commentary published Friday in the New York Times, thos
