Health

The drug company Genentech is using secret — but perfectly legal — rebates to eye doctors to get them to prescribe Lucentis, a drug for age-related macular degeneration that is 100 times more expensive than another, equally effective drug, a

People who are hospitalized for a stroke are more likely to survive if they are admitted to a hospital on a weekday rather than on a weekend — no matter how severe the stroke, a new Canadian study has found.
And, interestingly, the poorer weekend out

Keep up your exercising routine this cold and flu season — if you want to avoid any of the 1 billion colds Americans are expected to come down with during the next year (every year, actually).

Across the pond, actor and humorist Stephen Fry got into deep, deep trouble this trick-or-treat weekend for some comments he made about female sexuality.

I’ve posted before about how cognitive dissonance (a psychological theory that got its start right here in Minnesota) causes people to dig in their heels and hold on to their beliefs even when faced with overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
Indeed

A meta-analysis of 11 different studies has found that regularly drinking sugar-sweetened soda or other beverages significantly increases people’s relative risk of type 2 diabetes and metabolic syndrome.
And, apparently, you don’t have to drink much

Thanks to a string of new and quite disturbing studies (including one I reported on earlier this year), neuroscientists are finally beginning to get their message through the (thick?) skulls of football, hockey, soccer and other contact sports enthus

The American College of Cardiologists and other medical societies have just widened the criteria under which computerized tomography (CT) scans are considered “appropriate” for the diagnosis of heart disease.
That means doctors will be recommending C

How long does it take to form a habit?
That was the question a team of researchers from University College London attempted to answer in a study published in the October issue of the European Journal of Social Psychology.
They found that healthful be

“I don’t like to stir the pot and cause trouble,” 31-year-old Molly Scrutton, a hairstylist in Portland, Ore., told a reporter for the Oregonian newspaper earlier this week.

Veneta Masson, a nurse practitioner and writer living in Washington, D.C., has written a powerful essay in this month’s issue of the journal Health Affairs on why she no longer gets mammograms.

Back in 2002, the Women’s Health Initiative (WHI) randomized trial found (to many, but not all, people’s surprise) that not only did taking postmenopausal hormone therapy (HT) have a deleterious effect on women’s cardiovascular systems (more heart at

Most Americans — 74 percent, according to a just-released Consumer Reports survey — don’t like the idea of their doctors taking payments from Big Pharma in exchange for promoting specific drugs to other doctors.
Yet thousands of U.S.

The firing earlier this month of CNN anchor Rick Sanchez for making what many people perceived to be anti-Semitic remarks — and his subsequent apology, in which he claimed his words were the result of exhaustion and not of any deep-seated personal be

Those Lino Lakes officials who voted last summer to make sure that all city documents are printed only in English might want to rethink that action.
In fact, they might want to enroll all the town’s kids into bilingual classes tout de suite.

Researchers can still unethically take advantage of study subjects, but today’s exploitation has taken a different form — often involving marketing, says Dr. Carl Elliott.

Years ago, I called an elderly aunt, who was then living alone in an apartment in Cleveland, only to find her almost incoherent and complaining of dizziness.
“Sit down right now.

We Americans are terrible at estimating how many calories we’re taking in when we’re eating out, particularly if we think a restaurant serves healthy food, a new study has found.

When I was strolling and biking on Minneapolis’ lake paths this past weekend, enjoying the unseasonable and gorgeous weather, it seemed like everybody was out there with me.