A huge new study shows vitamin supplements have essentially no ability to prevent cancer or cardiovascular disease. Vitamins. If you are like the majority of American adults, you took a vitamin or supplement recently. Over the counter sales of these products in this country amount to over 30 billion dollars a year. That’s more than the market for statins — and vitamins aren’t covered by insurance.

I have Borrelia on the brain as the weather gets warmer and the ticks get bolder. Well, the weather is getting warmer, the birds are singing, the grass is growing, and as the shorts and skirts start appearing, so to, like clockwork, do rashes that look like this.

A new study suggests an impressive reduction in cancer death after bariatric surgery, but it is not the final word. There is an epidemic in this country that has been raging far longer than COVID-19, claiming around 300,000 lives a year in the United States. That epidemic? Obesity. Obesity is a major contributor to cardiovascular disease and mortality, but less often discussed is the role of obesity in promoting cancers…

A new study raises some difficult questions about the doctor — patient relationship. — This is Cassandra.

While COVID may not directly infect brain tissue, it causes a lot of inflammation around the brain. SARS-CoV-2 is a strange virus, and not only because it is so novel. The variability in clinical presentation and outcome is still perplexing, the emergence of variants — like omicron — with few links to established lineages is weird — and then… there is the anosmia. In retrospect, it may…

Yes, there may be a million cases a day right now. — Over the past week, I’ve been spending a lot of time looking at this graph — the count of COVID cases in the US.

A new study shows a markedly beneficial effect of steroids after COVID hospital discharge. Some of you may be aware that I have an online course on interpreting the medical literature. It goes through everything from reading an abstract, to understanding the statistical framework for hypothesis testing. But if you were to distill that entire course into once sentence it would probably be something…

A new study finds that the ability of vaccination to protect the community, as opposed to just the individual, may have waned during the pandemic. Someday, perhaps in the not too distant future, we will be able to have a calm, and informed debate about what interventions saved the most lives during the coronavirus pandemic. My personal vote, supplemental oxygen, doesn’t get enough appreciation. Other interventions are no doubt up there as well — dexamethasone…

Adenovirus? COVID? Both? The disease seems to have come out of nowhere. Late last week, the CDC released a Health Alert Network advisory regarding a cluster of 9 cases of acute hepatitis in children in Alabama over a 5 month period from October 2021 to February 2022 — a rate substantially higher than what would be expected given the relative rarity of…