When you hit the physician’s office for your annual check-up and bloodwork, does your doctor test your vitamin D levels? If a “quick check” of vitamin D is a routine part of your health care, you aren’t alone. According to numbers I recently found, in 2016 alone, tests for vitamin D deficiency were ordered for Medicare patients alone no fewer …

When I take a step back and think about what it must be like to work for the American nicotine-delivery industry, it’s actually difficult not to feel at least a tiny pang of something approaching…sympathy. It’s nearly impossible to imagine there’s anybody left in the developed world who isn’t aware that smoking is harmful to human health, and yet many …

Is there anything that says “Mom Purse” quite as convincingly as a convenient, pump-top bottle of hand sanitizer? What could be more common, more convenient, more effective? Grab, gel, and go, right? Not so fast. The evidence is clear: If you can find a sink and some soap, you should head there and wash up instead. That’s because hand sanitizers …

In 2007, the scientific and medical ground shifted at the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections when word emerged of the first patient whose HIV had apparently disappeared after two bone marrow transplants. At the time known only as “The Berlin patient,” Timothy Ray Brown had undergone the transplant procedures for leukemia (not HIV) only after chemotherapy had failed; his …

When it comes to pharmacologic agents and their mechanisms of action, the line that divides “natural” and “unnatural” has always been somewhat…artificial. Consider medieval apothecaries. These equivalents of today’s drugstores and pharmacies once sold medicinal infusions, powders, tinctures, compresses, potions, and unguents to physicians and patients alike. But the medicines themselves? Those were prepared from wines, herbs, and spices. They …

Would you believe me if I told you a sort of “Wonder Woman” has been living on the shores of Loch Ness for 71 years…and for some reason, even though scores of amateur sleuths have been combing that area looking for something else out-of-the-ordinary, nobody ever noticed? It sounds like something out of science fiction or fantasy, but it’s not. …

It took decades to convince most Americans that smoking was harmful, but as health care professionals, we seem to have finally broken through the barriers and convinced most people that inhaling the incinerated byproducts of the tobacco plant directly into delicate lung tissue is a bad idea. If you want to see the evidence, check out this nationwide this Gallup …

Early last year, we got our first confirmation that vaping—once touted as a “Get Out of Jail Free” card for smokers—isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be. That confirmation came in the form of a 600+ page report that comprehensively analyzed 800 peer-reviewed studies. It concluded that the available evidence supports far more caution should be exercised with regard to vaping …