The word “addiction” brings up images of crack pipes, alcohol bottles, lottery tickets and other sickly fascinations, but the bigger issue may be the number of people addicted to ultra-processed foods. Consider: while drugs, gambling, and other unsavory addictions definitely harm those trapped in them, this study estimates 21% of Generation X women have a…
Artificial intelligence is all the rage these days, but this article may cause some rage of its own. In this study, researchers tested a type of AI called a Large Language Model on different medical ethics cases. When tweaks were made to some of these cases, the AI defaulted to intuitive answers rather than taking…
Stepping into the inter-workings of our body systems is like stepping into a modern factory assembling a large and complex machine. The interplay between something like a simple bacterium in our colon and an on-site immune cell can end up triggering autoimmune diseases like rheumatoid arthritis in our joints. What goes on in one system…
In the ongoing story of autism, researchers may have discovered a brain area which plays a key role in the outworking of autism as well as its connection with higher rates of epilepsy. Learning of such novel mechanisms for autism pathology can be as exciting as reading a well-written mystery novel. Often it is the…
Caring for a patient requires caring for the whole person, a whole person who is a collection of parts. Some of these parts are more easily cared for by medicine than others. Some of these parts are better cared for by families, churches, and communities than by a health care system. This second class…
New research offers an interesting answer: the common cold As we continue to answer countless questions forced upon us by COVID 19, this study offers an answer why children seemed more resistant to this troublesome new SARS CoV2 virus: the common cold. While medicine is rarely simple enough for a single mechanism to explain everything,…
Daily in our office, we talk about one of my least favorite subjects, mold. Why would I daily spend time talking about or even thinking about something that caused so much harm to my own family? It primarily comes down to the simple fact that my hatred for mold makes me want to fight it…
With the advent of direct-to-consumer testing, especially the latest craze of online memberships that give you a long list of labs complete with computer-generated health report, we are getting more and more anxious calls about abnormal labs. While we applaud the concept of getting patients access to labs that their conventional providers refuse to order,…
With the growing epidemic of mental health diagnoses in our current world, much research is going into answering the how’s, why’s and what’s of stress. We not only want to understand how stress impacts our mental health, but what to do about it. In our clinic, we deal with the impact of stress on our…
Everyone wants to know how to optimize a baby’s brain health, but who would have thought that giving mom a probiotic was the answer? Researchers have searched through countless avenues of optimizing baby’s brains, having realized that the critical window of pregnancy and the first year or two of life could determine much of the…