Healthcare Triage
Are Video Games GOOD for Kids?
Many people like to argue about whether video games cause violence, but what about evidence for the positive effects games might have? The research is out there, so what do we think about it?
Healthcare Triage
Beauty Products, Hair Chemicals, and Uterine Cancer
There’s a lot of buzz around beauty products and how the chemicals in them may affect hormones, and thus contribute to the development of certain cancers. How much weight should we give to studies that report these associations?
Healthcare Triage
A Fentanyl Vaccine Shows Promise
Fentanyl is many times more potent than heroin or morphine, and is responsible for a lot of overdose deaths. Recent news reports have covered a potential fentanyl vaccine - how does that work, and how far are we from human trials?
Healthcare Triage
Climate Change Is Already Impacting Our Health
Massive storms, flooding, extreme heat, droughts, air pollution, increased rates of disease, changes to our food and water… global warming, and the changes to climate that come with it, are increasing human health risks. Our physical and...
Healthcare Triage
Reforming Federal Laws that Slow Marijuana Research
Marijuana is classified as a Schedule I drug, making it difficult for researchers to study, and difficult to understand how it may help or harm our health. A recently passed bill is aimed at making marijuana research easier to conduct,...
Healthcare Triage
Fraud and Dysfunction in American Healthcare: The 2022 Shkreli Awards
The 2022 Shkreli Awards have been released! Each year, the Lown Institute passes out awards as a way of reporting on dysfunction in the US health care system. Dysfunction in healthcare is one of our foundational pillars here at...
Healthcare Triage
Climate Change and Health: Heat, Rain, Storms, and Fires
Climate change is causing weather events that are a direct threat to human life. We’re not gonna lie, this is an anxiety-provoking topic, as is much of the conversation surrounding climate change. Increased heat, changing precipitation...
Healthcare Triage
Did Covid-19 Evolve Naturally or Leak from a Lab? The Many Confusing US Intelligence Reports
The Covid lab escape theory! This has been in the background for a while, but it came roaring to the forefront when a prominent news source claimed that the US Department of Energy concluded that Covid was the result of a laboratory leak...
Healthcare Triage
Did All Those Masks Help with Covid or Not?
Headlines recently blared about the new review that looked at how effective masks are at preventing the transmission of flu-like disease. Cochrane reviews are well respected, and the media coverage about the recent review has been hard...
Healthcare Triage
A Vaccine for Breast Cancer?
Cancer prevention is a major goal in health research, and one major milestone was the HPV vaccine, which targets a virus that is responsible for different types of cancer, mainly cervical cancer. Now we’ve got some recent excitement in...
Healthcare Triage
Is ChatGPT Nicer than Your Doctor?
Is the ChatGPT artificial intelligence chatbot more empathetic than your doctor? And does it deliver higher quality information? A recent study suggest that might be the case. At first glance we figured, sure, a chatbot never gets bored...
Healthcare Triage
Climate Change, Particulate Pollution, and Air Quality
We’re back with another episode on climate change and health, and this time we’re looking at some of the indirect health effects, with a focus on how things like air pollution and allergens arise from a warming planet and make us sick,...
Healthcare Triage
The Latest on Artificial Sweeteners and Health
Are there harms of artificial sweeteners that outweigh the benefits? We’ve asked this question before at Healthcare Triage, and the answer was no! There are lots of data that suggest artificial sweeteners are bad, but none of those data...
Healthcare Triage
Does Cold Immersion Therapy Work? Let's Dive In.
Cold plunging is…almost exactly what it sounds like: Immersing your body one way or another in super cold water. Some people do this by hopping in a tub full of ice water, some people take very cold showers, or some people dive into...
Healthcare Triage
An RSV Vaccine for Infants
Respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV, strikes fear into the hearts of parents, especially those with very young babies. It’s not very kind to other compromised populations, either. We’ve been working toward a vaccine for a long time, and...
Healthcare Triage
Ticks, Mosquitos, and How Climate Change Could Increase Disease
We’re back again with another episode on climate change and human health. The effects of a warming planet on our wellbeing are multifaceted, and there’s a lot to address in these complex interactions. One of those things is an increase...
Healthcare Triage
Does Breastfeeding Result in Smarter Kids?
A recent study conducted in the United Kingdom claims that breastfeeding makes for smarter kids when they reach the ripe old age of 16. If I had to guess, I’d guess that you were thinking, “So what, don’t we already know that kids are...
Healthcare Triage
Climate Change and Safe Drinking Water
In our last climate episode we took a look at how climate change affects the spread of infectious disease. Unfortunately, that isn’t the end of our discussion of disease on a warming planet. Waterborne diseases are already a serious...
Healthcare Triage
Robert Kennedy, Jr. Is Wrong About Vaccine Testing
RFK Jr. is claiming that scientists do not test vaccines with placebo-controlled trials, specifically against a saline placebo, and that all he’s asking for is that they are tested this way, as all other medicines are. On its face alone,...
Healthcare Triage
Climate Change and Our Food Supply
So far in our adventures on climate change and health, we’ve covered the critical issue of how our water supply is impacted by a warming planet, and that is a perfect segue into something equally important: The impact of climate change...
Healthcare Triage
Studies Show New Weight Loss Medications are the Real Deal
Back in 2021 we did an episode on Semaglutide, the then-recently-approved drug for weight loss that was originally approved for Type 2 diabetes. Since that episode another paper has come out on what happens to weight when the drug is...
Healthcare Triage
Misinformation About Health Is Nothing New
Misinformation. A recent and major problem facing us all, and one that is pervasive in many realms including medicine and healthcare, which are, of course, favorite realms around here. But is all this stuff recent? Is misinformation a...
Healthcare Triage
How to Talk About Misinformation
In the first part of this three-episode series we touched on the fact that misinformation has been around for a long time, and that it may seem like a recent problem because the internet has forever changed the way we share information....
Healthcare Triage
Debunking and Prebunking: How to Fight Misinformation
It’s the final episode of our three-part series on health misinformation, and we want to spend these few minutes with you talking more about the best strategies for countering misinformation and how we can best deal with misinformation...