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...
Healthcare Triage
The Unequal Mental Impact of Climate Change
We’ve been on a Climate Change and Health kick lately but so far, we’ve focused on the threats that our physical health faces on a warming planet. However, the looming cloud of climate change is tough on our mental health, too, and we...
Healthcare Triage
Aspartame and Autism?
What's the deal with Aspartame and Autism? Whenever you see a study claiming that a single ingredient has a specific link to a specific health outcome, you should immediately feel wary. That’s because it is nearly impossible to conduct a...
Healthcare Triage
Public Health Solutions to Climate Change Problems
Much of the conversation around climate change centers on things like lowering carbon emissions, which is obviously critical, but we think the public health response to climate change should be a larger part of the conversation. Whatever...
Healthcare Triage
Zoloft, Mounjaro, and Social Stigma
Drugs that do a pretty good job of easing symptoms of depression and drugs that really help people struggling with obesity have a couple things in common. The first is that we have almost no idea how they work, and the second is that...
Healthcare Triage
Artificial Sweeteners and Cancer
When we released a recent episode about the artificial sweetener erythritol, many of you brought up questions about recent news on other artificial sweeteners – sucralose and aspartame – so we went to take a look and That’s the topic of...
Healthcare Triage
Do Food Dyes Make Kids Hyperactive?
Avoiding certain food dyes to help improve a child’s behavioral issues is common advice, and not just on TikTok! Several doctors stand behind this recommendation as well. But several doctors also prescribe vitamin D, and that’s usually...
Healthcare Triage
Do Processed Foods Lead to Depression?
Healthcare Triage is no stranger to dissecting studies about processed foods, but we were recently alerted to a study linking them to depression, and since we haven’t dissected that yet, that’s the topic of this week’s Healthcare Triage.